There has always been a division between the very wealthy and cripplingly poor in this nation. Diego Rivera's mural Frozen Assets illustrates this point with poignant clarity. The era during which this mural was painted was one of total uncertainty, the stock market crashed, and the Dust Bowl shrunk America's food supply. Cut forward to present times, and we still see the same economic disparity that plagued Diego's time. During this day and age, the cries of protest don't come in the form of murals, taking sly jabs at the economic structure of our nation. Today the suffering masses are galvanized by shared tales of financial disaster, the all too similar stories of feeling intentionally misled and betrayed by our banking institutions, tied together by the mass and instantaneous communications now available to us.
The Occupy Movement could only have been born in this era of the Internet, an era where any American who feels mistrust towards our economy or has a story of hardship can not only share, but find anyone and everyone who is going through the same thing.
What I see in Diego's work is a world where the lowest class of American's are treated as assets, not people. This world, not unlike our own, is one where your hard earned money is the plaything of the banks, something to take a gamble with, rather than something to protect. When a bad decision is made, the repercussions extend far beyond a loss of money to a bank, it ruins the lives of those who readily entrusted their earnings to these institutions.
Now, unlike then, every American can be heard, protests are organized across entire cities in the blink of an eye, and the rage and anger of millions of citizens can no longer be ignored and marginalized, like a mural being painted over by the rich men who commissioned it.
No comments:
Post a Comment