“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Learn more at #RevolutionOfValues)
NOTE: This blog was written for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, where I serve as Chief Policy Wonk.
This morning the White House released its proposed budget for FY 2018. The $1.1 billion proposal for federal discretionary spending (which amounts to about a third of all federal spending) calls for deep cuts to many agencies that protect the commonwealth. For example, it chops nearly a third of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, and more than one-fifth of State Department programs supporting exchange and development.
But federal cultural agencies—the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services—are singled out for extinction along with other independent agencies that promote international cooperation and address issues such as homelessness, community development, and public safety.[1]
The proposed budget has to go through the Office of Management and Budget and Congress before it can be enacted. You, the taxpayer, can influence whether it breezes through or is blocked by public outrage.
Want to be heard? Write to your elected representatives as part of the Arts Action Fund’s #SaveTheNEA campaign or use the Performing Arts Alliance’s response form. This tool will help you find contact information and background about elected officials: use it to make your own calls or write your own letter.
The President’s budget is at once shocking and unsurprising. He’s making a frightening statement about American values, adding nearly $60 billion to our investment in war—which already amounted to three annual NEA budgets a day, seven days a week. For reasons far more symbolic than cost-cutting, he wants to eliminate the small programs that help us know and understand each other, those that make the constitutional commitment to freedom of expression real, for what does it mean to declare a right without the means to exercise it?
Here are some of the facts Carlton Turner, Minister of Creative Southern Strategies on the USDAC National Cabinet, posted to Facebook this morning with the hashtag #followthemoney:
I wish mainstream arts advocates talked less about economic impact and much more about who we are as a people, what we stand for, how we want to be remembered, because that’s what is endangered here: the value of beauty and meaning to the body politic. We urge everyone to stand for cultural rights and cultural freedom—for the public interest in art—against a White House that considers them dispensable.
The quotation at the head of this blog is from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Riverside speech, “Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break Silence,” delivered fifty years ago on April 4, 1967. In the speech, Dr. King calls for a “a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.” Presented with this thing-oriented budget proposal—far more oriented to such things as guns and bombs than to the well-being of communities and families—, it is our obligation to stand for love and justice, walk in Dr. King’s footsteps, giving voice once again to his powerful words, and reminding people of his real message and unfinished work. Join us:
- Enlist as a Citizen Artist to join the people-powered USDAC in year-round learning and action to make cultural democracy real. You’ll be the first to know about actions, events, and resources you can use.
- Download the free #RevolutionOfValues Toolkit to join people across the nation in drawing inspiration from and breathing new life into the prophetic words Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shared one year to the day before he was assassinated. The Toolkit will give you everything you need to take part in #RevolutionOfValues, a national Day of Creative Action on April 4th.
- Join our free, online video Citizen Artists Salon on Wednesday, 22 March, at 3 PDT/4 MDT/5 CDT/6 EDT when fiercely creative activists from three generations share their wisdom and inspiration in preparation for April 4th.
The release of this budget proposal is the just first shot in a battle over investment in cultural rights, human rights, equity, and social and environmental justice. Public response can turn the tide, not only from ordinary citizens who cherish cultural rights, but from all those big Republican donors who support arts organizations. If the White House won’t listen to parents whose kids benefit from arts in education or neighbors who love their local arts center, perhaps they’ll listen to the people the rest of their policies seek to profit. Let them hear your voice:
Write to your elected representatives as part of the Arts Action Fund’s #SaveTheNEA campaign or use the Performing Arts Alliance’s response form. This tool will help you find contact information and more about elected officials if you want to write your own letter.
[1] Including the African Development Foundation; the Appalachian Regional Commission; the Chemical Safety Board; the Corporation for National and Community Service; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the Delta Regional Authority; the Denali Commission; the Inter- American Foundation; the U.S. Trade and Development Agency; the Legal Services Corporation; the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation; the Northern Border Regional Commission; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation; the United States Institute of Peace; the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness; and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.