Maine Legislative Breakfast 2021: The Impact of Our Cultural Sector

Below are comments I delivered to a Maine legislative breakfast hosted by the Maine
Association of Nonprofits on Friday, January 22, 2021. By posting them here I am able to include links to underlying statistics, research, and resources for your reference. Questions? Need additional info? Please don't hesitate to be in touch with me at lindanelso@gmail.com.

Good morning. Thanks again to you all for being here --  we're all grateful for your interest in and attention to the vital work nonprofits play in Maine, as well as to the impacts the pandemic has had on our work and priorities.

I'm Linda Nelson, Deputy Director of Portland Ovations and founding Executive Director of Opera House Arts in Stonington, with you today from Bath, the homeland of the Sagadahoc of the Wabanaki Confederacy.

As I hope you are all aware, the performing arts in Maine, as around the country, were among the first to shut down and will be among the very last to regain normalcy. Stages are shuttered; hundreds of thousands of events cancelled; millions in event and related revenues are lost.

This extreme shut down is due to one very crucial fact: bringing people together is the heart of the charitable mission of nonprofit performing arts organizations.

Literally bringing people together. To share experiences. Across differences.

We are traversing an historic time when our need to create such opportunities is greater than ever. Learning and understanding each others' stories, perspectives, and cultures through music, dance, and performance -- sitting in the dark beside a stranger with whom you later talk, laugh, and cry; watching live people perform ourselves and others on stages across our great state -- is one of our most powerful, and underrated, tools for uniting us. And for healing.

That's the heart of what we need to acknowledge today: arts and culture are the unsung heroes of the strengths of our Maine communities.

Nationally, the arts generate more revenues than construction or transportation. Fact. Surprising, hey? The latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that arts and culture make up more than 4.5% of the nation's GDP, with over 5 million wage and salary workers.

Here in Maine, the last study of five years ago documented over $150 million in revenues generated by this sector, with over $12 million in state and local government revenue.

Here in Maine, for every dollar spent on a cultural event ticket a local purchaser additionally spends more than $30 in that community. A visitor, who has been attracted to that town by that performance, spends an additional $60 plus dollars.

Maine's nonprofit arts and cultural sector employs thousands of people around the state.

While these numbers generate significant impact, there is also opportunity for growth as indicated by the national figures.

But economic impact is not the only, or perhaps even the best way, to understand the impact of arts and culture in Maine communities.

That, perhaps, was best felt during Wednesday's inauguration.

When Lady Gaga performed a national anthem like no other, gesturing to the flag that still flies above what was a besieged U.S. Capitol.

When J. Lo brought her own amazing heritage to This Land Is Your Land and America the Beautiful.

And most strikingly: when 22 year old U.S. Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recited an original poem that returned the light to many hearts.

Amanda reminded me and hopefully everyone here today of Maine's own recent Poetry Out Loud champions, Joao Victor of Lewiston and Allan Monga of Portland.

THE ARTS had people weeping and remembering why we love this country. THE ARTS enflame a passion for UNITY in our HEARTS -- where it matters most.

But this pandemic has stolen many such experiences from us and will continue to do so.

My organization, Portland Ovations, is working almost entirely virtually and despite the optimism of Dr. Fauci, in his recent keynote address to the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, does not see a return to "normal" ticket sales until our 2022-23 season. Like our peers in the cultural sector, we've used our creative ingenuity to pivot -- and our pivot includes investing our budget, greatly supported by recovery dollars, directly in Maine artists, in the form of five commissions of new performances.

State and federal recovery dollars make up ESSENTIAL parts of our budgets: keeping arts workers employed and nonprofits from permanently shuttering. Even the most innovative amongst us -- and I look toward my peers and friends at Portland Stage, Penobscot Theater, Opera House Arts, Celebration Barn and beyond -- are, like the 90-year old Portland Ovations, operating at less than 20% or our usual revenue capacities.

We are all swimming hard to get back to shore -- making up new strokes, including a pilot project called the Cultural Alliance of Maine that unites Maine's cultural organizations for a stronger voice and more visible seat at the table. We can't continue to retain and attract workers and visitors alike to Maine; we can’t continue to support the Maine artists and events that are an important component of what makes Maine a special and unique place; we can’t continue to bring people together across our differences and divides without YOUR continued inclusion of the cultural sector in all that you do for Maine people.

Maine people and communities need the arts to thrive. And the arts need you.

Thank you.

#nonprofitmaine

#MANP

#cultureME

#MaineArts

The Holiday Card List Revived for MLK Day

I'm guessing that a lot of us working class white people of a certain age had a mother who kept some kind of list of Christmas card recipients.

Mine kept hers in a couple of places as time went on, but they started out very neatly on index cards in a little box. Everyone had an index card, and everyone had the many, many years marked on the card on which she had shipped off a holiday card to them.

I decided to copy this tactic. It being 2021, I loaded my list of recipients into a Google Doc in Google Drive and decided to send cards in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and our perpetual quest to become a nation that lives up to the ideals in our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution. 

It's been a long quest and it's not over yet.

Meanwhile, I keep my mother's box next to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, CA salt n' pepper shakers I recovered from my grandmother's stash when I was cleaning out my mother's house in 2014 (see previous post).

Actually, I'm not sure they're a pair. Not sure what the rabbit is doing there or where it came from. But I imagine it on its way through the hot desert (I mean, its ears are drooping) trying to find its way to Hollywood to get its paw prints in the famous sidewalk.

My mother's oldest brother, Richie, and his wife, Jody, never had kids. So they made a plan to take all four of us nieces and nephews on a roundtrip road trip to California when we turned 12. It was held out before us our entire lives, something to look forward to despite the fact that cars back then did not have air conditioning and by the time we would reach Needles, CA it would be 111 degrees in the shade.

They road tested the trip on my grandmother, Richie's mother, Mary, in the late 1950s/early 1960s. I wish any of them were alive now to talk about that trip. My grandmother was a big woman, six feet tall and over 200 pounds. What kind of car did they travel in? I know she -- a huge enthusiast for life with a loud voice and endless generosity and maybe a touch of manic-depression -- loved the trip and brought back boat loads of souvenirs -- pieces of the Painted Desert, cedar toothpick holders from Crater Lake, etc. in addition to the salt and pepper shakers -- so how did they fit all of this into the vehicle?! It had to be larger than the one in which we journeyed in 1973, a blue, four door Mercury Comet circa 1971. 

The first of the kids to go was my cousin Walter in 1965. My cousin Cindy must have been on the trip in 1969. Looking back at the sometimes violent civic unrest of that era during the height of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, a time in which the nation sustained the political assassinations of four progressive leaders, I am wondering what both those trips were like. Did they follow the news? Did they circumvent certain cities? 

Luckily my cousins are still well and with us, and I can find out. Luckily we've elected a new administration in Washington that is respectful of Dr. King's legacy, the Black Lives Matter movement, and our ongoing work for equity for all. Stay tuned.

The Slippery Longings of Crises

Last Sunday I found myself pulling out my mother's 1938-vintage Hamilton-Beach stand mixer to make some banana bread. 

Who can believe this damn thing still works. But it does, with its two white Pyrex bowls and a crumbling cord no doubt leaking asbestos covering across my counter.

This is no Vita Mix. It needs some help creaming butter and sugar together, scraping the sides of the bowl toward the beaters, unclogging the beaters which...just don't go fast enough. It's not that they've slowed down. It's that things just didn't go as fast in those days.

In the six years since she died a month before turning 91, I've been surrounded by a lot of my mother's stuff. My brother, a local garbage hauler who had loyally and miraculously lived with and cared for our diabetic parents until each of their deaths, had run up some debts and could not afford to keep the house. We had to empty and sell it. Our parents had lived in that same cheaply built tract house in Mystic, CT for 41 years at that point. Previous to that, they had resided in the house they built for themselves, with heavy plaster walls and an ocean of front lawn on land my maternal grandmother had given them next door to her own, for only 16 years before moving to Mystic to follow my father's entrepreneurial dreams.

Yes, those cereal canisters in the background of this photo were my mother's too.

Finding myself making banana bread with my mother's mixer caused wave after wave of longing for my parents and my grandmothers to crash over me: for times when I, an adopted child, was secure and loved and cherished by the strangers who took me in. Blessed.

That's how everyone wants and deserves to feel right now: secure and loved and cherished.

And very few do. The COVID-19 pandemic has us quarantined in our separate homes, many, especially elders, fighting the ills of social isolation. As I write this, almost 4,000 people A DAY are dying from COVID here in the U.S. alone. And all around the world, people continue to die not only from the pandemic but from violence, starvation, grief. Many try to flee the horrific circumstances in which they find themselves, refugees seeking better lives just as my biological French ancestors did emigrating first to Quebec and then across the border to the U.S. But we, the wealthiest nation in the world, essentially closed our borders and wallets to refugees under the Trump administration.

It's possible that Trump himself and his "base" feel the least secure, loved, and cherished. They sure act that way. Their white male "politics of resentment" is right from the playbook of the insecure. Like the Confederacy before them who fought to keep Black people enslaved in their service, these fellows' insecurity about losing their white privilege and power becomes aggression against the rest of us. The fragility of their white masculinity is on display for the world to see.

Change is tough, and to achieve equity those of us with privilege -- whether skin color, education, gender, or economics -- are all gonna have to give up something. We need to use government to do what it does best: bring us into the commons where we can figure out the difficult solutions that will best serve the most of us, and in particular those with the least among us.

It would be easier to feel compassion for these angry white men if they were not so hateful, armed, and violent.

In the meantime: we have to hold them accountable for themselves not cherishing those around them. Not the women, girls, boys, people of color, or legislators with whom they differ. They are operating under the misperception perpetrated by Trump: that their government supports their incivility. They are wrong, and our government now needs to hold them accountable for their uncivil, illegal behaviors. Only after they realize they are NOT supported can we start to urge them toward healing.

My mother never made a banana bread from scratch her life. She was a fan of Duncan Hines and Pillsbury prepared mixes, and produced unmessy, perfectly even, black-speckled little breads every time.

Mine, on the other hand, is densely filled with banana mash and walnuts.

A fine example of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Sunday Morning Observances: We Belong Together

 

Woke up at 4 am with Nina Simone in my head.

"It's a new dawn, it's a new day, and I'm feeling..."

How AM I feeling? How are YOU feeling?!

On my end: the divisiveness of the country has me truly disheartened. 

Yesterday, Trump’s motorcade drove through a far right, white supremacist crowd (have you seen the photos of the many Nazi and Confederate flags that flew above them? I don't want to do them the honor of reprinting here, but it was appalling) on his way to ... yep. You got it. Play golf.

Our lame duck president is not working to manage the growing pandemic, nor to shore up our economy being damaged by his lack of management. Instead he is playing golf, while actively encouraging these segregationists -- he is encouraging our civil division even as his many lawsuits are tossed out by the courts. He refuses to concede and continues to lie about the election and stall the transition to the Biden administration. Even worse, one of his former officials--one at the heart of the Russia investigation no less, tweeted, “The military is with the president.” 

Luckily for us, they're not. Trump's pants must be on fire with so many lies, which is why he is mostly keeping out of view and not working.

We belong together: fighting for justice for all after centuries of oppression.

Our nation does not deserve white supremacists stoking another civil war as they did in the 1850's. These are, historically, the same people as the Constitutional originalists--in fact, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson, this was one of the strategies they promoted at the time. Government could not act, could not even build bridges or roads, unless it was written in the Constitution. Because if government DID take these actions, it would build a thriving economy APART FROM their system of enslavement.

A strong government serving all people takes power from the enslavers.

The parties have flipped--Lincoln's Republican Party was formed in OPPOSITION to these white supremacist southern Democrats--but the strategies remain similar. Our modern Republican Party now represents the slaveholders' legacy, as well as the interests of the 1% who hold the majority of our nation's wealth.

They don't want government support to repair and to grow a thriving economy independent of their white male interests.

So with this historical schism very much alive and well 200 years on, we're witness to a peaceful transition of power being stonewalled by those who desperately want to keep power for themselves.

I'm asking myself, and I ask you: what are we called to do in these short, impermanent lives that we have been given?

What actions will we take today, tomorrow, next week, to best serve others and not just ourselves?

How will we continue to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice?

Sunday Morning Observances: Healing the Resentful and Aggrieved

 

It's an unusually sunny and warm day beginning the second week of November in Maine.

Some of my feeling of light and warmth has to do with the hope that washed across much of the nation last night, as we celebrated the election of Joe Biden as President and the first woman and first person of color, Kamala Harris, as Vice President.

Kamala appropriately wore white in a nod to the suffragettes who, 100 years ago this year, succeeded in passing the 19th Amendment and gaining white women the right to vote.

Black women wouldn't have the same for another 45 years, until the Voting Rights Act. Yet as Kamala so gracefully said, "I'm the first women elected Vice President and I won't be the last."

And even as I celebrate, I know that while we the people have voted that we no longer wish to be led by a man who lies, breaks the law, divides us, and serves only himself -- another 70 million of us feel this man's actions represent the American way.

As Joe Biden noted, this is really a battle for the soul of our nation. It is about the culture of our country.

Will we allow ourselves to be divided, ever angry at persons who either look different from us or hold different beliefs? Always fearful of what we are losing, rather than what we gain together? Can we rediscover values that we share?

I look around at family, friends, and communities and I hear and see and feel the resentment. The aggrievement is real. We cannot afford to dismiss or ignore it. We need to fix the roots of this toxicity at the very heart of the U.S.

For far too long we have allowed -- as a people, as a culture -- money, land, and the racism and privilege that accompany these to become our nation's bully pulpit.

We as Americans hate to admit we suffer from the same diseases that are the scourge of world politics. Racist oligarchs everywhere such as Trump on both left ("big tech," "the media") and right ("big oil," "Wall St.") -- those who have inherited and wish to maintain white wealth and power -- benefit from dividing us and deepening the oppression of many for the benefit of the few.

And yet as Americans we have an advantage, when we choose to use it, over some of our global brothers and sisters -- we still have a free and fair vote to express our voices.

This election demonstrates it is time for us to unite in our opposition to wealth inequality: to the 1% and the culture and policies that enable and sustain it.

Because democracy cannot be sustained with as many resources in the hands of so few white people.

A quick reminder of the data: As of 2014, the wealthiest 1% of Americans possessed 40% of the nation's wealth; the rest of us, in the bottom 80%, owned 7%. The gap between the wealth of the top 10% and that of the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1,000% for the top 1%. The average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour."

This wealth gap DOES divide us. It should not be surprising to us that so many are so open to a politics of division and resentment. We dismiss these feelings to our own peril.

And now, for the second time this century, Democrats are being asked to step in and fix a giant Republican-made mess.

The policies of resentment and aggrievement have allowed the current administration to destabilize the economy by tax cuts to the wealthy which have underfunded our common needs, such as infrastructure and education; destabilize public health by underfunding and not managing our response to the pandemic; destabilize the environment by rolling back protections designed to reduce the harm to our families and economies caused by climate change; destabilize our democracy by alleging voter fraud where there is none; destabilize our communities and our future by feeding racist fear and fury designed to drive us apart over race, gender, wealth, and more.

Our nation is unstable and reeling. We find ourselves in desperate need of policies and rhetoric that bring us together rather than tear us apart.

We need policies and rhetoric that recognize the parts of our culture, like the obsession with white-held, individual wealth over diverse community good, that really do divide us.

We need to do the hard work and take the small steps, one at a time, to get us out of the pit into which our democracy has been sinking over the last four years.

Joe Biden, a decent man committed to serving the public good for more than 40 years, and Kamala Harris, representing the future of this country, will need every bit of support from us -- they need ALL of us to, as Biden asked in his speech last night, "give each other a chance."

#uniteagainstfear #endweathinequality