Add My Voice

Hello, and welcome to addmyvoice.art. powered by WordPress.com.  At home here in the United States, the scene on the smartTV presented a lovely large room with high ceilings in an old French building with a group of people sitting on metal chairs designed like art deco,  set in a half circle, speaking French, talking about a video and Afrotonic. The staging on this episode on the program called 300 Million de Critiques on TV5 Monde États-Unis (channel available on Xfinity) was beautiful. On one side of the circle of commentators was a grand piano with the top propped up, and the space on the other side was defined by a concert harp.  That was the background sound and peripheral awareness to my action of scribbling thoughts down onto paper to add to this blog.

 The news is usually on with important matters directly in front of my thoughts such as politics, current events, and the concern about the governance for our country. Sometimes, the songs we learned in elementary schools about our country, land, and liberty, playback in my mind while watching the news about our government. Many of us who vote to select our elected officials who represent us, want them to take care of the details that are much too politically time-consuming for us to think about on a daily business. The current political environment requires alert citizens. Have you ever wanted to jump into the discussion to help provide a solution to any of the several problems our representatives are addressing on our behalf? Do you want to donate to all the causes and to all the people that you feel are important and relevant to the betterment of humanity and purpose? I felt that way and still feel this way, even more so now because our Congress needs more help doing the work.  I regard the news with concern. I think a group called the Creative Congressional Committee should be assembled to filter through possible creative solutions, up to the moment best solutions and long term solutions. The most talented innovators with wonderful designs for architecture in buildings and in company infrastructure have well-known business practices which encourage the best of the best in programming to work at their respective companies. I wonder if they could donate ideas at addmyvoice.art to produce social solutions if not prohibited by their company policies. It would motivate us all to explore creative, beneficial, healthy, profitable, and nourishing solutions which benefit all in a community.

 The year is 2019 and we had a government shutdown in the United States which caused great despair for the approximately 800,000 federal employees who worked without receiving paychecks which of course, trickled the problems into all of their accounts payable which are businesses, too. For 5 weeks, this news was reported by all the major news programs. There are other situations which require immediate attention and solutions, too. Have you heard what the immigration department of our government is doing at the border between the US and Mexico with migrant families? Those people who wanted to emigrate from Mexico, and from countries in Central America, and South America, and immigrate into the United States were detained, and parents and children were separated and set up into large cage structures because the government has not figured out any good solutions yet, obviously. Let me introduce a suggestion to form a Creative Congressional Committee. You know, agreeable people conversing about possible solutions and ideas.  The creative people who work at Google, for example, creating apps which serve humanity and business, might be asked to think of possible solutions to this huge mistake of less creative problem-solvers. Please.  If you can remember childhood and ever getting separated from your loving family and into the hands of strangers, perhaps babysitters, you would know, it is not the most comfortable situation for a child. In fact, it is sometimes very frightening. These children need help. What can we do?

When our United States Senator Jeff Merkley investigated the situation at one of the border facilities with the detained adults and children who were separated from their families, the news stations were there to report on the events. He has worked tirelessly on our behalf to correct that messed-up situation and he needs our help to do more.  If you are like me in that we have obligations which do not include time for going to the border facility to help, we will have to find other ways to help our Congress who report, legislate, and argue on our behalf, for a just cause. I’ve donated within the 3-50 dollar range to many causes. I really feel that they need more help. What can a person do? This is the sharing of my effort. The original plan was to write a helpful and interesting book and that a small portion of the sales from each book would be for donations to certain members of our Congress doing work to improve our society, government policies, and humanitarian support.

I wrote some helpful information that will be useful to people who want to go to college, who might have obstacles to overcome to get there, and for those who feel like it is an overwhelming experience who weigh the choices of dropping out and staying enrolled in courses, on a regular basis. It is simple and concise because students already have a lot of reading to do and this book is easy to read and easy to understand.  This is a kind coaching style to share these tiny bits of observation from experience.  To begin the work; I wrote the book, designed the cover and uploaded it to sell online on Amazon.com. Even with the rewrites and editing, I found five errors and had to rewrite and upload the manuscript again and change the paperback version of the cover.  

Next, I researched how to make fundraiser items for high schools and middle schools. This topic is vast and requires more research. To generate income, care for my family, and contribute time and effort to finding solutions for those who desperately need our help,and to donate to members of Congress who need supportive ideas and funding, requires much thinking, learning, doing, reviewing, correcting grammar, adjusting color, drawing illustrations, formatting and connecting it all together in a smooth transitional way. It is time-consuming. If successful, it is worth the work. 

When I asked Google for information about the border in question between our countries, the search results provided interesting articles.

The area has fewer than two thousand miles and borders the states of  California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, with the country of Mexico,  in a beautiful zigzag-like slope over terrain much like that of which our ancestors already challenged and overcame. Those states and a couple more were originally part of Mexico, by the way, before Manifest Destiny. My mind imagines an idea of a tourist railway or monorail along this slope, traveling in cyclic patterns with views of the desert, the mountains, and we could have hotels, shopping,  and restaurants, all along the border or just at the train stations. We can have helicopter rides and all the types of businesses that tourists enjoy.  The stations of embarkation and disembarkation should have the immigration staff working to allow people to stay comfortably on either side of the border with their halves of the railway cities in each country while doing the paperwork for research and providing documentation for immigrants. This is an idea for game makers and app makers who get paid to come up with workable products in the best industries. We should have some of them help us suggest workable, viable solutions for all humans concerned in this project.

To get positive ideas, we need healthy and positive suggestions. Something better than a wall would be something that generates money and supports the community of all humans involved. Meanwhile, how are the children spending their days in the wired rooms? Are they learning anything? Do we have interpreters going to visit them and let them know what is going on in their situation? Do they know about technology? How do they spend their time? Are they learning both English and Spanish grammar? Where are the parents and are they allowed to use communication devices such as Facetime on iPhone or video chat on Messenger to comfort their children?

If you have a computer or device which can access the internet, you can start on WordPress. It is a great website to help people. I appreciate its user-friendly tools and like to give them credit because it is a generous company considering all the components available to make a very efficient website for blogs or e-commerce. If you are starting on a zero budget, you can get the free version and upgrade whenever you are able to upgrade to Premium or Business. With premium, you can monetize your website to earn money to help your causes and find solutions.  You can add a free- to- start PayPal Business account which will charge a small percentage for each transaction, and you can try the free version of Grammarly to help with grammar choices. It is a start to one method of participating in civic duties which can inspire hope for improvement in mutual existence. This free version of Grammarly is added into my Microsoft Word, which I am using now in this experiment of using these items to be part of the solution. I will upload or copy and paste this article into addmyvoice.wordpress.com. (This experiment worked!) I discovered that Grammarly works in this WordPress editor as well. A domain name is a perk in the premium version of WordPress.  I like the address of addmyvoice.wordpress.com. They offer and suggest many possibilities such as .blog, .press, .life, .net, .art, and more. I’ve considered a few of them and decided on addmyvoice.art. This makes me feel optimistic. I look forward to the best possibilities of a publicly powered Creative Committee to help our Congress with creative problem-solving minds creating better solutions.  I remember watching a video about the Google Company and the available jobs within the company. It was impressive because Google encouraged the staff to think and design innovative products and valued the effort and importance of directed thinking and imagination.

Thank you. I hope you enjoy beginning this journey with addmyvoice.wordpress.com and addmyvoice.art. It is the work which strives to be work of progressive conceptual art addressing the challenge to convey a concept from the intangible to a tangible matter of lasting value. Here we will try to produce many types of art to document our current story.