A Response: How does one justify funding the arts and humanities?

How does one justify funding the arts and humanities? a response

When all the materialists have bought their last trinket. And the social engineered have modeled their last data set. They will begin to wonder, as humans have when after feasting on mammoth, they leaned back and stared at the fire. Why are we here? Is this the sum today of life? And they will day-dream. And they will see visions.

When the dreamers imagine some solution, or their brain phantasms bring them some new insight (carbon rings) and they bring it back from dreamland, this is the stuff of the Humanities. When we are intoxicated by a poem, or a song get's stuck in our heads, and we are lifted to inspired heights to bridge the apparent gap between these silly skin bags
we seem to inhabit. These interior vistas are the stuff of the Humanities. When we read Homer's tales of Ulysses, Hector and Achilles and the fall of Troy are hearts not inspired? When you listen to John Coltrane's "Love Supreme" are you not lifted up?

When inspired by the view of some smile, some sparkling eye, we reach out with a metaphor, with a poem, with a rhapsodic and felicitous phrase. That enticement that reaches out across the miles or inches, that too is enriched by Humanism. When you took your love to the movies, quoted that song, or paraphrased that poet' to win your love, and later you brought babies and homes into the world, Can you say yet your world wasn't build on poetry and the arts?

If you have never been touched by a melody of Mozart or the poetry of John Lennon your heart not your hard drive needs nourishing. When you praise the universe of technology, did you fail to notice that there is MUSIC on your IPOD. There are story-tellers filling the HIGH-TECH Blue Ray DVDs. Technology is a delivery system, but the content is what even the tired materialists turn to when the long days toils are done. Whether you have been slaving over a spreadsheet, or coding in c# or designing tools of mass destruction.

The poetry of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Upanishads, the very foundations of the belief systems of millions of materialists are enriched by the dreamers, the poets and storytellers. Even androids dream of electric sheep.

RW Spisak Jr.
poet, artist, storyteller
janhuss@bellsouth.net