Young people leading in the arts brings hope in bleak times

Dark times in America, even as Vermont is only a small part of the whole, our own Senator Bernie Sanders is adding disproportionate reach to our small footprint at a critical time and doing so in a voice that millions of Americans can hear.

When I zoom in from my sad country to my home state, I search for glimmers of light. Although we’re not engineering a fascist state like the current federal leadership, we’re facing daunting challenges in how to fund and improve our own fundamentals of democratic society:

• a quality public education infrastructure within our communities,
• a healthcare system that’s accessible to Vermonters,
• a criminal justice system that delivers the constitutional right to a speedy trial and favors safe reentry over long-term incarceration,
• universal housing, nutritional security and a sustainable food system,
• managing a benign environmental impact by Vermonters on our landscape,
• a fair and equitable tax code and regulatory system that supports a common good.

Even as these fundamentals of a sound democracy are being shredded nationally by selfish little boys and girls dressed up as grownups, here in Vermont for the most part, we have many committed Vermonters trying to address these problems. We just lack visionary and courageous leadership.

So, I look for the light. I find it in the faces of young people, especially those committed to artistic endeavor.

Vermont has a plethora of artistic opportunities for young people seeking to express themselves through the arts. The beauty of the arts is that they demand more than inspiration, they also require great skill that takes practice and commitment to achieve, skills that enable other successes in life.

We are blessed. We have the Young Writers Project, the Vermont Youth Orchestra, Young Tradition Vermont, Peter Gould’s Get Thee to the Funnery, and my own personal favorite, the Youth Opera Company of Middlebury. Add two and two together here and you’re apt to get five. By way of example, the Vermont Youth Orchestra and the Youth Opera Company of Middlebury performed together in a Mozart mashup this past Friday at the Elley-Long Music Center in Colchester.

Young people performing grand opera says so much to me about our hopes for the future of civilization.

In December, we saw a cast of 140 young singers perform Purcell’s 1680 opera “Dido and Aeneas” at the Mt. Abraham auditorium to a sold-out crowd.

The pain of what’s happening to my country was briefly eclipsed by this supernova of young talent. Hope glimmered for a country that will soon be in the hands of the ascendent generation.

As we devolve from a free and fair world that understands and commits to our common good and instead uses wealth and power to bring forth an oligarchy controlled by unimaginable wealth, to see and experience the commitment to artistic rigor and beauty performed by our emerging leaders brings me hope.

Art lifts us beyond the quotidian world of our immediate wants and desires. It asks more of us. It infuses discipline with the grace and beauty of human connection.

In a world that has come to measure self-worth in terms of consumption and ownership or subservient power, we look to the arts to better understand how we are connected beyond the smallness of ownership and control. We can see and share a vision of common good and beauty.

There has never been a better time to reach out and support artistic endeavors and to support our children and grandchildren who have committed to the beauty that surrounds us.

Options to support our young people in the perpetuation of this beautiful world are available within all the above links.

(Bill Schubart, twice former chair of the Vermont Arts Council, is an adviser to The Charlotte News.)