This is the first part of the text of my keynote address offered at the Western Pennsylvania Arts in Education Partners Resident Artists Conference in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, 16-17 May 2007. There’s a link at the end you can use to download the whole text in PDF format.
I’m working on a community arts project that [...]
It’s official. In the Zeitgeist sweepstakes, my generation wins the Gold Medal for Self-Importance. The contest ended when “our” generational PBS documentary came packaged with this title: Boomer Century: 1946-2006. We’re claiming 40 years that haven’t even happened yet! By that standard, “the Greatest Generation” of World War II vets is a bunch of pikers.
I’m in Appalachia, watching snow fall on daffodil buds and the new green leaves of day lilies that will bloom, I am told, on the first day of summer. Once again, I’m working with the Thousand Kites project, artists and activists using theater, film and computer media to surface the emerging story of our nation’s [...]
On the Gregorian calendar, today is the yahrtzeit (the anniversary) of the passing in 1976 of Rene Cassin, a French human rights activist and an author of the UN’s masterpiece, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
That noble document contains a single line articulating the right to culture:
Life brings me many opportunities to talk with people who are serious about their work in the world, work that almost always involves some form of healing. Their lives are very different, but their dilemmas are often the same. Almost all of the teachers, therapists, community artists and activists I meet torture themselves about whether [...]
We Americans have strange ideas about social class. In study after study, the vast majority (often more than 80 percent) self-identify as “middle class,” suggesting that for some people identity is aspiration and for some illusion. When social scientists study class distinctions based on measurable factors such as income, it turns out unsurprisingly that 1/3 [...]
The company was convivial, the food delicious, the candlelight and music divine. Then one guest, just making conversation, began to inventory recent outrages from the powers-that-be: did we hear about fraud and callousness in this government program? About this attack on civil liberties? About this scandal in high places? Air began to leak [...]
This week I dug out the light box I bought when we lived in Seattle, where darkness falls before 4 pm each day and persists till nearly 9 in the morning. The box generates an intense light that helps overcome the malaise some people experience in the season of darkness. For some reason, even though [...]
There is a persistent story that people who stood up to fascism in the 1930s, before World War II took shape, were later condemned as “premature antifascists.” Some of the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, volunteers who fought the fascists in Spain in 1936-39, described facing this opprobrium when they later attempted to join [...]
Everywhere I look these days, I see an new, integrated awareness emerging from collaborations that transcend just about every conventional boundary there is: national borders, cultural differences, race, religion, gender—you name it.
Two weeks ago, my good friend was one of more than 1200 people attending an event at the Pachamama Alliance, an extraordinary group [...]
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