It was brought to my attention yesterday that the new administration of the United States is considering cutting the entire budget of the Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
I know some of you gasped and are filled with the same outrage as I was, while some of you are shaking your head in confusion because you don't understand the significance of it.
The National Endowment for the Arts helps fund programs that encourage the arts across the country. They support art, music, theater, dance, writing, and cultural studies. There is also a huge push within the NEA to study how the different art forms affect and help unrelated subjects like education, health care, and business.
Without the NEA, there will be a huge cut of art programs in schools and communities across the country. There won't be the money for school bands, art classes, local theater, writing workshops, or dance programs. Without the exposure to the arts, it will be the end of people like Frank Loyd Wright, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Misty Copeland, Stephen King, Beyonce, Suzanne Collins, Robin Williams, and thousands of others.
The National Endowment for the Humanities encourages and funds projects that deal with history, languages, archaeology, cultural heritage, comparative religions, ethics, and anything else dealing with humans as a whole. They promote programs at cultural centers like museums, colleges, archives, public T.V./radio, etc.
The NEH is all about learning and educating the public about who we are as a people and how we fit into the grand idea of humanity as a whole. It helps celebrate our differences and helps bridge the gaps to encourage understanding.
Without the NEH, many small museums would lose the grants that help them get wonderful traveling exhibits and presenters. Some even rely on the NEH for grants to keep the doors open. Small libraries would not be able to afford to bring in nationally renowned speakers, authors, and educators. Without the NEH's funding of preservation projects across the country, thousands of pieces of America's history in the form of interviews, oral histories, newspapers, books, letters, and photographs would be lost.
Please follow the links to what these two organizations have done in the last year alone: NEA's website and the NEH's website and explore the rest of their sites to see everything they have done in the past and what their plans are for the future.
I am probably not in the right mood to talk about the possible loss of these two amazing organizations. As a writer, a museum volunteer, an art lover, a student of history, and a humanity watcher, I am terrified at what this news means, I am angry at the potential loss, and I am frantic with the unknown timeline of the budget cuts.
If you feel any sort of connection to either of these two organizations, please, do what you can to help save them. Together they make up less than a half a percent of the national budget, but without them, this country would be a darker place.
