Monday was a bad day.
I started writing this at 10 to midnight on January 20, 2025. By the time I finish and certainly by the time you read this, we will be well into a new day.
But as of starting, Monday was bad.
As my subscribers know too well, I do not hesitate to express my political opinions in this art and writing blog. Marketing people always say you shouldn’t do that. You want your audience to get to know you, but only the sellable you, the SEO-friendly you, the positive, unchallenging, amusing version of you that won’t turn away potential sales. Not the you that might not be universally palatable to all demographics at all times. Nobody wants to see that crap.
But you know what – fuck that noise.
That’s job advice – the cubicle-jockey concept of professionalism. Trust me, I have jockeyed enough cubicles in my life to know that the conventional wisdom against being abrasive or opinionated, against publicly taking a stand on issues, against bringing your personal views into the work space, is all about maintaining the work flow of your boss’s business.
And it’s good advice as far as it goes. It’s the right way to behave when you’re working for someone else. It’s especially good advice for anyone who is getting paid to represent someone else’s image or brand.
But it doesn’t apply here because I’m not an employee. I don’t have a boss to answer to. I am the boss in this space.
Jen Fries Arts is the portal into my studio. When you come here, you’re an honored and welcome guest in my house, but I don’t work for you, so I don’t have to separate myself from my work.
As a business-owner, which is what an independent creative is, my professionalism is about delivering goods on time and within agreed terms and dealing in good faith. It’s not about sucking up. It’s not about putting on a mask and lying to you about who you are following on this site.
That’s why, when bad things happen in the USA, where I live, I post statements about them. Long-time readers will be aware that I am firmly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, -sexist, -transphobe, etc., firmly pro-democracy and civil rights, an ally to marginalized people, and, especially, pro-Earth.
I make statements because I’m a future-oriented Aquarius sun INTJ with a fiery Sagittarius moon and pragmatic Virgo ascendant, so when shit happens, I must confront it and declare my path over, under, around, or through it.
Well, on January 20th, shit happened. It was probably the worst non-personal day of my life so far. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
To be blunt, as of 1/20/2025, a new Confederacy is in charge of the USA, and this country is at war with itself.
I know a lot of experts will balk and start parsing legal definitions and splitting historical hairs – and I certainly can’t argue with them – but personally, I’m ready to call it. Civil conflict.
It’s been brewing as a cold war in politics and the media for many years, but it turned hot on Jan 6th, 2021, when Donald Trump instigated a violent mob to attack the US Capitol with the aim of overturning the 2020 election. I don’t care what the magaists say, we all saw it.
We beat back that attempt on that day, but, stupidly, we did not press our advantage. We did not root out the corruption in our institutions. We did not defend our Constitution. We failed in our civic duty.
And sure enough, our enemies came back for another round. This time, emboldened by lack of consequences, there’s no pretense, no mask, no cubicle-politeness. They are out to destroy people they hate. Simple as. You can find the details all over the news media. I won’t go into it here, but the rightwing’s extremism is cartoonish in its malice and cavalier abandonment of law.
He said he’d be a dictator on Day One, and here we are.
Now the question is, what will he be on Day Two?
Or rather, will there be a Day Two at all? Or will January 21, 2025, be another Day One –
the first day of a new American independence movement?
I’m no billionaire oligarch, media mogul, or A-list celebrity who goes to bend the knee and kiss the ass for favors and privilege.
I’m just a working stiff like millions of others, barely scraping by. I don’t have to beg Mango Mussolini not to push me off some high perch. I may speak as I please and create as I speak. So here goes.
When I talk about civil conflict, I’m not talking about armies seizing cities and carving out territories. That’s not going to happen.
However, I’m also not talking about a bloodless coup or some kind of paper secession program worked out in courtrooms. People have died by political violence in the US in recent years, both before and since 1/6. I do believe there will be more of that.
We are entering a dark time, and we will all be caught up in it, one way or another. It will not be possible to pretend it’s not happening, as we have for so many generations till now. Everyone is going to have to choose how to relate to these times and its belligerent factions.
But what could I possibly do, broke-ass, minor creative and isolated individual that I am, with neither money nor connections? What can any of us do, realistically?
Well, realistically, we can think about this very question. We can think seriously about how we define ourselves as human beings. That itself is an action, a response, to our present moment.
We will all be defined by world events, whether we participate or not. Everything we do from now on will come with moral assumptions and judgments attached. No, it’s not fair, and it should’t be this way, but it is because that’s how deep the civil conflict has saturated the fabric of society. Literally everything we do tells the world who we are.
And that’s where I come in – I and all creatives, big and small, maybe especially small.
Because we artists, storytellers, poets and singers, designers and artisans, actors, dancers, etc., are the real influencers.
Sorry to all the modern influencers on the internet, for whom that cynical title was invented. I’m glad they earn decent money, but artists have been the cultural influencers for thousands of years, and we’re still here.
We’re here, and we are not going to be replaced by AI or rendered irrelevant by artificially shortened attention spans because what we do is core human stuff. We adjust with the times, but fundamentally, there is little difference between what artists do today and what the cave painters were doing 40,000 years ago. When a thing’s got legs like that, it’s not a fad. Art is fundamental.
Creatives channel the vibes of society. We interpret world conditions. We explain, contextualize, and set the narratives. We comfort, reassure, encourage, excite, and sometimes scold, challenge, and hold to account. We create the culture references everyone turns into memes. We bring people together in mutual recognition.
We are the bards who raise kings with praises and tear them down again with satires. We open minds, get people curious, thinking, and talking. We are dangerous to power, and that’s why the powerful censor us, slander and denigrate us, cut us out of school curricula, ban our books.
Granted, too many of us have slacked off. We’ve let ourselves fall into self-indulgence and the complacency of thinking we’ll never amount to anything if we don’t reach some unnecessary level of wealth in some impossible time frame so why even bother. We’ve allowed ourselves and our profession to be made ridiculous playing out banana and duct tape kayfabes with the ultra-rich.
That’s got to stop, right now.
This is the Information Age. Control of thought is the key to power, and very bad people have seized that deep power via disinformation, distraction, propaganda, and censorship. They have woven webs of confusion and fear around every mind they can reach. The damage is profound.
And there is no one – no tech developer, political leader, college professor, or tragically today, journalist – better equipped to break through those webs than artists. I truly believe this.
Because what they do is fake. What we do is real. They tell lies. We cast magic. They spin webs. We build worlds. When the artists wake up, we will wake up the world.
So wake the hell up, artists. It’s work time.
You may be thinking, “What the frik are you talking about, Jen? You just make collages and nature pictures and sometimes weird shit with bones and junk, and nobody knows who you are. How can you wake up the world?”
Recall, I said this may come down to small artists like me.
Why? Because we are your friendly neighborhood artists. The regular, working people whose art is hanging in regular, working people’s houses all over the country. We’re the bands playing in local bars, the writers giving talks to community book clubs. We teach classes down at the Y and paint kids’ faces at municipal fairs. We set the style and look of a community with park sculptures and downtown murals.
People know us, and we know them. We have the ability to get inside their heads, to bypass the programming of social media, 24/7 news, and ideological podcasts, and stir up memories, emotions, connections.
We can plant the seeds of better possibilities and better choices. We can set ripples in motion that have the potential to grow into tsunamis.
I’m talking about the work of artists supporting a grassroots awakening against the malefactors of the new fascism. I’m talking about a counter-culture that can help dissolve the webs we are trapped in.
How we do it will vary artist to artist. We’re all different. Some of us offer healing and therapy. Some, reassurance or respite. Others are rabble-rousers, whistleblowers.
Myself, I’m into raising consciousness. I seek to awaken awareness of a larger world and deeper experiences. You’d be surprised – it’s pretty effective. Anyway, that’s the kind of artist I am.
And this long-winded essay aims to raise the consciousness of my fellow artists.
It is time now for all of us to think about what kind of artists we are.
I would like all of my colleagues, all creatives, pro and amateur, in every medium and genre, to take some time and think about what we are putting out into the world, what we want to be putting out there, what we should be putting out there.
How can we, with our small, human abilities, contribute to building a better world?
Many of us will start dissembling. “I just play piano.” “I just do pet portraits.” “I just make drawings.”
Stop that! There is no “just” in art. All art is more that it appears, because there’s a human behind it.
Quit belittling yourself. Own your work, your thoughts, your dreams. Create, share, teach. Speak freely, and let the only words you never say again be those self-poisoning apologies for your existence.
The world needs us because tyrants fear us. They fear our doodles, ditties, and dog drawings, because they can’t control how our work lands with the people. Neither can we, but we don’t want to. Art liberates.
So that’s my assignment to myself, and my call to all of you: Create. Express. Do the things, no matter how nuts. Communicate. Cooperate.
And above all, speak truth to the people around us, because truth is the first victim of autocracy.
It’s now January 22. Writing this took me all of Day One of the New Movement. Thus it begins.
Illustrated with details from various of my works over various of my years.
Jen Fries Arts 