Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/arlenegoldbard/page/8/)
The work of artists and creative activists can help to create a cultural democracy that prizes diversity, practices equity, and brings a deep respect for human rights to every aspect of civil society. Therefore, the people-powered U.S. Department of Arts and Culture calls on all artists and creative activists to join in the movement to demilitarize the police and bring justice to victims of publicly funded racism. Be part of USDAC’s call to action.
When discussing equal rights between the sexes, biology and possible gendered differences should be left out of the conversation. Equality is not based on privilege or earned, equality is everyone’s basic birthright.
Facebook has been a forest of assertions and denunciations this week. Maybe it’s the company I keep, but almost everyone is posting links at an accelerated rate, and the subject of this battle of citations is Israel-Palestine. I spent a remarkable amount of time reading blogs and essays, but still, I was able to consume only a fraction of this material. The volume was such that I could have begun reading each morning, pausing only to sleep, then rolled out of bed and continued till bedtime the next day. The vast majority of posts came from people who, like me, live thousands of miles from the Mideast and, like me, have almost no direct knowledge of the situation.
Culture is the matrix of every humane society, the power-source of the imagination, empathy, creativity, and resilience needed to activate our innate capacity for moral grandeur and social healing. Begin to see culture clearly and everything changes from despair to possibility.
Does a civil society require conferring on its members the right to protect themselves from evocations of pain? Or would this lead to a society starved of humor, challenge, and the learning that our pain enables? A reaction to, and personal reflection on the New Yorker’s, Jack Halberstam’s latest piece about “trigger warnings.”
A review and expansion on the ideas in Nick Hanauer’s essay, “The Pitchforks Are Coming…For Us Plutocrats,” which reflects the growing recognition that the super-rich often have difficulty getting a grip on real-life calculations in the lower ranges.
The way work is valued is so distorted by now that the things we most need are the ones we are most reluctant to pay for. But what happens when this way of seeing work takes hold in the minds of those who could contribute to our collective stock of beauty and meaning?
Art grants have been poorly distributed. Now, advocates for cultural equity have urged the city’s Board of Supervisors to add a million dollars to the Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants funding pool, created to channel support to the same communities repeatedly short-shrifted by Grants for the Arts.
People turn to culture as a means of self-definition and mobilization and assert their local cultural values, and as the digital age demonstrates a zillion times a second, there are no longer cultural boundaries that cannot be crossed; the choice is to risk sharing what you love or risk seeing it shared despite your refusal.
Part of the pleasure of living is discovering what we love, and understanding ourselves as having choice, including the choice to trade other things for the freedom to pursue what we love if we wish to do so. Class differentials color that right, of course; but everyone has it, and to say that they don’t is to serve oppression while claiming to do the opposite.