From seemingly calamity comes something amazingly new
I just finished watching Dogtown and Z Boys on cable. It’s a documentary about the Venice/Santa Monica skateboarders in the 70’s who re-invented and re-defined the entire sport, taking it to levels no one even thought possible.
One fascinating tidbit. They pioneered skateboarding in swimming pools, which soon led to the quantum leap of vertical skating – which changed everything.
This happened because a severe drought forced mandatory water rationing and consequently there were lots of empty swimming pools. So they, um, took advantage of empty pools wherever they found them (ignoring quaint concepts like “private property” and “permission.”)
The skaters took something apparently bad, the drought, used it for their own ends, and ended up creating something utterly new – which in turn had massive impact on the culture at large; in skateboarding, in related sports, in punk and metal, in alt culture, in all sorts of areas.
Given the current imploding of progressive/Green politics under the withering drought of Lesser Evil politics, maybe there’s some metaphorical empty swimming pools that can be used to create something radically new too.