When my grandmother died I had to drive from Rockville, Maine to Durham, North Carolina. Coasting down interstates I rode in the passenger seat. Slumped down the road slipping away behind me gave me the feeling that I flying. I thought about everything that was going on in my life and my mind went blank. Passing cities and landmarks they fluttered past my vision and I can barely remember what I saw, having just been pulled from the cool waters of Maine and pushed in the heavy air of North Carolina.

When I got there I realized that I did not have the money to buy anything to wear to the funeral service. I'm a student, notoriously strapped for cash. My mother and my aunt scraped some money together and sent me off to a dying American institution: Sears. That Sears is now closed and still strapped for cash, entering an America where a man in the Oval Office wants to take more away from me and my friends.

The National Endowment for the Arts has a small budget, especially when you compare it to the budgets of our military departments. It doesn't make sense that you would take money from something that asks for so little in the first place. The endowment for the arts is my mother and my aunt, pulling money together so that we can have what we need in a dire situation. The only want us to look out to an America that is losing cultural icons like Macy's and The Ringling Brothers Circus and to put on your very best and try to create something more beautiful than what is leaving us. The greatest show on earth so far this year did not take place under a tent, but out in the open morning air of the presidential inauguration. Just like when I was drifting thought the states on the highway, I watched Trump take the Oath, not sure of what I was seeing but I couldn't look away.