Post 46 - April 26, 2020
Day 46…
I am guessing that most everybody with kids is more than ready for our schools to reopen.
Kids need time away from their parents as much as parents need time away from their kids.
For those with means, this is a unique time of constant interaction that, for better or for worse, will be something that both sides remember for the rest of their lives.
For those of limited means, it’s a time of additional stress.
It is hard enough to survive alone, during this, but the added responsibility of providing for children without the support umbrella offered by public schools must make it that much more daunting.
Beyond actual education, the school lunch program is a lifeline that can mean the difference between eating that day or not for many under-privileged kids.
The reopening of our schools is something on many parent’s minds.
Even before the shutdown, though, our public schools have been under attack.
For years, funding for our public schools has diminished.
In the last few years the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has launched an attack against the public school system the like of which we have never seen before.
90% of the children in the United States attend public schools.
Many come from single-parent families or families where both parents work.
DeVos believes that the Public School System should be dismantled and that education should be privatized.
She has proposed massive cuts to after-school programs.
She has proposed eliminating summer school programming.
Her goal is to dismantle the entire system.
Now that we have been forced to live without the school system for these past six weeks, is that really something that we want?
Can we afford to let her continue to gut our entire educational system?
My husband and I, like the overwhelming majority of our friends work in the arts.
What is sustaining people and getting them through this time?
The Arts.
People are watching movies and television programming created by artists and a whole host of craftspeople.
The stories that we tell each other are the way that we process the world around us.
When we experience Art, we are experiencing something outside of ourselves that informs and illuminates what is happening within us.
If that's too airy-fairy for you, on an economic level, the television and motion picture industries are responsible for over $700 billion worth of annual revenue.
Those industries employ over 2 million people annually.
Those of us who work in the theatre are on hold.
We can’t gather so we can’t do what we do.
One of the huge costs of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been the fact that we have all sacrificed what we do for what we believe is the greater good.
Funding for the performing arts, much like school funding, has been eroding for decades.
Almost every single high school used to have a performing arts program.
My high school had a band.
We had a choir.
We had a drama club that put on a big play and a big musical every single year in our high school’s auditorium.
I performed onstage in some of those productions.
I crewed offstage in some of those productions.
I owe my career to what I learned in school and how it inspired me.
I owe my career to how my middle school and high school drama teachers first lit the fire in me and encouraged it to grow.
That programming is now extremely rare in most public school districts.
It’s been taken away.
It’s largely gone.
The National Endowment for the Arts was formed under the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.
Johnson was not all that interested in the Arts himself, but he felt that the Arts had the power to improve the lives of ordinary Americans and could reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
The NEA has encouraged writers, performers, painters, sculptors, performing artists with exposure and with much needed financial support.
Because of that funding, artists from every medium have brought their work to a larger audience - inspiring thought and maybe controversy. These artists allow us to examine our own lives and maybe help us make some sense of them.
And these artists have provided jobs and generated revenue for the people and institutions who presented them.
The National Endowment for the Arts has been deemed by Republican lawmakers as being unnecessary.
Right-wing Christian groups have attacked it for encouraging what they consider to be “obscene”.
They have put loud and vocal pressure on the government to halt the public support of artists who do not conform to their view of what Art should be.
Sixteen years later, in 1981, the Republican President Ronald Reagan was already trying to dismantle it.
It was one of the first things his administration tried to do when he assumed office.
As his administration pushed forward, however, a special task force (that included the right-leaning actor Charlton Heston) actually discovered the “needs involved and the benefits of past assistance” didn't warrant dismantling it.
They backed off realizing the need for and the positive effect of the NEA.
Since taking office, our current President has already attempted to eliminate the NEA twice in his proposed budgets.
Both times, Congress has defended the NEA and refused to let that happen.
So, fast forward to 2020 and COVID-19.
We, as a nation, left and right, agreed to shut everything down.
We agreed to allowing the schools to close.
We agreed to stop performing.
We agreed to these things believing that it was for the greater good of the country to do so.
Both schooling and the Arts require a coming together of people.
With the advent of the new coronavirus, that act is now dangerous.
We have put schooling and performing arts on hold TRUSTING that they will still be there when we get back.
We are trusting a government that has never supported either one of these institutions not to take advantage of this break and further harm them.
Is that a good idea?
I don’t have an answer for that.
If we learn anything from this period of enforced shutdown it should be how much we rely on our educational and artistic institutions.
We need to ensure that as we move through this, that education and the arts are given everything that they need to recover.
They are a vital component of both our mental health as well as our basic economic health.
We need them.
We will probably need to fight for them.
We will need our voices to unite.
What an opportunity this is to make our schools BETTER.
What an opportunity this is to EXPAND support for the Arts.
Instead, I fear, they are going to have a difficult go of it.
We have willingly, for the greater good, released our children into a pool of sharks trusting the sharks not to attack them.
Let’s not take our eyes off of our kids for a second.