A few days ago, I received one of those telemarketing calls from the Democratic Party. Usually, as soon as I learn that someone is trying to sell me something over the phone—stocks, carpet cleaning or a cause—I break the connection with a request to be deleted from that group’s list. But this time, the hallucinatory …
The trip to London from which I’ve just returned was the first time I had visited that country since 1987, twenty years. I’d seen some of my English friends at international meetings or on visits to the U.S., but until this month, we hadn’t sat together for long, convivial chats, taking stock. I learned a …
A little over a year ago, I wrote a series of three essays about a perceived generation gap between people my age and younger activist artists (click here to find the first; the others come right after). This past weekend, I attended a gathering of a few dozen people across the generations, so I want …
The longer I am privileged to live, the more astounded I am at the yawning gap between our own conscious intentions and the things that drive our actions. We humans like stories that add up, so we tend to craft neat parables of cause and effect to explain ourselves. But every effect has unlimited possible …
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 …
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 …