Words are all I’ve got, and so from where I stand today, seeing what I have to see happening around us I feel I have to use those words.
Historians will record February 15th, 2025 as the day NATO ended. Our Vice President spoke to European leaders yesterday telling them to get on board with Far Right extremism or to be seen as an obstacle to the United States. The President today betrayed Europe praising Russia and agreeing to give them everything they wanted in their invasion of Ukraine.
Macron (President of France) has called a special summit of European leaders for Monday, Starmer (UK Prime Minister) has already agreed that the UK will be there… A new post NATO post US western alliance is forming…
Please explain to me how selling out our allies, threatening to invade our allies, and praising Russian imperialism protects our people and Makes America great; because I am at a loss to see it.
While the safety concerns of making these moves against our allies brews internationally, we are faced with equal devastations to our journalistic, academic, artistic, and preservation institutions domestically.
Exclusion of major press outlets from briefings for ideological disagreement, accusing a major news wire of a fraudulent research contract with the State Department. These are just a few of the volleys we have already seen to silence the press and replace it with his own sanctioned media outlets parroting his own talking points.
The academics have had their research grants illegally frozen. Researchers at government institutions have been ordered to retract journal publications or be fired. The Department of Education is being threatened with dissolution. Again this is merely the most egregious attacks in the administration’s quest to silence academics.
On the arts front; the administration seized control of the Kennedy Center canceling contractual obligations on shows that organization had previously commissioned. These new “Assurance of Compliance” guidelines for NEA grants are written to silence opposition and ensure the production of exclusively White Nationalist art under the guise of celebrating the nation’s semiquincentennial anniversary next July.
The mass firings within the National Park Service ensuring our national parks, monuments, and forests will rot from neglect. This will hurt not just these national treasures, but the communities that benefit from the tourism and economic stimulus they bring.
It hurts to write all this because it hurts to watch this destructive storm against who we are as a nation and a people. How does any of this make America Great, because I am at a loss.
I think within my own home about the roles these institutions have played and my heart breaks to see these institutions dismantled. My heart hurts knowing the support services two of my children received allowing them to successfully finish their schooling will not be available to future students. I think about the many artists I have worked with as part of the St Louis theater community, it is from them that I have learned that art must exist as the counter balance to the power structures of the culture to keep both systems healthy. I have seen my daughter grow as a student through her work in a campus research lab, and have seen that position dissolved because of this funding freeze. I think of many special experiences I have shared with my children in our National Parks, the amazing learning we have shared at our National monuments; I hurt at families who will miss these experiences. How we treat our vulnerable students, how we give opportunities to learn to our next generation, how we learn about our cultural blind spots, and how we grow as family through our history and our forests, this is what America’s greatness looks like to me.
America will never be great, if its greatness requires the destruction of its press, its academics, its artists, its preservationist, and its allies. America is great because we are a collection of many people of many faiths, races, histories, cultures, and stories connected in community, it is our heterogeneous blending that makes us great. Our press, our academics, our artists, and our preservationist know this. Our allies know this, and we really need those at the reigns to know this again.
The words, “Love. Told in story. Lived in community” are the creedo of our house… These words are the only elements that will navigate us to a place where America is truly great.
Love for each other, and that means every single each other whether we look like them, worship like them, vote like them, or build families like them. A Love that welcomes us all together is a love that is listening to the stories of our neighbors and seeing our common hopes and dreams in those stories. Love that forgives our past mistakes and offenses against each other and instead choose a future of finding, building, uniting and connecting together locally for action nationally, and action globally. That is the kind of community we need.
I believe and live by these words Love, Story, Community. This is our path forward.
