04-01-2017, 01:20 AM
I watched Larry Summers on Charlie Rose; not that I agree with him on everything, but he made the good point that Trump's budget cuts for arts and science do the opposite of "make America great again." The greatness of a nation, what it's remembered for, is its culture, Summers reminded us. When I was growing up, I noticed that I live in a country that doesn't value the arts; that is focused on commerce and technology. For me, the psychedelics, the human potential movements, the new age spirituality of the Awakening period of the mid-sixties and seventies, represented the chance for the USA to develop sensitivity, to learn to appreciate beauty, to unleash creativity, for the USA culture to bloom. Now, as the people who lived through those years get older, I wonder if this breakthrough has borne fruit, or when it might happen again. This sensitivity, this new light, seemed to vanish through the 3T/Reagan-Bush era, and now our nation's priorities are consumed with either making money through unleashing commerce from government restraints again, or else the need to resist this and get political in our 4T. Good business skills and political decisions are not enough to "make America great." It must be our culture, and we remain the "nation of dollar trappers with no past or future," as Oswald Spengler once called us.