It's time

This video has been making the rounds this week, getting passed from friend to friend and site to site. It’s lovely, just lovely and I won’t ruin anything for you if you haven’t seen it yet. And even if you have seen it, watch it again with me. I’ve watched it a good half dozen times and each time get that lump anew. But it’s a good lump, such a good lump.

You know, every time I write passionately about pop culture, someone will inevitably tell me to lighten up. It’s fiction, idiot. It’s make believe, dumbass. It’s not real, loser. Get a life! This is always terribly edifying. I’m so glad someone finally let me know. This is truly life-altering news. Next thing you’ll be telling me you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. Crazy.

Aside from wondering why these people are on a pop culture site in the first place since they’re clearly so busy doing important things with their lives like collecting unicorn tears to cure global drought, I always want to ask if they think art – even popular art – happens in a vacuum. Sure, we use it to entertain. But we also use it to illuminate, to educate, to elucidate, to fascinate. At its best it’s not just a mirror to reflect our current reality, but a powerful looking glass which we can travel through to imagine a world exactly how we want it.

And popular art, pop culture, matters exactly because of its popularity. It’s our mass opiate, but with more than just the ability to get us high. It came make us think. It can help change who we are. So, then, if a show about a bunch of high school students who sing and dance can help someone, somewhere out there understand the world just a tiny bit better, why not embrace that? And if a show that can help people misses an opportunity to do so, why not call it out and demand it improve? Is it a cure for cancer? No. But it’s something that has the potential to impact masses.

And in a world when we still aren’t as free, as equal, as accepted, as embraced as everyone else, every little bit of positive representation counts. If even a dumb old commercial can make you cry, it matters. It all matters. So here’s to art, in all its forms, the high brow and the low brow. The popular and obscure. The message filled and even mindless. May we never stop demanding it be better. May we always look to it to show us who we are, and who we’d like to be.