When I first caught sight of one it almost seemed like something alien, so out of place, out of context, out of the ordinary. In the beginning they were so far and few in between it didn’t seem so strange, but within weeks they were everywhere. You couldn’t walk down the street without noticing them, in plain view for everyone to see like cuts across the faces of people, growing wider and wider until they could have easily gone from ear to ear. Genuine smiles were growing on people, and it was as if nobody had ever seen it coming.
A year earlier is when this all got started with very little planning, not really knowing exactly what I was trying to do, or say. Regardless, I wanted to do something, I had become tired of being bullied and I wasn’t going to sit around and see I how much was I going to take before it became unbearable. Truth be told, it’s probably how we all felt, practically forced to watch and hear them from every bus, television, radio, billboard, window and wall. Constant shouts of how we just weren’t sexy enough, sleek enough, strong enough, famous enough, how we would just never have enough. They were a constant reminder of how inadequate we were. The advertisers were laughing at us and enough was enough. So one warm summer night I waited, sat and stared until the clock clicked into position, 4 am. If I had to describe the feelings of that night as I stepped out my apartment, spray paint rattling in my pocket, in one word, I would have to use, “Déjà vu”. I had unsuccessfully tried this before, so many times that eventually I just quit. Now here I am again, staring at a woman trapped in between the glass of the side of a bus stop. She’s laughing, smiling the kind of smile only a liar could pull off, so easy for her to claim that this is the cola of my generation, as if a generation is defined by the cola they drink. A can of spray paint can lead to childish, immature behavior, but that’s only if you’re doing it the right way.
As I walked those quick nervous steps back towards the stairs up to my apartment I only kept thinking how I couldn’t come up with anything better than, “Are you restless, like me?” I shrugged it off, accepting that in all possibility it would be gone by tomorrow morning. So you can imagine my surprise as I walked towards the subway, only to find that not only was it not gone, but that a number of people had answered “yes”, in what seemed to range from ball point pens to oil based markers. Maybe this was the beginning of something big, maybe the general consensus would become that these advertisers knew very little if anything at all about what kind of people we were, so why should I allow them to dictate my life? Nobody elected these people and quite frankly, nobody ever asked for their opinion on what kind of cola I should drink. Then again, I could just be getting ahead of myself here, I could just be having delusions of grandeur, but I can dream.
Sometimes though, you just have to be at the right place, at the right time. Within weeks, the city was alive, changing faster than I could keep track, advertisements were being buried under art almost over night. A common theme became to begin by spraying the question, “Are you restless like me?” followed by the placement of as many yes’s as possible. So much so that the city all together stopped trying to crackdown on it. Of course, commercials remained uninterrupted; you could still find ads in the newspapers, magazines and here and there in the streets you would maybe find a few that may have survived. The general feeling towards them however seemed to be that nobody cared much anymore. Maybe you would find an ad for make-up buried deep between layers of posters and spray paints containing poems and art. Nobody was saying they were all excellent poems and art, but nothing is perfect and I think it’s safe to say that anything was better than what we had before.
Suddenly the ever-constant roar of how we’d never be perfect was dulled to a mild whimper, you could see it in people’s faces as they greeted each other on the street. They no longer resented each other because one had more than they did, the illusion of the social hierarchy through material possessions was slowly becoming obsolete, and we were human again. People started going to work because they wanted to, not because they had to, as soon as they stopped trying to claw their way up onto the next wrung in their social class ladder everyone just became…friendly. People became friendly towards each other, but most important of all, friendly towards themselves. You couldn’t find one man or woman that hated being himself or herself anymore and so it was that people started smiling again. So drastic was the change that people started to realize that so many of the things that they held on such high pedestals held no real value at all. Within a year, music, television and every medium conceivable became entertaining and informative, but most of all, challenging and introspective.
One warm summer night, as I looked out my window, watching the children play in the sweltering heat, more than happy to just be outside; I couldn’t help but think back to that moment in time. What started as writing on public property became a network of people, connecting with each other and quickly realizing that they weren’t so different. Of course, there’s the ever constant problem that people will often find difficulties with race, creed and gender, but let’s take one step at a time. Sure, we didn’t solve all the problems, but change is not unlike gravity, in that all it requires is one simple push.
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