I recently read something relatively unnerving while scrolling through playbill.com looking for a review of a new play that recently opened on Broadway. Through my casual search, something caught my eye. I clicked on the article and read through it, slowly becoming increasingly more disappointed as I read.

The article described a political plan to reduce federal spending over the next decade, with the National Endowment for the Arts on the chopping block. The National Endowment for the Arts is an organization signed by president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 under the National Foundations On the Arts and Humanities Act. The organization was created to foster a devotion and support system to the arts and humanities in the United States. Through its history, the NEA has given tremendous amounts of funding and support for Americans participating in the arts. Over the past 50 years, they have given over 5 billion dollars in grants to support concerts, readings, visual arts performances, and exhibits of visual and media arts. The NEA has done tremendous things for people in theatre, fine art, literature, and music all around the country. It can be inferred that National Endowment for the Arts changed the course of art for the future, as it provided funding and national attention to something so often belittled and forgotten.

All political views aside, one could understand how upsetting this news is to hear. To preserve the ideals of American freedom of speech and right to opinion, I will remove the situation from the political climate in our country right now. If the situation is separated from the political world, as hard as that may be, it puts the blame on nobody. The arts has been on the chopping block before, it will end up there again–– despite whoever makes the choice to place it there. This simply raises the question, if this were to happen –– what would we as artists do about it?

This would be yet another rock on the petrous road to creating art, but these obstacles we have overcome as artists in the world have never stopped us from creating, and this will certainly not be the first time it does. It is our job as artists not to be silenced, but to be as loud as we have ever been, to scream with audacity and clarity that this is our art, and nothing will stop us. We don’t create art for the earnings, and despite the comfort of having grants available to us, not having the option will not stop the world from blooming with art. The best art is created under limitations, the best artists have been born from limits in their worlds. If the NEA is defunded we will not watch it fade and fade with it. We will be louder than ever.

My pen is my sword, darling. I dare you to stop me. I dare you to silence my voice. I was born with a vocabulary that I am still discovering everyday. I entered this world with hundreds of thousands of sentences etched into my cluttered little mind. I was born with ink dripping from the tips of my fingers. With adjectives and polysyndeton and alliteration pouring from the sockets of my eyes and ears and nose. I was born with words upon words upon words in my belly and in my heart. I just didn’t know what to do with them until I was handed a pen. I dare you to take this away from me, I dare the world to tell me I can’t, to shut me down, to try and silence me. I will not let any of these things happen to my words. One day I will be buried in the ground with hundreds of filled notebooks, with ideas on pieces of scratch paper, with poetry on restaurant menus. With books filled with my own words. With playbills and my memoir, which will be fittingly titled with a witty irony about the things I still accomplished when everyone tried to stop me. Fill your coffins with my words, die in the pretty arms of my art, because anyone trying to silence the artists will be long gone before the artistic light that burns so bright on this beautiful country ever goes out.