In some neighborhoods they can tell you what color to paint your house.  Twenty, thirty years ago, one was criticized for suggesting a personal solution for a political problem.  For example, the public problem of big business contributing to the pollution of air and water would be to regulate business and use alternative energy sources.  The personal solution was to quit smoking, carpool and drink bottled water.  Many marched to regulate corporate and government behavior and against laws regulating personal behavior, but eventually quit smoking and drank bottled water.

Today, hardly anyone talks about political solutions—big business has grown stronger and government continues to support that growth.  All we have is the personal solution.

And while there are laws in some neighborhoods against being an eyesore, according to the tastes and culture of the neighbors, inside your private space you have the power to have an opinion, express it, change it, and make all kinds of choices around it.  They can’t tell you what color to paint your kitchen.

What’s more, it is not a futile or powerless act.  It’s a stone thrown into the pool to move a buoy down shore.  It’s about the ripples.  The waves of energy that radiate outward.  Paint your kitchen red and you light a fire under the sign of nurturance in your house of support—not so tiny a pebble.  Who knows what waves it will make?  Who knows what will topple in its wake?  Who knows what boats will rise?  Revolutions start somehow.

A light, a sound, a wave—a color, a wall, a map; like the slave work songs and Negro Spirituals that showed the way to freedom, color and art are the songs walls sing.  These colors just might hide codes of new thought, true freedom and change, showing a way out of this mess that a lack of political or public solutions have made; a code, a gesture, a ripple in the pool of the angry or apathetic mob.  Signaling a buoy down shore to look up, to see, singing a path to somewhere new, somewhere better, awakening deadened senses to get people caring again.  To get you caring. 

To everything there is a season.  This is the season of personal solutions.  It’s a revolutionary act.  The paint heard round the world.