...Art, is created to encourage people to hang on, stand up, forbear, continue.I suggest that we must be suspicious of censors who say they mean to prohibit our art for our own welfare. I suggest that we have to question their motives and tend assiduously to our own personal and national health and our general welfare. We must replace fear and chauvinism, hate, timidity and apathy, which flow in our national spinal column, with courage, sensitivity, perseverance, and, I even dare say, love. And by love I mean that condition in the human spirit so profound it encourages us to develop courage. It is said that courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue with consistency. We must infuse our lives with art. Our national leaders must be informed that we want them to use our taxes to support street theater in order to oppose street gangs. We should have a well-supported regional theater in order to oppose regionalism and differences that keep us apart. We need nationally to support small, medium and large art museums that show us images of ourselves, those we like and those we dislike. In some way that is very important to us we need to see those we dislike even more than those we like because somehow we need at least glancing visions of how we look as in a mirror darkly. Our singers, composers and musicians must be encouraged to sing the song of struggle, the song of resistance, resistance to degradation, resistance to our humiliation, resistance to the eradication of all our values that would keep us going as a country. Our actors and sculptors and painters and writers and poets must be made to know that we appreciate them, that in fact it is their work that puts starch in our backbones. We need art to live fully and to grow healthy. Without it we are dry husks drifting aimlessly on every ill wind, our futures are without promise and our present without grace. ...Maya Angelou
Posted on: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 02:50:00 +0000
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