‘Raise Your Voice’ Archives
Raise Your Voice – Glow lights against hypocrisy
By PETER MOLENAAR In the small town Christmas season of my boyish years, atop the towering silos of the malting plant, the lights were strewn to form a teepee. At home, my Christian mother decorated a real tree. The living room reverberated all the inspired carols. However, it was the Nutcracker Suite which moved me to lead the siblings in a circle of running leaps. More recently, a thousand lights swayed to the music of the New Power Generation. Actually, 10,000 had gathered to uplift Ilhan Omar and her guest, Bernie Sanders. Visions of socialism danced in our heads. Who are the jihadis of love, compassion, and forgiveness? Millions of Muslim people and Ilhan are. They do not harken the ancient crusades”¦ the wholesale slaughter of a people who truly revered Jesus as a prophet. Ilhan Omar has written: “We must apply our universal values to all nations”¦ only then will we achieve peace.” Why did it take 100 years for the United States Congress to [...]
Raise Your Voice Indigenous Day Dialectics (Negation of the Negation)
By PETER MOLENAAR From Howard Zinn”™s A People”™s History of the United States: “Columbus tried again for gold, but this time he and his men didn”™t go looking for it. They ordered all Taino* people 14 and older to deliver a certain amount of gold dust every three months. If they didn”™t, their hands would be cut off”¦. In 1500, Columbus wrote: there are many dealers who go about looking for girls; those from 9 to 10 are now in demand.” Recorded scenes of slaughter will not be rewritten here. Suffice it to say, “a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine” produced diseases which took millions of lives. Thank goodness, Minnesotans will never again honor Columbus. Dialectics? In October”™s “Raise Your Voice”, in reflecting on the local indigenous arts scene, the expression ”˜dialectical tension”™ was deployed. This created a number of “teaching [...]
Raise Your Voice: Changing horizons
By PETER MOLENAAR Peter Molenaar Those of us who have connected over the years with All My Relations Arts and Two Rivers Galleries were privileged to receive invitations to the recent opening receptions. These “Changing Horizons” events commemorated the 100th birthday of George Morrison, the Ojibwe artist who graduated from the local Minneapolis College of Art and Design, before viewing much of the world through the eyes of an abstract impressionist. To which I will add: Neighbors, these art openings offer a splendid opportunity to mingle with bright young faces who have significant lives awaiting. Some questions: Did Morrison violate his heritage, as some have suggested, by immersing himself in the modernist art movement? (Conversely, did some “modernists” violate the past when they took inspiration from Navajo sand paintings?) Moreover, how does Marxism resolve the dialectical tension between ”˜formalism”™ and [...]
