...is the issue of publicly-funded art. So Rush and Hannity can humbly kiss my ass as I disagree with them on this point.

I have been without cable since the last night of the Republican Convention of 2004. I did this for the main reason of purchasing a new computer while not having it affect my monthly budget. So, for almost two years, I was living without the influence of any mainstream media source upon my intellect and judgment. I chose every avenue from which I received my information on a daily basis.


But until I started watching my local PBS HD channel (which is the best looking channel on my $50 antennae); I had no concept of what fantastic programming they hosted on there. This is worth funding; but I believe it is paramount that partisan political thinking (the worst kind of thinking there is for everyone) must be kept to a minimum or always brought back to the center.


That is being fair and level and letting your audience decide; Right?

I support PBS for the same reason I passionately support the private funding of local libraries who participate in a large-scale sharing program. It's far better than the alternative...

...Imagine a world where the poor and disinterested had no avenue to gain the information and skill sets to encourage their passions to become their livelihoods while giving back a significant portion of that wealth to the social structures around them.

That is what living in a community is all about and it seems that we should be making more of an effort to sanctify the ground around us and see it reflected in the other inhabitants of this planet who immediately surround us in life.

A significant part of any "compassionate conservatism" should be compassion and neither sides in the political rift in America have any abundance of compassion. That's where we as individuals must step in, step up, cock our weapons once again and aim at the tyrant who seeks to take away that which Providence allowed a great nation to be built for the sole purpose of--bringing to light the freedom of the individual acting in the best interests of themselves and everyone around them.

And this tyrant is not any one man or group of people--the tyrant is fear. The tyrant is ignorance. The tyrant is compulsive disregard.

This is the enemy to be defeated in the War on Terror. This is the whole point of fighting a war, right?

Or is the goal still taking away the toys and essentials of others, call them us, and move on to the next unlucky culture? If this still is the goal, then someone at the committee forgot to copy me on the memo because I was under the impression we were trying to get to the whole "I Have a Dream" world, just over the mountaintop, where everyone eats at the table regardless of their skin color, where they come from, or who they are?"

If this isn't the goal then what the fuck are we celebrating on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday? Are we rewarding ourselves for slipper further into the nightmare? Or are we celebrating the ideal as a substitute for the action?

I believe in a world where every human being whose lungs are filling and emptying with the correct oxygen to atmosphere ratio, on regular basis, has complete and total access to the creative thoughts and artistic productions of fellow human beings.

Art should be both publicly and privately funded. It will be the true mark of historical social progress for us when artistic funding has been unleashed from the corporate and political fence post it has been tethered to for three thousand years. But when art is totally funded by private citizens, you will know that we have reached a milestone in our social evolution.


TAGS:
Art, Funding, PBS, HD, High Definition, Sociology, History