I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

Right now, I feel the history and weight of human conflict. Nobel Laureate Albert Camu wrote, in the face of so much suffering,

if art insist on being a luxury, it will also be a lie.

For over 30 years, I have returned to these words from his lecture create dangerously, given at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in late 1957.

In times of global crises, I reacquaint myself to argue Commuse finer points and increasingly

find his remarks pertinent and weighty as they relate to the artist's conscious

during times a political volatility. Undeniably, someone somewhere presently is facing an ethnic hatred.

Someone else feels they have been given permission to hate them and therefore ethnic hatred is on the rise.

Someone somewhere is being persecuted and someone is attempting

to assert their rage through misguided and extreme violence.

Someone somewhere is a traumatized survivor of that violence.

As a pacifist and poet, I am jolted by an atmosphere in which language is no longer a viable

option to settle issues.

On multiple continents,

our planet is witnessing large-scale massacres,

competing perceptions of humanness, and as always with it a very

powerful parallel struggle of words that results in a repressive environment.

Amid deep-seated hostilities that flare to remind us that war blinds entrenched enemies

to the possibility of our collective moral imagination

to resolve conflicts.

Camus' clear articulation of the pressure on artists comes back to me.

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