What ways can you think of to put your creativity to positive, non-violent use?
Can you come together and share creative projects demonstrating the changes you’d like to see in the world?
Can you help focus public attention on joyful, creative action, on the positive and inspiring energy of the human spirit? We may live in a world that is often full of negativity, but you’ll be amazed at the love and positive energy generated when you share your creativity and start the ball rolling.
Speak out and show that beauty is still here; humanity is not hopeless. Choose this day to tell your story of hope in song, art, film, and poems.
On this day, we challenge you to gather peacefully and create!
1. Meet in a park with materials and make fun hats for Day of Pride over a picnic.
2. Organize a sidewalk chalk campaign! Draw and/or write positive slogans and quotes or fun pictures on the sidewalk downtown or in high traffic areas so that people on their way to work will witness your creative maladjustment!
3. Hold a poetry reading at a room in the local library. Work with a local gallery to have a workshop, or an exhibit of local art.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. on CREATIVITY and CREATIVE MALADJUSTMENT:
This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists… Dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless calvaries; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority… Human salvation lies in the hands of the creative maladjusted.
(from Strength to Love; 1962)
Through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.
(from “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement;” 9-1-1967)
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