Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is Angela Johnson, celebrant with the Humanist Society Scotland.
Members of the Scottish Parliament, good afternoon.
Do you remember that, two years ago, as the first lockdown was easing, there was talk about how, when we were back to normal, we would make the way that we lived together kinder? I know that we may be in the early stages of what might be a long arc of recovery, but that back to normal now seems—to me, anyway—to be back to the same public and online vitriol, the same judgmental voices: the very same-old that we did not want to go back to.
But I have hope. I have hope that our arts can begin to play their part in our recovery. It is perhaps only now that our creative sector, the last of us to get back to normal, is beginning to do its work for us—to entertain us, of course, which is great, but also to allow us to see things in a different way, to enable us to feel empathy with those whose lived experiences are not our own.
Our arts have always done that. We can watch news reports on the war in Ukraine and they can affect us deeply, but if we stand in front of Picasso’s “Guernica”, we can, in a greater sense, feel the violation of a homeland destroyed by atrocity. We can watch a film about a man called Daniel Blake and question why the safety net of our welfare state does not always save. We can listen to a storyline in “The Archers” and realise the power of coercive control to totally rob a victim of their sense of self.
Many among us are finding it difficult to get back to normal, because the past two years have forever changed their lives. I hope that our arts can help us to more deeply understand not just loneliness, endured by so many, but aloneness; not just grief and loss, but grief and loss that had nowhere to go because those who grieved were denied the healing comfort of being with those who shared that grief.
The Declaration of Amsterdam, which sets out the fundamental principles of humanism, speaks of the transforming nature of all the arts for us as individuals and as a society. Now, surely, is the time for us to let them play their part in speaking for those of us whose voices are never loud—those of us who still suffer. We who have come out of the past two years pretty much okay will listen and watch, and take time to understand, and help to create that kinder place to live.
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