Letters to the Editor Policy
South County Newspapers welcome Letters to the Editor. Letters should be fewer than 400 words. Guest columns should be between 400 and 800 words. Letters and columns may be dropped off at South County Newspapers, 522B Broadway St., King City, CA 93930, or be sent via e-mail to ed****@so*******************.com. All letters must be signed and have an address and phone number for confirmation purposes. We reserve the right to edit and condense all submissions.
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Impoverished thinking
The budget President Trump has introduced proposes cutting funding to the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which makes high quality artistic programming available to everyone. A spokesman argues it is humane to make these cuts, as money will not be taken from poor people to spend on such frivolity.
The same budget proposes a $54 billion increase in defense spending, so that same poor family can suck it up for bombs while hungering for affordable art.
Indian scriptures list 64 classical arts, including singing, dancing, painting, poetry, playing cards, making arguments, making flower garlands, etc.
In contrast, the United States neither considers argument-making an art, nor supports the few arts it does recognize, in the brave new world ushered in by its election of a TV reality show host and business tycoon as its 45th president.
What kind of impoverished thinking has taken hold of the national consciousness? Will we the people stand by and accept this kind of justification for eliminating public support to activities that bring joy and goodness to lives at the expense of supposed security through warfare. War makes both its perpetrators and its victims less secure. It is about death and destruction instead and creation and life.
What is happening to the soul of the America I thought I knew?
Susan Raycraft
Lockwood-Jolon
