I’ve been pondering a few uncomfortable questions since watching President Obama’s third State of the Union speech last night on KLRU. I must admit that it was a stunningly crafted speech, thoroughly moving and exquisitely written. That said, there was one point that struck me in an off-key way. This was the topic of job creation in America. As an artist and author I have had my fair share of extreme struggles over the past couple of years since the epic tanking of the American economy. Watching my country dissolve beneath the weight of the most horrific economic collapse since the Great Depression was an experience which left millions of us traumatized and, still to this day, skittish and wary about any and all promises or declarations made by politicians. Many of my peers lost everything in the crash and are struggling to recover their livelihoods in a world where putting food on the table is still chosen over art. Am I to condemn anyone for that, of course not! If eating oil paints didn’t erode your brain and make you cut your ear off (thank you Van Gogh) there might be an exception. However, it leaves the artists, authors and musicians of the world in a precarious place where we find ourselves fighting harder than ever to preserve our positions as the pillars of culture in a society that is drowning with the daily fears of becoming homeless or worse. Our beloved President talked a good talk last night about job creation, about investing in programs to train able-bodied workers to fill positions and creating millions of jobs where none existed before. This sounds perfect in theory.

However, the jobs in question, the training in question that was described were, for example, engineering and auto mechanics. Technical trade and technological scientific careers that are about as far removed from something an artist such as I is trained to do as possible. It left me feeling a bit shut out in the cold, so to speak, and I found myself wondering if there will be a place for artists in this new world order in the future? Are we being completely eliminated? Where is the talk of investing in funding for the arts so that artists can pursue their careers against all odds? Or is our only hope of survival to be forced to put down our pens and paints and return to the hive where we will be fashioned into a worker for an assembly line somewhere? The idea of setting aside everything I have worked so very hard for my entire life to force myself to take up a trade or a career that I neither have any ability for, nor interest in because that is my only option in this country is heart-wrenching. Now, granted, I am allowing my imagination to envision a world 5 to 10 years down the road, and my imagination is rather vast. But it could very well happen.

I remember being in kindergarten and sitting at the feet of my teacher who asked each and every one of us “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It didn’t matter what we said whether it was “astronaut” or “unicorn”, our teacher said “Good! In this country you can do whatever your heart desires if you just work hard enough for it!” Now, I’m pretty sure the kid who said “unicorn” fell just short of that ambition, but the rest of us took that to heart. We believed that whatever dream we had could be realized if we committed to it and strove to grab hold of it. I know I did. I never for a moment believed that I could not overcome whatever obstacle I encountered because my passion for art and writing was so intense that I was going to make a career of it, just as had all of the artists and writers I idolized who came before me. I sit here now and wonder if teachers can look their children in the face today and say those same things? Can they honestly tell their kids that this is a country where anything is possible? Or is it now becoming the country where a few things are possible. Will teachers eventually hand their kids a short list of technical or scientific roles and ask the kids to select one instead of telling them to dream big and aim for the sky? What will this do to the revolutionary minds of the future? What will happen to the kid who wanted to be a unicorn?

I make light of this a little because it is a very serious question which I do not see many acknowledging or addressing. For me, there is no other path. I cannot do anything but be true to myself and remain the artist/author/musician that I am for to be anything else, to force myself to fit into any other box, would be a death sentence. It is all well and good that America’s leaders are doing what they perceive as “best” by investing in the barebones industries of this of the industrialized 1st world economy, but I beg them not to allow those well-meaning intentions to put out the lights of those pillars of culture: the arts. Civilization is defined by whether or not it has culture, the arts. While the world will always need auto mechanics and engineers, it also desperately needs artists for without culture, we are simply barbarians.