There’s power in connectivity. There’s freedom in constraints.
Creativity isn’t a profession, a state of mind or even a type of class. It’s the answer to a problem. It’s the lifeblood that too many people toss aside as unimportant or irrelevant to their daily lives.
Creativity is achieved through collaboration, whether physical, psychological or emotional. For most people, it requires a gathering space. It must have rules. It must have limits. Place is important.
The Phoenix Metro area struggles with this because there are so few constraints to what can be done. Want to organize a tweetup? Hop on Twitter. Want to showcase a bunch of ideas? Call it passion and turn it into an event. Don’t like the current answer for an existing problem? Start anew.
And this seems okay. Just like the Arizona economy’s dependence on the seemingly limitless market of tourism and real estate, the creative people and businesses of AZ operate without any sort of boundaries. We’re not mashed together. We’re not different.
Yes, cities like San Francisco ooze a kind of energy that’s produced when many unlike minds are shoved together. So do Seattle, Chicago, New York and Austin. Hell, Silicon Valley was CREATED for this exact purpose.
But until we can’t hop into our cars and easily commute from one place to the next, Arizonans will not have this. We’ll wander from place to place, without any real spot to call our own. Some are trying, some just avoid the problem. It’s time to rock the boat.
Don’t like something? Say it. Disagree with how things are run? Don’t wait until it’s too late to affect anything. Say it now. Stop playing so fucking nice. It’s pathetic and it’s unproductive.
We’re not all supposed to get along, but we CAN work together. And we can do it well.
