Yeah, it’s a hard pass from someone who has both been (briefly) a working artist, and who is friends with people who make their living through their craft. There’s so many reasons to be staunch in my position- as someone who holds strong environmentalist beliefs, has found joy and community in the arts, and frankly- if someone can’t spend the time and effort to make something, why the hell should I waste mine on engaging with it?
But I’ve been there, through the tears and the terror, of redundancies and broken contracts, fired departments, rent looming, food bank visits, domestic abuse survivors who had to scrimp and scrounge and panicked over the added timeline of their escape because of their income being pulled out from beneath them essentially overnight: many of these people’s livelihoods and lives were thrown into utter chaos.
I care about my friends. I don’t want to see them go hungry. Standing in solidarity here is the least one can do for their loved ones. It’s sort of like the tipping debate- Jesus, of course in an ideal world restaurants would pay well enough for servers to make a living, but you seriously aren’t going to stiff someone who is scraping together minimum federal wage, right? You’re not sticking it to the man- you’re just making life harder for those already at the margins.