We leave traces of our existence. Drawings in the sand, smears of color, or sculptures in timeless marble. That's the closest we get to immortality, these encoded messages, left for the ones who come along after we're gone, after our communities are obliterated by time. Family bloodlines and even recipes stretch back through millennia, but they change with each generation. Only the things we make with our creativity, as expressions of beauty or emotion…only those things speak to who we were, or that we existed at all.
So why do we treat these sacred acts of creation with so much disdain? Art is all that reaches beyond our own brief lives, but it's always the first thing to be cut from the budget; to be confiscated or burned during war; to be ignored by the fickle public.
Do we secretly hate art because we know it's going to survive us? Because we know it will tell our great great grandchildren all about us. Are we are that ashamed of who we really are?