Facebook – arts, ink.

Two minions stand in an open space. One has an umbrella and the other doesn't. The one without the umbrella looks sad, so the one with the umbrella pushes a button and another umbrella pops out of the first to cover the sad minion.

It’s my senior year, and while I’ve lost a lot of friends and gained a lot of friends throughout my existence, it feels strange knowing that the end of this year will mark another time in my life that friends will purposely leave and enter. I’m not upset about that—it’s only life, but because of this, I’ve been thinking about my friends a lot lately.

As it happens, today is Facebook’s 12th birthday, and apparently they’ve been thinking about friendships, too. In an emotionally charged compilation of pictures, Facebook came up with a campaign to showcase social networks, AKA friends. And thus, #friendsday began.

When I went to check out my video, I wasn’t sure if I’d like it. As I said, I’ve been considering my friendships a lot lately and I was a little nervous to see what Facebook thought about the people I surround myself with. I loved my video, though. It showed me people I care about and the moments that I shared with them. And even though I’m not as close with some of those people, or I don’t get to see them as much, I’m still glad they were in my video. Every friendship I’ve ever had has helped me become who I am, and Facebook’s #friendsday video showed a little part of that.

New Girl's Jessica Day scratches Schmidt's back while Schmidt says,

My mom once told me, “friends are like elevators. They can bring you up, or they can take you down.” Now, okay, my mom told me that when my two friends from middle school and I skipped a free ACT prep class to go to 7/11 and Rite Aid and she was trying to explain peer pressure and how friends can affect actions, but that’s not all that sentence can mean. It can be so much more.

Good friends can bring you up and hold you there in a warm hug of love and affection. They can encourage you to shoot for the stars and make you feel good about yourself and most everything you do. They’ll tell you to do things because they know what will make you better and make you happy. They’ll support you and tell you when you’re being an idiot in the best way possible. And, they’ll laugh with you until your sides hurt and eat grilled cheese with you at three in the morning just because you had a craving. These friends are good friends.

Amy Poehler's Parks and Recreation character Leslie Knope shakes whipped cream and says, "hoes before bros."

Amy Poehler's Parks and Recreation character Leslie Knope says, "ovaries before brovaries." Parks and Recreation's Ann Perkins sits down while Leslie Knope says, "uteruses before duderuses."

Bad friends, on the other hand, can drag you down to the depths of despair. They can make you anxious and stressed out. They can make you feel worthless and uneasy, like your goals are pointless and shouldn’t be reached for. They can do rude or obnoxious things to you that make you question why you would be friends with them in the first place. Here’s a hint: you’re not. Drop. Those. Friends.

Everyone deserves to have good friends who bring you to the top floor of the Empire State Building. Yep, that’s right, I’m sticking with the weird elevator thing. So, if you find yourself being lowered to some dark and stinky basement by your “friends”, just know that you don’t have to get off the elevator with them. Say good bye and find the people who really care about you. Believe me, they’re out there waiting to journey skyward.

We are in need of a revolution. No, I’m not talking Bernie Sanders; no, this is a revolution in creativity. To remind ourselves that art is a vital aspect of hope and that we must utilize it if we want to change the way that we view the world.

It seems like every time I open a new webpage these days, I’m flooded with Facebook fights over colors of coffee cups, posts of people taking pictures of their cell phones in dingy bathroom mirrors, presidential candidates talking talking talking without any action, and terrible acts of hatred pockmarking this earth, scarring it, destroying it.

Keep scrolling and it’s a wonder why we’ve all become so cynical of the world. Yes, it’s important to keep a finger on the news, but when we get so bogged down with it, is there any hope of returning from the deep end?

I believe there is, and so I’ve decided to start bringing hope to the world in my own little way. And that way is through art.

At the beginning of the school year, I stumbled upon a few blogs that dedicate themselves to exploring art and other visual cultures, such as photography, design, animation, painting, installation art, architecture, drawing, and street art. These blogs, such as Colossal, My Modern Met, and Laughing Squid to name a few, are already doing what I want to do: they are hunting down all of the amazingly innovative and passionate and beautiful things that people globally are creating and sharing with the world.

I want to bring it closer to home, and share these little nuggets of inspiration and hope with my world. About once a day, I try to share at least one link to Facebook, highlighting anything from:

...The Largest Art Festival in the World: The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale

Giant Urban Flowers in Jerusalem That Bloom When Pedestrians Pass Under Them

and sometimes natural art, produced by no one other than Mother Earth –

The Crooked Forest: A Mysterious Grove of 400 Oddly Bent Pine Trees in Poland

Throughout the constant scrolling of anger and suffering and irritation at the world, I hope that these posts remind my friends that art can be powerful. It can lift us up, it can bring us together, it can confuse us and spur heated conversations in their own way, it can be magical, it can be an escape. But most of all, it is a way to communicate with the world in a non-violent way. It’s a way to tell people that they have the ability to create beauty, to change people’s thinking, to challenge the way that they see the world. To remind people that among the bad, there is good stuff happening, too.

Take the events that happened Friday night in Paris. Jean Jullien’s simplistic image of the Eiffel Tower holding up a circle of peace went viral within 12 hours.

In an interview with NPR, Jullien says, “I turned on the French radio. I heard that there was an attack, and my first reaction was to draw. It’s this sort of moment where you don’t necessarily try to understand everything coherently. It’s more of a state of shock and sadness and anger and all these very sort of raw feelings. So for me, it’s just sort of trying to summarize these feelings in one image with my way of reacting,” Jullien says. “I shared it online as a reaction, not really thought through at all.”

What’s interesting is that he didn’t want it to be viral. He felt uncomfortable being in the spotlight as the “creator,” benefitting from exposure during this time of tragedy. But, his reaction achieved the revolution that he had hoped.

Jullien says, “The idea was just for people to have a tool to communicate, and to respond and to share solidarity and peace. It seems that’s what most people got out of it. So in that sense, if it was useful for people to share and communicate their loss and need for peace, then that’s what it was meant to be.”

The takeaway? The size of the action doesn’t matter: it can be a larger-than-life fabric flower that lights up at night; a powerfully minimal black and white peace sign, or a simple Facebook share. All that’s important is that the art brings people together, it makes them notice what’s going on around them, it makes them feel agency in the world, that they can make a difference by doing something. This Earth is amazing, yes in a tragic way that it can be so self-destructive, but mostly, because of the billions of people who have the power to share a little art with the world in any way or form that they can.

P.S. Sharing art is wonderful and definitely can lift people’s spirits and hearts. But, generous donations can also provide resources and necessities that human beings require. Please if you can, support the French Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or Friends of Fondation de France, Inc. Thank you!

Tag: Facebook

The Gift of Friendship