J.A. Moad II - Veterans’ Voices Month: Listening to those who served

J.A. Moad II is a former Air Force C-130 pilot with over 100 combat missions who served as an Assistant Professor of War Literature at the United Air Force Academy and as a fiction editor for the War, Literature & the Arts Journal (WLA). He writes online essays for the WLA Blog, and his short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He has performed on stage at the Library of Congress and The Guthrie Theater as part of The Telling Project. He currently resides in Northfield, MN where he flies for Delta Airlines and is working on a novel about an American military in a not too-distant future. 
(This was published as an Opinion piece in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on October 22, 2014.)

Whenever I speak on the topic of Veterans or war, I always start with the same questions: has anyone ever served in the military? How about your siblings, parents, or children? A few hands climb into the air, but only a few—a reality reflecting the small percentage of people who understand the challenges faced by Veterans. The Minnesota Humanities Center is working to change that in part through a new law dedicating the entire month of October as Veterans’ Voices Month.

Last year on Memorial Day, Sebastian Junger called on Veterans to tell their stories. He said it was a way of sharing “the moral burden of war”—an effort to reach out to the ninety-nine percent who’ve never put on a uniform. I acknowledged the importance of hearing Veterans’ stories, but realized they’d be hesitant to speak to civilians. How could I help to make this dialogue possible?

As a former educator, Veteran, and the son of a Vietnam Vet, I understood that it would require a concerted effort from artists and educators, along with community and government leaders. For me, the solution was grounded in the Humanities—a sentiment echoed by the Veterans’ Voices program at the Humanities Center.

While in discussions with the Humanities Center and key state legislators (Rep. Jerry Newton, Rep. Bob Dettmer, and Sen. John A. Hoffman), we crafted legislation that would dedicate the month of October to teaching and studying the stories of Veterans. It would serve as a prelude to Veterans Day, and with the help of some talented educators and writers in Northfield, we kicked off the project last fall. The results were astounding: the bill unanimously passed both legislative houses and on May 16, 2014, Governor Mark Dayton signed Veterans’ Voices Month into law. Minnesota is now the first state to devote an entire month to honor, recognize, and celebrate Veterans.

It seems all too appropriate that this initiative begins here in Minnesota, a leader in the humanities and the birthplace of Tim O’Brien, one of the greatest war writers of our generation. Much like the post-Vietnam Era, we’ve become a society inured and exhausted by the longest conflict in our history. We hear about Traumatic Brain Injury, Post Traumatic Stress (not a disorder), sexual assault, suicides, and a Veteran’s Administration plagued by failures of past and present policies. But we haven’t heard enough of the individual stories. It’s time we did.

Veterans’ Voices Month is only part of a long-term initiative of the Humanities Center that draws on the power of the humanities to call attention and amplify Veterans’ stories and contributions. Veterans’ Voices is building a network of Veteran organizations, artists and individuals to capture the authentic voices of the men and women who’ve served and died on our behalf.

While the project here is a just getting off the ground, it is part of larger endeavor that’s gaining momentum across the country. Over the last few years, I’ve witnessed the power of honest expression by Veterans. Whether it’s a production of The Telling Project, where their stories come alive on stage, a reading by the soldier-poet, Brian Turner, or the Pulitzer Prize-winning exhibit, Always Lost (currently touring Minnesota), the words and images always resonate through an audience. Veterans’ Voices is about bearing the weight of these stories into the present—into classrooms, libraries, community groups, churches and town halls… It’s about discovering what we can learn from these Veterans. It’s the only honest way to share the moral responsibility of war.

This post originally appeared as an Op-Ed in the Pioneer Press on October 21, 2014.

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Michael Garcia - How will the humanities help lead America toward a brighter future?

Michael Garcia is President and CEO of the Duluth Children’s Museum and he retires at the end of 2014 after 10 years in this position. Garcia has dedicated his career to the arts and humanities and their importance in the education of every child. He has provided consulting and volunteer services to numerous cultural institutions across the country. Garcia lives in Sawyer, Minnesota.

I cannot comment on the importance of the humanities without paying tribute to my high school humanities teacher, Wayne Slater. As a student at Roosevelt High School in Virginia, Minnesota, I enjoyed two semesters of English electives in survey courses on the humanities. Mr. Slater brought life to the slides, records, and writing during those affluent years in public education. I, for one, benefited from his passion for teaching.

For many of us growing up in remote areas of America the concept of travel even to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, much less the National Gallery or Prado Museum, was only a dream. Typical of that time, I did not see Lake Superior just 55 miles south until I was 15. Imagine that today if you can.

However, growing up in relative isolation, exposure to the humanities in its many forms helped shape and define who I was and what I would ultimately do in my lifetime. From my parents came a love of music through the DECCA hi-fi system that bellowed out the sounds of Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and other great jazz artists. The fantastic proscenium stage in our high school was where students honed their skills for the state student one-act play competitions or the school musical. I was inspired by slides of the Monet Water Lilies and The White Girl, which I eventually visited years later at the National Gallery. The humanities provide vision, hope, and aspiration for all and we must not take this for granted.

Growing up in a household of severe domestic violence, at a time when there were no shelters and a code of silence and secrecy was the community norm, theater arts gave me the personal outlet to imagine a reality outside of the confines of my experience. Playing a role in the student play “The Man in the Bowler Hat,” with my name on a program and footlights and a follow-spot, I had a context for creating an alternative reality. This allowed me not only to survive but to thrive.

For some, in moments of deepest despair, an element of what we collectively recognize as “the humanities” provides a life-line that is responsible for providing hope to hang on. And yes, in spite of the violent environment that haunts me to this day, I am fortunate. I did survive, and I have made a lifetime out of advocating for the arts and humanities. We cannot shape the future without looking at the past. The humanities offer the best pathway for understanding history and our collective past.

Many say “these are desperate times” or “our children are at risk.” While I do not disagree, I believe that these are “different times” and that every child is a potential “child at risk.” Assuring access to active participation in the humanities is one of the best investments we can make for our children and the future of our society.

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Timothy K. August - Why do the humanities matter in today's world?

Timothy K. August is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University in New York. He recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and has publications appearing in MELUS, Mizna, The Blackwell Postcolonial Encyclopedia, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the emergence of refugee aesthetics.

In the digital age nearly everyone is an author, researcher, and reader. How we engage with these three positions, in many ways, defines our roles as both national and global citizens. The unparalleled amount of choice that technology provides gives the impression that we are constantly involved in an active and lively dialogue with a limitless constituency of others.

Yet as David Mura reminded us in his October 9th post, even though we have been gifted a golden ticket to a public sphere filled with an immeasurable amount of intellectual and cultural resources, this dialogue often remains remarkably one-sided. In practice, context, histories, and identities are constructed, which determine how we speak and naturalize the ways that we listen.

Humanistic inquiry interrogates this relationship between the producer, the object, and the consumer. As a collective review, the humanities can be the champion of all that is not so easily quantified, and can speak truth to power—particularly when power needs to hear it. While it is understood that the humanities attend to matters of pleasure, the imagination, and beauty, through critical evaluation we also provide necessary checks and balances to both public and private institutions that seek to shape our values and habits.

My goal as an educator is to reverse the trend of, in the words of Henry Giroux, “collapsing education into training.” My students must leave a course having developed a critical humanistic perspective that comprehends: 1) The process by which we come to value certain objects and feelings over others, 2) How power operates through our everyday lives, and 3) How our experience is formed so that we come to imagine we belong to particular communities.

A humanities education slows us down by engaging thought problems that challenge our received modes of thinking. Students who go through this schooling emerge more sensitive to multiple perspectives, understand how and why arguments are made, and are able to make decisions when facing contingency and uncertainty.

However with funding for humanities programs being bled away by reforms favoring programs that instrumentally promote commerce, this form of knowledge formation is being forcibly marginalized. The very act of devoting an entire month of blog posts to justifying the humanities’ presence in today’s world, speaks to how deeply we have learned to internalize that the humanities should be constantly under review.

Considering the massive undertaking the humanities is tasked with—the analysis of culture, identity, difference, representation, space, bodies, everyday life, language, technology, pleasure, aesthetics, interpretation, rhetoric, and power—the real question we should be asking is, in what possible context would the humanities not be relevant in today’s world? And, perhaps, more importantly, who would have us think such a thing?

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