This draft valuably reflects the process by which you thought your idea through. The reader benefits more from a different structure, I think, so the next round of improvement would come from that effort. The ideas that the essay develops, that it's ultimately about, should be shown to the reader up front, so she can understand the stakes from the outset. If it should take 130 words to explain why words matter—which I'm not sure it is—they should not be the first 130 words.

Two ideas that arise at opposite ends of the present draft would probably in the reader's most productive structure fall into dialogue.

Not since Joan Mondale made increasing public support for the arts the project of "the Vice-President's wife" half a century ago has any figure of real or symbolic prominence in American politics presented arts policy as serious policy. Perhaps what begins here in the particular set of needs to which you are so well attuned might also develop secondarily its generalist consequences, around which other coaliion-building is possible. Underpinning the peoples' creative lives with public resources shared through grass roots non-profit organizations is a pillar of democracy. All sorts of politically-aware people can agree on that, regardless of the communities they call their own. Where I come from, "ideologically" as we may say, it is not surprising that in the lives of all our different parts of the society, the free development of each is the free development of all.