The Perfect Wave Project: Healing the Cultural Divide

To heal the political divide that afflicts our country, we must first heal the cultural divide. That's the assertion of James F. Cooper, author of Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape. In the culture wars, he is an art critic that I expect would be viewed as one who swings to the right. But he takes issue with conservatives that would defund the arts; quite the opposite, as his concluding remarks state in the following excerpt:

We can boldly advance into the future with the visionary gifts that artists and poets alone possess. Or we can choose to hang back with the dead, blind culture of the old order. I suspect we will choose life. Let us unashamedly honor the strengths and virtues of our nation and encourage our own recognition of them. Let us begin this great task by enlisting gifted artists to help us see once again.

We can draw on Coopers argument and broaden the base of support for the arts without alienating its regular patrons. What I've tried to do as a writer and a poet, is take Walt Whitman's vision out of its time and place in the nineteenth century, bring it through the awful truth of the twentieth century, and set it down into the twenty-first century to restore hope and faith in both our human nature and our democratic society. Furthermore, I believe this vision is supported by and anticipates developments in scientific fields such as neuroscience and evolutionary biology.