We can doomscroll. We can tune it out. We can become consumed by anger. We can tell ourselves that somebody ought to do something.
Or we can become part of that “somebody.”
Throughout history, people have resisted injustice in countless ways. They have marched. They have organized. They have voted. They have challenged power in courts and legislatures.
Artists have always stood among them.
They have written poems and novels that outlived dictators. They have composed songs that carried hope across prison walls and national borders. They have painted murals that reclaimed public space.
Artists have performed plays that questioned authority. They have designed memorials that preserved memory long after governments tried to erase it.
Art has never been an escape from civic life.
It has always been one of the ways societies remember who they are.
Today, many of us sense that something deeper than politics is being tested.
Public trust is fraying. Democratic norms are under pressure. Expertise is dismissed. Independent institutions are questioned. Culture itself has become a battleground.
The temptation is to believe that the problems are simply too large.
They are.
No one person can repair everything.
But history offers a different lesson.
When you cannot fix everything, you can often fix something.
Every great civic achievement began as an act of imagination.
Before there was a constitution, someone imagined self-government. Before there was a law, someone imagined justice. Before there was a movement, someone imagined solidarity. Before there was a public institution, someone imagined a better way to serve the common good. Before there was policy, there was imagination.
For a long time, I described this capacity as creative intelligence. I’ve come to realize there is a better word.
Imagination.
Not imagination as fantasy or escape. Imagination as the human capacity to envision a reality that does not yet exist and begin bringing it into being.
Every one of us possesses imagination.
Artists dedicate their lives to cultivating it.
That is why artists have a unique contribution to make to civic life. They practice seeing alternatives. They connect ideas that others overlook. They help communities remember, question, mourn, celebrate, and begin again. They remind us that the future is never inevitable.
Authoritarian movements understand the power of imagination. They work relentlessly to narrow it, replacing complexity with certainty, curiosity with ideology, and possibility with fear.
Democracy asks something different of us.
It asks citizens to imagine living together with people unlike themselves. It asks us to solve problems that have never existed before. It asks us to create institutions worthy of the generations that follow.
That work requires imagination.
This is why Res Creativa exists.
We are building an alliance of artists, designers, writers, performers, filmmakers, architects, musicians, makers, and citizens who believe imagination is not a luxury. It is civic infrastructure.
Our goal is not simply to protest what is broken.
Our goal is to help imagine and build what comes next.
No change for the good ever happens without first being imagined, even when that change seems impossible in the present.
The poet Martín Espada reminds us of that truth.
So does history.
If America is entering another period of reconstruction, then imagination will be one of its essential building materials.
There are some things we can fix.
— Randall White
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