American Vets to Perform Ancient Greek Works to Support the NEH

The Society of Artistic Veterans and Aquila Theatre are staging a performance event in support of the National Endowment for the Humanities on Saturday, Feb 25th at Battery Park, NYC from 1-4pm.

Members of Aquila Theatre's NEH-fundedd Veteran's program, The Warrior Chorus - all American veterans, will read scenes from Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, including Aeschylus, Sophocles and Plato, the Federalist Papers, and speeches of Dwight D Eisenhower, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy and others on democracy to heighten awareness of the essential work of the NEH and its highly regarded veteran's programs in particular (www.warriorchorus.org).

Founding father, and the first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay wrote that the survival of the republic was dependent on the light and knowledge of its people. Since its establishment by an Act of Congress in 1965, the NEH has been providing funds for public education, libraries, scholars and veteran's groups across the United Sates. Yet the total costs for both the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts is less the 0.006% of the federal budget.

The NEH and NEA are now under threat of total elimination by the new Trump administration and we believe 2016 report from the Heritage Foundation, which may be influencing current policy decisions, is erroneous in its characterization of the kind of work the NEH performs. For example, it states:

Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for plays, paintings, pageants, and scholarly journals, regardless of the works' attraction or merit. In the words of Citizens Against Government Waste, "actors, artists, and academics are no more deserving of subsidies than their counterparts in other fields; the federal government should refrain from funding all of them.

However, the NEH provides as essential service, which the funding models that sustain the non-profit arts and humanities worlds do not - a rigorous and judicious non-partisan funding structure based on project merit and responsive to the needs of the American people, particularly marginalized voices and areas of the country that do not normally attract funding. Cutting the NEH would actually be counterproductive in that many programs in underserved areas such as the Mid-West, South and American rural areas would lose funding.

The NEH's innovative veterans' programs such as Standing Together (www.neh.gov/grants/standing-together) is one example of this kind of vitally important funding. Thousands of American veterans have personally benefited from the education, companionship, connections and training these programs have provided. They have also, in turn contributed to the scholarly discourse on important subjects such as combat trauma, war policy, democracy and foreign policy. The NEH has helped give thousands of US veterans a voice and the means to contextualize their experiences serving their country, as well as a seat at the table of scholarly and educational discourse at the highest level. Cutting these programs will in effect, silence the opinions of ordinary Soldiers Marines, Airman, Sailors and Coast Guard personnel who have so much to offer the country they fought for.

Battery Park is a New York City public park which overlooks the Statue of Liberty. It was the place where the last British troops left America after the War of Independence, was a fort built to protect New York Harbor, a theatre and the landing point for thousands of immigrants to the United States. It is also the site of several war memorials including the New York Korean War Veterans Memorial, The East Coast Memorial, which commemorates those who died in the Atlantic in WW2, The Admiral Dewey memorial, honoring veterans of the Spanish American War and the Merchant Marine memorial.

Society of Artistic Veterans is a non-profit organization founded and managed by veterans to provide education and opportunities for military veterans who are pursuing professional careers in the arts, including theater, film and television. This event is coordinated by Neath Williams a Navy Corpsman (Combat Medic) who served 3 tours in Iraq.

Aquila Theatre is a non-profit arts and humanities group that programs in more that 40 American states per year and has been running humanities-based veteran's programs supported by the NEH since 2007. This event is coordinated by Peter Meineck, Professor of Classics in the Modern World at NYU, a volunteer fire captain in New York, and who trained as a Royal Marine Reservist.

Visit www.aquilatheatre.com and www.warriorchorus.org for more information.

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