A Prayer for Peace
Laurel D.
Laser-cut and hand-cut construction paper
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Over the car radio, a girl my age pleaded for the bombings of her home to cease. Air raids turned her school to dust. Her little sister lost her life to sniper fire. Beside me, my own sister hummed along to the music in her headphones, oblivious to the horrors in the news. To be honest, I’m not very educated about the histories behind the wars I’m growing up with. Before the explosions began, I didn’t consider the lives of other teenagers in Ukraine, Palestine, or Israel. I focused on the trials and tribulations of my own story. But as the terror and violence continues to be publicized, I realize that I must care about those outside my Bay Area bubble. The girl on the radio could be me, born in a different country. My sister could be dead by bullet, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Only random luck keeps my childhood house and the dreams in it from becoming rubble, too. So I contribute my own voice to the millions begging for the killing to end. My fragile paper artwork represents the hopes of people victimized by war. The beautiful, vulnerable threads of those lives can be broken by hate, but also preserved by compassion. They ask for empathy. They ask for deliverance. Compared to the scale of the conflicts, “A Prayer for Peace” may not be much, but if my piece can move even one person to kindness, that will at least be something.
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In the broad sense, creativity means breaking molds. To be creative is to innovate, to try things in different ways, to be willing to fail in order to improve. In the sense of art, creativity means building new methods of communicating ideas and reaching people in impactful ways.
