This is not insane

Photo via Upsplash by @pazarando

Did you know that an artist named Agnes Denes, along with a group of volunteers, planted, tended to, and harvested a 2-acre wheat-field in lower Manhattan in 1982?

The project was meant to confront the growing culture of greed, exemplified by Wall Street trading, with the equally growing worldwide income inequality and food shortages. The grains from the harvest were distributed across the world.

“The insanity of the project made it necessary,” Agnes Denes said.

Those words touched something deep inside me.

1982. The age of yuppies and flashy cars and individualism had only just started. There have been several declared, and many more undeclared, famines since that time. All of these famines were linked to wanton wars or to droughts, caused by the climate disaster we also caused and which also was a prominent topic of political debate already in the 1980s.

The insanity of the project made it necessary.

I think about this as I sit with deep grief for our overproduction of weapons and hatred. It is not insane to demand peace, to insist on our joint humanity, to posit the possibility of love.

It is not insane. But it feels like that. And that makes it all the more necessary.