It's the year 2178, twelve years after art was outlawed on earth. At first I thought it wouldn't affect me since I didn't consider myself an artist. I'm just Handen Judsen, a sky car engineer. It kind of saddened me, though, to think that I would never again be able to see the creation of an artist's mind. But it was for the better of all mankind, I reasoned. Without art to occupy creative people, they could start work on other things, and we could make some great advances in space travel, psychology, etc. I think most people saw it in this positive light. If only we had known what it would cause. It started as a slow, steady process, transferring the artists into their new jobs or putting them back in school to learn a new trade. Then they started collecting art pieces from everywhere and stockpiling them, locking them up in enormous lock boxes scattered throughout the continents.

There was some resistance and a few people even managed to steal some truly great pieces such as the Mona Lisa and Starry Night. It was then that it really started to turn bad. Things such as movies and the theater were outlawed. Most advertisements stopped because they contained a great amount of artwork and creativity. The television became an empty constant grey with only news reporters in grey suits with grey backgrounds. We began to be smothered. The clothing design industries were shut down and a couple suit-and-tie industries gained the entire clothing market. Even the beautiful gardens around our towns that the caretakers had spend millions of dollars and painstaking hours to create were boarded up and left to rot because they had too much creativity being poured into them.

Newspapers, magazines, tabloids, all were shut down in the name of improving humanity. Book authors were forced to find work elsewhere and whole libraries were burned to the ground. They collected one electronic copy of every book anywhere and stored it underground in one giant computer box, destroying every other copy. The original writings from the literary favorites were incinerated. Soldiers came to every house around the world and collected millions upon millions of books, piled them high, and burned all that they found.

Life lost its vivaciousness. All the buildings, vehicles and aircraft were painted a sickly middle grey and no one dared to wear any color outside their own homes for fear of being arrested for the displaying of art. Music, the greatest art of all in my opinion, was also forbidden. The whole world turned to silence and grey. It was a tremendous shock at first, but after four or five years we almost forgot about it. Life went on as usual for me. I went to work, did my job, and came home afterwards, just as before. We did in fact make some exhilarating advances in technology. The harnessing of atomic energy was one of these accomplishments. This was something we'd been trying to do for only about two hundred years, and a splendid achievement. The only difference was that I didn’t have a paper to read during breakfast, dressed in grey clothing, drove a grey sky car to a grey building, listened to a ticking clock while I worked instead of music, and then drove my grey sky car past grey buildings back to my grey house.

After six years I began to notice that everyone seemed to always be in a consistent dour mood. Our state of mind seemed to start to meld with the nothingness that surrounded us. I desperately wanted to see color. In fact, it became habitual for me to take a break every fifteen minutes to go to the window and stare at the sky, just to see the glorious blue of the atmosphere. It was the only joy anyone had, I think. That and whatever vegetation managed to spring out of the cracks in the streets. We all became somewhat desperate mad men and women, strictly contained in a grey box.

Five years ago, however, something broke loose. An email virus started it. Someone took a photograph of the Mona Lisa hanging on a wall and passed it out secretly to nearly every personal computer in the known universe. On April 1, 2173 all those computers opened up that one picture at the same time with a note that said, “We lost our humanity when we set out to improve it.” The government traced it and caught the guy within a matter of hours. The next year, Mallone Redd became our most famous martyr to art, and suddenly there were angry mobs popping up everywhere around the world, splashing home-made paint onto the grey walls, wearing hand-dyed bright clothing, and singing or shouting poetry to anyone that would hear. That was the beginning of one of the shortest civil wars in history.

Today, I will tell anyone that says that art is not important to human life: “Bull.” Every person on earth has a creative spirit, whether they recognize it or not. Without an outlet for this creativity, the world goes mad and dies. We’ve seen what that is like and we will never go there again. We will tell our children about it, make them understand how vitally important imagination is to mankind, and the next generation will know art to an extent that no other generation has before. It’s ironic, this sudden jump from a grey world to a world completely saturated in the arts. What we set out to suppress in ourselves, we ended up strengthening and growing instead. I believe that’s the nature of the creative spirit. If you try to subdue it, it will push back with a much greater strength than your own.