Creativity Quote by Wynton Marsalis

Marsalis lands the line like a muted trumpet note: quiet, controlled, and stinging. “Even in these times” does a lot of work. It nods to an era that congratulates itself on progress - post-civil-rights mythology, social-media connectivity, the comforting idea that we’ve evolved past the ugliest instincts. Then he punctures that self-congratulation with the oldest social unit in American life: the neighbor. Not the politician, not the abstract “system,” but the person who knows your name, your kids, your porch light.

The choice of “turn their backs” is deliberately bodily. It’s not simply disagreement; it’s refusal of recognition, a moral flinch made physical. Marsalis, a musician who has spent decades insisting that jazz is both art and civic practice, is speaking from a tradition where listening is the first ethical act. In a bandstand democracy, you respond, you make space, you don’t pretend you didn’t hear. Turning your back is the opposite of swing: it breaks the shared time.

The subtext is less about sudden cruelty than about how thin solidarity can be when it costs something. “Still” implies disappointment without surprise. This isn’t a hot take; it’s an indictment of the everyday failures that make larger injustices possible. In context - a country cycling through polarization, racial backlash, and pandemic-era suspicion - Marsalis frames betrayal as local and intimate, which makes it harder to dismiss as someone else’s problem.