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Housing:
A Basic Right, an Urgent Need, a National Priority--Aesthetic
Realism
Explains
America’s Housing Crisis, the Cause, and the Solution!
There's an honest answer
to the housing crisis and homelessness in America. It's in this
groundbreaking presentation:
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Dale Laurin, RA, Moderator:“My
colleagues and I are here because we want and need to do something
about the cruel, unjust, totally unacceptable situation of between
400,000 and 800,000 people in our country -- many of them children and
senior citizens -- without a decent place to sleep on any given night.
We are going to speak about what we have seen through our study of
Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the great American
philosopher, poet, and critic, Eli Siegel, about the cause of our
country's housing crisis and the SOLUTION!” |
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Barbara Buehler, NYC Department of
Planning: "I’ve seen firsthand the terrible results of the massive
cuts in federal funding for housing programs—a 97% drop in 24
years. In that time, the number of homeless families in New York
City alone has increased 500%. The only reason homelessness
exists in a land so rich with natural resources is because a person’s
need for a home is seen as a means of someone else making profit.
This is contempt, which Mr. Siegel described as ‘the addition to self
through the lessening of something else.’ Contempt, he showed, is not
the result of the excesses of the profit system, but its very
basis.” |
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Anthony Romeo, AIA, Deputy Director of
Facilities Planning, Queens Borough Public Library system:
“There
is a choice that has to be made in this country to end homelessness,
and it’s exactly the same as the choice an artist has to make to create
something beautiful: it is a choice between respect and contempt.
Studying Aesthetic Realism made for a new integrity in my life. I
learned that beauty and ethics are inseparable—that the way to
take care of myself was by trying to be fair to other people, that in
order to express something original, I had to be impressed by the world
in a deep way. We have to oppose contempt in the way this country is
run, and we have to oppose it in ourselves.” |
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Ken Kimmelman, Aesthetic Realism
Consultant, Emmy-Award winning filmmaker: “I feel
passionately that when people learn to see other human beings as having
insides, hopes, feelings as real as their own, homelessness will be a
thing of the past. And I want people to know what is in these sentences
from the book Self and World by Eli Siegel: ‘The
world should be owned by the people living in it...All persons should
be seen as living in a world truly theirs.’” |
Ken
Kimmelman’s award-winning public service film on homelessness,
"What
Does A Person Deserve?" is part of this event.
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