The Brooklyn Rail

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”— Michelangelo

“You will hear thunder and remember me, / And think: she wanted storms.”— Anna Akhmatova

“When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.”— Toni Morrison

As we think and re-think who we are as individuals, capable of integrating our inner and outer lives, we should question how we are related to the world’s economic machine, especially in relation to our constant consumption of things, and how we as individuals relate to economic forces that we are part of and at the same time try to maintain a certain distance from. One thing we know with great certainty is that if our economy fails, we will be depressed and anxious. And yet, if it succeeds, we risk being bewitched by complacency and apathy. Across the whole broad spectrum of human endeavors and experiences—be it the arts, humanities, or sciences, or be it sport or warfare that is tied to either national pride or economic exploitation—we must acknowledge that the speed of our technology has had a long history in shaping our lives and our politics. And this often creates extreme polarities, characterized as the forces of good versus the forces of evil, the right versus the left, or the West versus the East, among the many pairs of opposites that exist within and outside all of us.

The world’s economy constantly needs to be maintained and repaired, especially when some of its parts become weakened or damaged. And so does our investment in educating and training our youth all over the world, so that they can be more than the fuel that feeds the machine or the spare parts that are ready to be replaced endlessly. We have to ask ourselves if we are providing enough good will and resources to inspire our youth to become the counter-frictions against the cold, impersonal machine of political and economic exigencies—by which we can turn their “cold” mechanism into a “warm” resource? It’s true that our youth grew up with endless technological distractions, such as addictive smartphones, which feed them both great quantities of useless and even harmful information—such as what is available via their fingertips on the dark web—but also provide a platform for both constructive information and self-expression, allowing them to be in constant touch with their friends and colleagues. This in itself has a double effect: while it allows them to be active participants in the social body, it also robs them of their time for self-reflection.

While we may criticize them for being distracted, we rarely think that perhaps what’s being taught at school may appear to be boring to them. In this context, I think of the great artist Nan Goldin, who recently challenged the Sackler family for having benefited from OxyContin that fueled the opioid crisis in the US, which has caused more than half a million deaths since 1999. In a recent documentary, Goldin has discussed how she herself was bored and distracted while at school, which provoked her to think outside the box, and which eventually allowed her to become both a great artist and an important activist. Goldin’s story also reminds me that there are no quick fixes. We ought to rethink providing our youth with Ritalin and Adderall as a quick-fix remedy of ADHD—a mental condition that gave rise to an epidemic of over-prescription that affected many of us in the arts and humanities. We have to allow our youth to aspire to a system of education that is not modeled on the interests of feeding the economic machine. Which leads us to the question of how we can create conditions and environments that foster personal growth in ways that transcend standardized testing and the forms of intelligence that such testing gives priority to. We know from our own experience that our lives aren’t prescribed as a linear path, so we should make a collective effort to help our youth discover their hidden passions and talents—not only for their own good but for the role they play in human ecology, part of the world’s natural resources, like the minerals buried under Earth’s surfaces that can serve as resources in many different realms without being aggressively exploited.

In thinking of two or our recent concurrent global crises—climate change and the war in Ukraine—many of us were inspired by organized efforts to mobilize public opinion into effective action. Regarding the first, Climate Change Resources has played an important role. It is a foundation that has brought together countless youth-led organizations, all of which share similar concerns, from focusing on science, justice, and politics to economics, clean energy, and animal extinction, among other things. Just to name a few: Future Coalition, Gen-Z for Change, Roots & Shoots, Billion Oyster Project, Earth Guardians, Sustainable Oceans Alliance, This is Zero Hour, Youth Climate Strike, and Youth Vs. Apocalypse. Regarding the war in Ukraine, we know that every conflict is unique, and fought with different military capabilities and strategic goals. Significantly, Ukrainian youth have played a crucial role here, in joining the army and bringing with them their multitasking abilities on all social media fronts. Using smartphones, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter to provide intel, while implementing drones to achieve their battlefield objectives, they’ve breathtakingly created a virtual panopticon in their war against Russian atrocity.

Our youth here at home deserve to be encouraged in exploring democratic learning and collaboration between them, and to be given additional opportunities to find their own quest for the synthesis of internal and external journeys. We must think outside of the bounds of an education system that is solely driven by certain ideological assumptions. In this October issue, we at the Rail celebrate our twenty-third anniversary. Twenty-three years of keeping our beloved journal free in print and online, and decades of our curatorial projects that include visual works in all mediums, in relation to which we organize panel discussions on various topics, poetry and fiction readings, film screenings, and dance and music performances—all of which are also free to the public.

As Maurice de Vlaminck once said, “Intelligence is international. Stupidity is national. Art is local.” After twenty-three years, we feel an urgency to encourage other locales in the US and abroad to create their own versions of the Rail. We believe in the idea of democratic learning and participatory democracy as the means to counter any form and shape of conformity that can potentially lead to authoritarian dictatorship.

In solidarity with love, courage, and cosmic optimism as ever,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. Please join us for the grand opening reception for Singing in Unison Part 8: Between Waves, curated by Alice, Nien-Pu Ko, on Saturday, October 7th from 6–9pm in Industry City, featuring a cooking performance by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomas Vu, and their graduate students from Columbia University (find more details here). We are thrilled to introduce Architecture as a new section, with the remarkable Nile Greenberg as editor. Additionally, we are sending our huge congratulations to former Rail contributor Sasha Suda, who is celebrating her first anniversary as the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art this month.