Street Art Dispatches: ‘Why Do We Just Accept Things?’

In our new series “Street Art Dispatches,” we report on street art and the symbolic messages contained within.

(Photo by Kevin Harber)

Yesterday, I had just crossed the intersection of 4th Avenue and 13th street in New York City, when red letters on a construction site caught my attention directly to my right.  Scrawled in bright red spray paint read the words “Why do we just accept things?”  And for the first time in a very long time, I stopped and stared at an artifact of the streets.  I felt that everything I had been trying to say for the last half a year, politically, had been encapsulated in a single interrogative.  Instead of being jealous of the graffiti’s brevity, I was encouraged that others are taking up the cause.

It was a question, obviously, but it was also a challenge.

Since graffiti must be done in the shadows, its message must have velocity and high impact.  Essays will not work unless one has the time to pull it off.  Even then, however, it loses its sense of immediacy—it loses the velocity that it requires in its form as subverted advertising.

I chose to interpret the phrase politically, though certainly it has other applications.  Indeed, the true sublimity of the phrase allows for multiple interpretations, but as a political statement it is unparalleled.   The graffiti has its greatest impact when viewed through the prism of not just American politics, but the politics of every nation, near and far—the whole line of democratic development from Athens and Sparta, through the Magna Carta and into the political ferment of revolutionary America.

Democracy, by definition, is a deceptive idea.  The etymology of the word suggests power placed equally in the hands of people, yet from the very beginning—in Athens and Sparta as our starting points—power was concentrated at the very top.  Athens prioritized its upper class, which was dominated by those who had undergone military training, and its democracy excluded slaves, freed slaves, women, children, foreigners (or ‘metics).  And anyone who remembers 5th or 6th grade world history will recall that in Sparta the Helots (an entire class of laborers without rights) eventually revolted against their masters and brought Sparta to its knees.

In fact, every history teacher should communicate to their students that Athens and Sparta were not, in fact, democracies in the idealistic sense—they were oligarchies, dominated by men of power and influence.  These history teachers might also emphasize to their students that the Helots asked themselves “Why do we just accept things?”  That, in fact, they probably had been asking the same question for a very long time until they found the answer: they did not have to accept things.  What followed, in their case, was revolt.

It could be argued that revolt is the only natural answer to that question and that, indeed, it should be.  Protests within the confines of a democratic order (nominally democratic, of course) only causes minor changes, and shifts the abuse elsewhere, or merely delays it for a time.  (See: the Labor Union Battles of 2011, which are part of a larger effort we have been fighting for well over 100 years now.)

Look at a timeline of the world and you will see a progressive evolution of freedom with various blips on the radar, characterized by reactionary counter-revolutions carried out by religious true-believers or nationalist dictators (who have the same true believer syndrome as the faithful).  History is on the side of progression, for it is a move toward true equality.  It comes by degrees and with much blood, as Thomas Jefferson envisioned—himself a progressive caught in an age of static tendencies such as slavery and embedded power elite.

(Photo by Dan Nguyen)

Progress, whether the reactionaries like it or not, is inevitable.  Never was there a time when things were perfect, as right wingers would have us believe.  For them, the 1950′s—just before the counter-cultural protests (or civil war) of the 1960′s shifted the paradigm—was an age of American perfection, never mind the event horizon of nuclear war, racial injustice or American imperialism in its infancy.

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower presided over a relatively peaceful and static America because the world had been laid waste by World War II.  No one was equipped to rival us militarily or economically: the world was America’s for the taking and we took it, which is why things seemed so perfect.  It was an hallucination, a deception, that right wingers like the Tea Party and the Republican party at large look to with nostalgic reverie, operating therefore under a double hallucination, or—to appropriate John Lennon’s album title—a double fantasy.

There will be no return because the game has changed, and the only direction is forward.  The only game is progression toward an ideal in which so much power and money are never again concentrated in the hands of so few.

And so we must ask again: “Why do we accept things?”

It’s encoded in our DNA it seems, perhaps as a result of evolution: learn to accept and you will survive.  One can imagine that the first of our prehistorical upright ancestors who challenged the dominant leader was summarily crushed and killed, spreading fear amongst the ranks of the primitive tribe, and that over time it became as human to accept established order as it was to be placated by sexual gratification.  The power of the leader was joined or perhaps embodied in the same person by a shaman or religious leader, someone who had the rhetorical and theatrical skill to suggest the channeling of the mysterious divine.

Some are able to break through the barrier and see things from afar.  The struggle or inability to do so has much to do with how families raise their children, where they are raised, what schools are forced to teach students, and the short-circuiting that religion causes in the child’s (and adult’s) mind. The Abrahamic religions, in particular, teach a revolting acceptance of the status quo, assuring their followers that all inequalities will be reset in the afterlife.  It is truly a wonder then that, under such careful and unrelenting conditioning, some ever transcend to the sublimity of progressive thought.

We are conditioned to display, if not regressive thought, then at least static thought—a reversion to a former order or a full stop of the progression.

“Why do we just accept things?”

Another ace-in-the-hole of oligarchical powers is that the mass of their subjects (subjected not to a royal line but to markets) are stuck in jobs for the better part of the day, which encodes a need and love of money and sublimation of the notion of “No, I do not accept” merely to get by, just as Melville’s Bartleby said, “I would prefer not to.”  How sad it is to know that work truly is the final impediment that revolt faces in its eternal battle against acceptance.

In fact, Bartleby might be a strange symbol of humanity in revolt.  Bartleby chooses, of his own free will, to no longer work.  However, he goes a step too far and withdraws from existence (which, in the final analysis, is his choice and his choice alone).

Thought experiment: what if we were to become a critical mass of Bartlebys, choosing not to accept things—how fast would the order come crashing down like the hallucinatory house of cards it has been for so very long?

And so we must ask ourselves every day, “Why do we just accept things?,” then find others with like minds to grow the ranks of progress’s critical mass.

As a tiny answer to the graffiti artist’s rhetorical question illustrates, “Some don’t.”

“Street Art Dispatches” is a series considering the symbolism of art and words as seen in graffiti and street art.  If readers find any street art and phrases that they believe deserve consideration for an article, we encourage you to submit the phrase and photograph to dj@deathandtaxesmag.com.