ELECTRONIC PROGRESS???
Almost daily we are informed about some new electronic marvel that will make our lives better. Whether it is in cyberspace, music, literature, telephones, communication, storage, autobiographical info, personal indulgent data, ad infinitum, I ask you to consider --just consider and ponder-- the following...
With all the amazing electronic gadgetry and musical "instrumentation," has the music gotten better?
With all the electronic and cyberspace opportunities to read material, are we better read?
With the multitude of new gadgetry, have we learned to communicate better?
With an endless array of ways to communicate, are we getting closer as a human species?
With all the marvelous new medical equipment, why do 100,000 patients die from errors in U.S. hospitals annually?
With the wealth of the U.S. zooming to astronomical proportions from new cyber-gadgets, why do we have so many underserved people in the U.S.?
With silicon valley bounding on the scene in the U.S., why do people in Europe live longer than we do?
Indeed, why do people in Europe and Japan receive better health care in their universal payer system?
With all of our military electronic hardware, why do we now kill more civilians than military in war?
Now being able to communicate with others from any place we are at any given time, how come we do not know each other?
We are plunging into an anti-intellectual abyss that pits the rich against the poor. And little is being done to give the underserved help in being educated and/or cultured. During the intense daily bombing of England during the Nazi blitz, Churchill saw to it that money was available in support of the arts. He felt that especially during war and tragedy, the arts were important in a civilized society. Not here, not in America. We are cutting the arts, seeing it as unnecessary. Schools and communities no longer see the arts as important in U.S. communities. You --yes, YOU-- should muster all the resources in time and talent that you have to turn the tide of anti-intellectualism that has swept the U.S. YOU must do what you can to save our culture, our society, our children from the ignorant, Neanderthal attack on the arts. We never seem to run out of money for our military might, but we are now scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to funding for the arts. With this way of thinking, our culture will not survive.
Whether it is as a parent, sibling, teacher, friend, neighbor, community leader, or whatever, you must see to it that our children are exposed to the great cultural expressions...Michelangelo, da Vinci, Homer, Chaucer, the Psalms, Confucious, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Pasternak, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Sandburg, Frank Lloyd Wright, Tennyson, Thoreau, Jefferson, Goethe, Whitman, Lincoln, Longfellow, Mann, ......the list goes on and on. We owe it to our children to expose them to the great works of our cultural heritage.
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." -Marie Curie
