The truth about the Yankees

From the Bergen Record


Cashman knows mess is his fault Monday, April 30, 2007 By BOB KLAPISCH
RECORD COLUMNIST

NEW YORK -- The Yankees exited the weekend with that unmistakable dreary feeling, the kind that fills up a non-contender's ballpark in late September when all hope is lost and a chilly off-season looms. It's still April, of course, but after losing another series to the Red Sox and dropping 5-of-6 to them in a week, the Yankees have made it clear their current roster, with all its underperforming components, just isn't good enough to hold off the leaner, hungrier (and cheaper) Sox.
The current crisis may yet cost Joe Torre his job; he'll need a good series in Texas this week to keep the corporate knives out of his back. But if Torre gets fired and is replaced by, say, Don Mattingly or Joe Girardi, the Yankees will still qualify as a $180 million mess, including a first baseman who's hitting under .200, a No. 3 starter (Carl Pavano) who doesn't want the ball, and four relievers who are on a pace for 100 or more games.
"It doesn't seem to be clicking for them, does it," one major league executive said of the Yankees this weekend. The Red Sox, 7-4 winners on Sunday, have proven they have a superior starting rotation, the more dominant closer and a deeper bench. And to say Boston has the better bullpen is the mother of all understatements.
The gap between the two clubs is obvious to everyone, even the Yankees themselves. Derek Jeter, sensing that Torre's reign is in jeopardy, pleaded for him not to be fired, saying talk of a new manager is "not fair" and "should stop" because "we're just not doing the job."
Even Brian Cashman is taking his share of the blame. The general manager must be aware of the not-so muted criticism in the clubhouse lately, the second-guessing of the weak bid for Daisuke Matsuzaka, the signing of Doug Mientkiewicz, the mindless reliance on Pavano.
All these factors have combined to turn the Yankees into a sub-.500 team. And while it's true the Yankees (likely) will rebound with Mike Mussina's imminent return, and (likely) will benefit from Phil Hughes' evolution, the Bombers no longer can count on fattening their record against the Blue Jays, Orioles and Devil Rays. In fact, the Yankees are just 3-11 in the East, a sure sign of continuing struggle.
Maybe a series with the last-place Rangers will help. Or maybe not. The American League has improved since 2005, the last time the Yankees started this slowly. Teams spend their money more wisely now, and there are fewer miracle-trade possibilities for Cashman to exploit. That's why he should've given more thought to, say, Ted Lilly as a free agent, or traded Pavano for Richie Sexson (or for anyone, really) when he could have.
To his credit, Cashman now says the deficits are indeed his fault.
"As far as I'm concerned, I take full responsibility," the GM said Sunday. "If people are looking for someone to blame, they can blame me. We're not going to sit and accept what we're going through."
It couldn't have been easy for Cashman to see Boston's Hideki Okajima outperform the entire Yankee relief corps once again. The Japanese lefty is just one of the ways the Sox outmaneuvered the Yankees this off-season.
Matsuzaka is the other, of course, with the strong possibility that J.D. Drew will turn out to be a more significant weapon than Bobby Abreu.
Okajima, a hunch signing by GM Theo Epstein, smothered a Bomber rally in the sixth inning with a constellation of weapons that stunned, if not overwhelmed, the Yankee hitters.
"You can't see the ball out of his hand, he's got a weird release point and it's tough to pick it up," said one veteran. "And there's one pitch he throws, I don't know if it's a slider or splitter ... whatever it is, it's filthy."
After Jeter reached on an error leading off the inning, Okajima got Bobby Abreu looking at a third strike and, after Alex Rodriguez's single to center, struck out Jason Giambi and got Hideki Matsui to bounce back to the mound.
Okajima was just as unhittable in the seventh, getting two of his three outs via strikeout. He was the perfect bridge to the eighth and ninth innings, where Jon Papelbon made it a perfect 8-for-8 in save opportunities. The Yankees, meanwhile, can only hope Mariano Rivera's cutter is fixed. The rest of the pen, however, appears beyond repair.
Yankee relievers already have thrown 36 more innings than their Red Sox counterparts, and that workload has sabotaged Scott Proctor more than anyone else. In his last six appearances (five of them against Boston), the right-hander's ERA has risen from 2.70 to 5.14, having allowed six hits in 42/3 innings.
Proctor still can hit 95 mph on the radar gun, but one teammate ruefully says, "His fastball is straight as a string right now." That's the surcharge for overwork, which is the price every Yankee reliever is paying for the starters' failure.
Put it this way: if Chien-Ming Wang can't outpitch Julian Tavarez, even because of a perfectly acceptable excuse like a split fingernail on his right index finger, then the Yankees' need for change goes beyond a new manager. They need Sexson, Roger Clemens and/or Dontrelle Willis.
If Cashman can't produce these saviors, how will Don Mattingly?
E-mail: klapisch@northjersey.com
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Napping together...

Start thinking, Yankees Fans

Bombers can only hope Rivera will save this pen
BY FILIP BONDYDAILY NEWS SPORTS COLUMNIST
Posted Wednesday, April 25th 2007, 4:00 AM
Read Filip Bondy's The Daily Blahg
The last-place Yanks dropped their fifth straight game last night, falling to Tampa Bay, 6-4, and this is as good a time as any to take stock of the damaged inventory: The hitting is just fine. Better than fine. The Yankees have been rounding the bases with great abandon whenever they aren't watching the other team do the same thing. The starting rotation is a terrible mess at the moment, yet there is plenty of depth and it will heal itself. If it doesn't, then a deal will be made or Roger Clemens will drop from the sky, straight into pinstriped pants.
That brings us to the real problem, the bullpen. And for once, after all these years, after more than a decade of his one perfect, illogical pitch, that problem includes Mariano Rivera. The bullpen failed again last night. Mike Myers hung a slider to Carl Crawford for a grand slam. Those middle relievers have been little more than a flimsy bridge for the past six or seven seasons, and the Yankees have worked around them. But if Rivera is not Rivera, then the Yanks are not the Yanks anymore, no matter how many homers Alex Rodriguez smacks. You do not simply pull a reliable closer out of your cap in August or September, no matter how much money you want to throw around.
If Scott Proctor and Kyle Farnsworth were halfway reliable, then you know Joe Torre wasn't bringing Rivera into the eighth inning at Fenway the other night. Farnsworth had six saves and an ERA of 4.36 last season. Proctor has one save in four seasons, with an ERA of 4.48 with the Yankees. These numbers, those arms, don't scare anybody. There's a 26-year-old closer in Scranton, T.J. Beam, who has a decent fastball, two saves and a 3.68 ERA in Triple-A. That isn't going to rescue a division title. The truth is the Yankees do not have a backup for Rivera. There is no Plan B.
So three-plus weeks into another year of 162 mini-seasons, you have your crisis. It is not the four-game deficit in the AL East, that's for sure. If you are a Yankee fan and you want to drive yourself crazy about yet another slow start (they were 11-19 in 2005, after splitting six games with Boston), then the smart sweat is all about Rivera. It is not about Chien-Ming Wang or Kei Igawa or Carl Pavano or Mike Mussina.
The people who tell you never to worry about Rivera, that he will be fine because he had another great spring, will be right until they are wrong. And of course, they have to be wrong one of these seasons. It is just a question of when that happens, when it is that age finally catches up with the Hall of Fame arm.
Rivera has blown two saves and given up seven hits in 6-1/3 innings. This is hardly a valid sample to judge a man with such an accomplished resume. He has also struck out seven, a more hopeful stat.
Still, the scariest of Rivera's number is this one: 37 years old.
Bruce Sutter began fading at 32, and was out of baseball at 35. He had injury problems. Goose Gossage pitched until he was 42, but he wasn't a viable closer after 38. Rollie Fingers, too, wasn't effective after 38.
You can take some comfort in knowing that Rivera has thrown far fewer innings in his career than most of these other guys, but he also has been used in the kind of playoff situations that exact their own special toll. There have been starters such as Clemens and Nolan Ryan who have broken through their own boundaries and kept right on pitching effectively. They are the exceptions, however, and they weren't walking into games in the ninth inning with the tying run on base.
It isn't time yet to panic about any of this. It won't be time even if the Yankees drop two of three to the Red Sox in the Bronx. That April sweep in Boston doesn't prove much of anything, except that the Red Sox have a sounder rotation at the moment.
It is harder to admit that Boston also has a much more effective closer in Jonathan Papelbon. If that doesn't change by summer, the Yankees are not the AL East champions in October.
Without Rivera at his best, the ride ends badly for Torre. One of these seasons, the optimists are bound to be dead wrong. If that happens this season, the Yankees ought to be readier than they are right now.
fjbondy@netscape.netEnd Content Columns -->

Nora: The Sequel (www.ravenswingstudio.com)

Nora, The Piano-Playing Cat (www.ravenswingstudio.com)

There's going to be a movie!

Want to see a movie about the way teachers are punished in NYC?

http://www.rubberroommovie.com/

Which franchise would you like?

April 17, 2007
Klein Specifies Restructuring of City Schools
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein unveiled new details yesterday about how the city school system will be organized once the 10 regional superintendent offices are abolished in September as part of the Bloomberg administration’s latest restructuring of the bureaucracy.
The reorganization is a sort of inversion of the city school administration. Instead of the traditional model in which principals work directly for a superintendent, each of the city’s more than 1,400 principals will choose a “school support organization” to work with their schools, and will pay these groups out of the school’s budget.
“Until now many educational decisions were made outside of the schools and classrooms,” Mr. Klein said during a news conference at Education Department headquarters.
Principals will have a menu of choices, at various prices, Mr. Klein said. At the low end, principals will pay $29,500 to join the so-called “empowerment network,” in which they are largely freed from oversight in exchange for agreeing to meet performance targets that include higher test scores.
At the high end, schools can choose to contract with the Success for All Foundation, a private nonprofit company based in Baltimore that offers a “whole school reform” model at a cost of up to $145,215, depending on enrollment. Smaller schools will be able to contract with the Success for All for as little as $44,694.
While the chancellor maintains that freeing principals from the daily oversight of superintendents will give them more power than ever to raise student achievement, critics have urged the Bloomberg administration to halt its plans, saying that too much is changing too fast and that the bureaucratic reconfiguration will not help children.
Principals are being asked to choose among three options: empowerment, in which schools are organized into networks and led by network support teams; partner support organizations, in which nine private nonprofit groups can be hired on contract to provide support to schools; and four learning support organizations, run by former regional superintendents, each with a different theme.
Officials expect that the learning support organizations, because they are run by veterans of the city school system, are likely to attract the largest number of principals.
Kathleen M. Cashin, now the superintendent of Region 5 in Brooklyn and Queens, is offering a “Knowledge Network” group that will help schools impose a “content rich” curriculum, focused on crucial facts that students need to know in science, literature, history, the arts and music, at a cost of $42,438 per school.
Laura Rodriguez of Region 2, in the Bronx, is offering the “Leadership Learning” support organization, which will focus on strengthening the skills of principals and assistant principals, at a cost of $55,000 per school.
Judith Chin of Region 3 in eastern Queens has created the “Integrated Curriculum and Instruction” group, which promises to help schools develop a multidisciplinary “thinking curriculum,” at a cost of $47,500 per school.
And Marcia V. Lyles of Region 8 in Brooklyn is offering the “Community Learning” support organization, which will focus on partnerships with communities and families. Dr. Lyles has set three price levels: basic for $33,750; premium for $39,850; and elite for $66,675. Failing schools needing the most help will pay the highest price.
The private groups that will be partnership support organizations include the City University of New York and New Visions for Public Schools, a New York City group.

Great Article on BCNHS in NY Teacher

http://www.uft.org/news/teacher/general/big_picture/
Brooklyn Comprehensive Night HS staff feels Tweed missing big picture
by Ron Isaac
Apr 12, 2007 11:18 AM
‘Excellent’ school scheduled
Brooklyn Comprehensive Night HS, for 17 years a beacon of hope for some of New York’s most alienated youth, recently got some bittersweet news from the Department of Education. It won’t be closed at the end of this school year as had been announced; but the ax will fall a year later, in June 2008.
The school, which was lately rated “excellent” on its DOE “Quality Review Report,” emphasizes a core curriculum, has a high Regents passing rate and an enviable percentage of graduating students of those who regularly attend. It is being closed, allegedly, because of poor attendance, not academic failure.
As a result, recruitment has ceased and no new students are being registered.
“The immediate and pressing issue for us right now is trying to get permission to admit additional students,” noted Chapter Leader James Ferentino. “We could do that and still close our doors by June, 2008. Unlike other high schools being phased out, we often keep students for only one semester, or even one quarter, during which time they are able to complete their course requirements. It will be a shame if we were barred from helping any more students graduate and become success stories.”
Staff and students feel that the school is being closed because the DOE fails to see the “big picture.”
Comprehensive night high schools in the city serve more than 140,000 overage — 18-to-21— students who are under-credited but highly motivated. Those at BCNHS continue their studies, although in a relatively inaccessible location in Canarsie, while meeting full-fledged adult responsibilities during the day. Many of them must independently earn a living while caring for their own children, parents or siblings. Making daytime “transfer schools” their only option would amount to abandoning them.
BCNHS operates in the South Shore HS building during hours that the larger school is not in session. This arrangement has helped to free up space for younger students who attend already overcrowded high schools.
In a March 1 visit to the school, UFT President Randi Weingarten pledged “to do everything within our power to ensure that the vital needs of these special students are met without interruption.” 
Joseph Zwerling, who teaches English and technology at the school, noted, “Our success over the years demonstrates beyond a doubt that the night high school model works.”
That seems borne out by a sampling of student testimony.
One recent BCNHS alumna e-mailed some good news to a former teacher and mentor. She is completing her master’s after having earned an undergraduate degree with honors from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Another student, after having lost one brother to untimely death and another to prison, had drifted away from school, but then returned and was welcomed by BCNHS where he reclaimed what he called his “blueprints to life.”
These are just two of the many students who have taken their cue from BCNHS’s motto: “Ad astra per asper” — “To the stars through difficulties.” But with the DOE’s plans to close the school, getting to the stars may be even more difficult.
As 19-year-old Marco Ponce said, “There are so many kids in this school who finally turned their lives around and now they want to shut it down on them. That’s not right.”

McCain trip highlights killer inflation

The day after Mr. McCain's stroll, The Times of London reported that 21 of the Shorja market's merchants and workers were ambushed and murdered.

See the rest of Frank Rich's article below:

Sunday in the Market With McCain By Frank Rich The New York Times
Sunday 08 April 2007
John McCain's April Fools' Day stroll through Baghdad's Shorja market last weekend was instantly acclaimed as a classic political pratfall. Protected by more than a hundred American soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters, two Apache gunships and a bulletproof vest, the senator extolled the "progress" and "good news" in Iraq. Befitting this loopy brand of comedy - reminiscent of "Wedding Crashers," in which Mr. McCain gamely made a cameo appearance - the star had a crackerjack cast of supporting buffoons: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who told reporters "I bought five rugs for five bucks!," and Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who likened the scene to "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime."
Five rugs for five bucks: boy, we've really got that Iraq economy up and running now! No wonder the McCain show was quickly dubbed "McCain's Mission Accomplished" and "McCain's Dukakis-in-the-Tank Photo Op." But at a certain point the laughter curdled. Reporters rudely pointed out there were 60-plus casualties in this market from one February attack alone and that six Americans were killed in the Baghdad environs on the day of his visit. "Your heart goes out to just the typical Iraqi because they can't have that kind of entourage," said Kyra Phillips of CNN. The day after Mr. McCain's stroll, The Times of London reported that 21 of the Shorja market's merchants and workers were ambushed and murdered.
The political press has stepped up its sotto voce deathwatch on the McCain presidential campaign ever since, a drumbeat enhanced by last week's announcement of Mr. McCain's third-place finish in the Republican field's fund-raising sweepstakes. (He is scheduled to restate his commitment to the race on "60 Minutes" tonight.) But his campaign was sagging well before he went to Baghdad. In retrospect, his disastrous trip may be less significant as yet another downturn in a faltering presidential candidacy than as a turning point in hastening the inevitable American exit from Iraq.
Mr. McCain is no Michael Dukakis. Unlike the 1988 Democratic standard-bearer, who was trying to counter accusations that he was weak on national defense, the Arizona senator has more military cred than any current presidential aspirant, let alone the current president. Every American knows that Mr. McCain is a genuine hero who survived torture during more than five years of captivity at the Hanoi Hilton. That's why when he squandered that credibility on an embarrassing propaganda stunt, he didn't hurt only himself but also inflicted collateral damage on lesser Washington mortals who still claim that the "surge" can bring "victory" in Iraq.
It can't be lost on those dwindling die-hards, particularly those on the 2008 ballot, that if defending the indefensible can reduce even a politician of Mr. McCain's heroic stature to that of Dukakis-in-the-tank, they have nowhere to go but down. They'll cut and run soon enough. For starters, just watch as Mr. McCain's GOP presidential rivals add more caveats to their support for the administration's Iraq policy. Already, in a Tuesday interview on "Good Morning America," Mitt Romney inched toward concrete "timetables and milestones" for Iraq, with the nonsensical proviso they shouldn't be published "for the enemy."
As if to confirm we're in the last throes, President Bush threw any remaining caution to the winds during his news conference in the Rose Garden that same morning. Almost everything he said was patently misleading or an outright lie, a sure sign of a leader so entombed in his bunker (he couldn't even emerge for the Washington Nationals' ceremonial first pitch last week) that he feels he has nothing left to lose.
Incredibly, he chided his adversaries on the Hill for going on vacation just as he was heading off for his own vacation in Crawford. Then he attacked Congress for taking 57 days to "pass emergency funds for our troops" even though the previous, Republican-led Congress took 119 days on the same bill in 2006. He ridiculed the House bill for "pork and other spending that has nothing to do with the war," though last year's war-spending bill was also larded with unrelated pork, from Congressional efforts to add agricultural subsidies to the president's own request for money for bird-flu preparation.
Mr. Bush's claim that military equipment would be shortchanged if he couldn't sign a spending bill by mid-April was contradicted by not one but two government agencies. A Government Accountability Office report faulted poor Pentagon planning for endemic existing equipment shortages in the National Guard. The Congressional Research Service found that the Pentagon could pay for the war until well into July. Since by that point we'll already be on the threshold of our own commanders' late-summer deadline for judging the surge, what's the crisis?
The president then ratcheted up his habitual exploitation of the suffering of the troops and their families - a button he had pushed five days earlier when making his six-weeks-tardy visit to pose for photos at scandal-ridden Walter Reed. "Congress's failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines," he said. "And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to."
His own failures had already foreordained exactly these grim results. Only the day before this news conference, the Pentagon said that the first unit tossed into the Baghdad surge would stay in Iraq a full year rather than the expected nine months, and that three other units had been ordered back there without the usual yearlong stay at home. By week's end, we would learn the story of the suspected friendly-fire death of 18-year-old Pvt. Matthew Zeimer, just two hours after assuming his first combat post. He had been among those who had been shipped to war with a vastly stripped-down training regimen, 10 days instead of four weeks, forced by the relentless need for new troops in Iraq.
Meanwhile the Iraqi "democracy" that Mr. Zeimer died for was given yet another free pass. Mr. Bush applauded the Iraqi government for "working on an oil law," though it languishes in Parliament, and for having named a commander for its Baghdad troops. Much of this was a replay of Mr. Bush's sunny Rose Garden news conference in June, only then he claimed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was taking charge of Baghdad security on his own. Now it's not even clear whom the newly named Iraqi commander is commanding. The number of military operations with Iraqis in the lead is falling, not rising, according to the Pentagon. Even as the administration claims that Iraqis are leading the Baghdad crackdown, American military losses were double those of the Iraqi Army in March.
Mr. Bush or anyone else who sees progress in the surge is correct only in the most literal and temporary sense. Yes, an influx of American troops is depressing some Baghdad violence. But any falloff in the capital is being offset by increased violence in the rest of the country; the civilian death toll rose 15 percent from February to March. Mosul, which was supposedly secured in 2003 by the current American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is now a safe haven for terrorists, according to an Iraqi government spokesman. The once-pacified Tal Afar, which Mr. Bush declared "a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq" in 2006, is a cauldron of bloodshed.
If Baghdad isn't going to repeat Tal Afar's history, we will have to send many more American troops than promised and keep them there until Mr. Maliki presides over a stable coalition government providing its own security. Hell is more likely to freeze over first. Yet if American troops don't start to leave far sooner than that - by the beginning of next year, according to the retired general and sometime White House consultant Barry McCaffrey - the American Army will start to unravel. The National Guard, whose own new involuntary deployments to Iraq were uncovered last week by NBC News, can't ride to the rescue indefinitely.
The center will not hold, no matter what happens in the Washington standoff over war funding. Surely no one understands better than Mr. McCain that American lives are being wasted in the war's escalation. That is what he said on David Letterman's show in an unguarded moment some five weeks ago - though he recanted the word wasted after taking flak the morning after.
Like his Letterman gaffe, Mr. McCain's ludicrous market stunt was at least in the tradition of his old brand of straight talk, in that it revealed the truth, however unintentionally. But many more have watched the constantly recycled and ridiculed spectacle of his "safe" walk in Baghdad than heard him on a late-night talk show. This incident has the staying power of the Howard Dean scream. Should it speed America's disengagement from Iraq, what looks today like John McCain's farcical act of political suicide may some day loom large as a patriot's final act of sacrifice for his country.
-------

A Beautiful Voice

Trash Talk Radio By Gwen Ifill The New York Times
Tuesday 10 April 2007
Washington - Let's say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather.
The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women's basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.
In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee's Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers' Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That's the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It's what explodes so many March Madness office pools.
But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded "nappy-headed ho's" - a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The "joke" - as delivered and later recanted - by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.
The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he's done some version of this several times before.
I know, because he apparently did it to me.
I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus's producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn't return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.
Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.
It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella - his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network - that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.
"Isn't The Times wonderful," Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. "It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House."
I was taken aback but not outraged. I'd certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.
I haven't talked about this much. I'm a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I've been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.'s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.
It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know - black women in particular - develop to guard themselves against casual insult.
Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus's program? That's for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don't know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.
Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It's more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.
So here's what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.
Let's see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

On punishment in the DOE -- One Teacher's Story

from the The Chief

Tales From the Rubber Room:Charge Has Teacher Dangling


By MEREDITH KOLODNER


'THEY ASSUME YOU'RE GUILTY': P.S. 147 Teacher Kathy Blythe says she has been falsely accused of roughing up a student, and as a result has been sitting in the Brooklyn 'rubber room' for the past two months.When veteran Teacher Kathy Blythe escorted a 9-year-old girl to her seat after she tried to run out of her classroom at P.S. 147 in Brooklyn for the third time that day, she had no idea that just a few hours later police officers would be escorting her to a cell in the 90th Precinct.Ms. Blythe has not yet been charged by the Department of Education, but she is accused of physically harming the child while preventing her from leaving the class Feb. 15.The police investigated the accusations and released her without charges that same day. She has nonetheless spent most of her days in the DOE's Brooklyn temporary re-assignment center ever since.'I Didn't Hurt Her'"I did not harm that child," Ms. Blythe said on a warm March day after she and a union representative had been to a Manhattan office to answer questions as part of the DOE's investigation.Principal Rafaela Espinal, who had recommended that Ms. Blythe be placed in the reassignment center, did not return phone calls requesting comment. Other school staff members said they had been instructed not to speak about the issue, although several of them said that they didn't believe the charges.Ms. Blythe said that she was told that three other children in the class claimed that she was rough with the child when she restrained her from walking out of the room.The little girl was not supposed to be in Ms. Blythe's class that day, since the school's support staff usually took her out for behavioral counseling. So when she began to act up in class, as the girl often did, Ms. Blythe called her parents to come to the school.'Kept Me From Teaching


'STUCK IN THE 'RUBBER ROOM':
Brooklyn's temporary re-assignment center holds more than 100 Teachers and administrators accused of violating Department of Education regulations or committing serious crimes. Some have been there for months and are still awaiting formal charges."I couldn't teach the rest of the class with her constantly getting out of her seat," said Ms. Blythe, who had never before been accused of harming a student.The girl's father arrived and talked to her alone in the hallway twice during that Thursday morning class after Ms. Blythe had blocked her from leaving the class, according to the Teacher. It wasn't until the 22-year veteran Teacher was called out of her final period class, and saw several police officers standing in the hallway, that she was aware that there was a bigger problem.Ms. Blythe had gone to the Assistant Principal's office earlier that day to talk about how to deal with the little girl's habit of running out of class, and she said the girl's mother had become enraged with her, to the point that a School Safety Agent was called to help Ms. Blythe get away from the parent and out of the office.But just an hour or so later, it was she was walked into a police van, where she was handcuffed. It wasn't until she was being questioned at the precinct, with one cuff attached to a pole, that she learned that the little girl had alleged that Ms. Blythe had ripped the buttons on her shirt and scratched her while preventing her from running out the classroom door."I was taken out of my school by police officers with everyone watching," said Ms. Blythe. "It was horrible."

Job At Stake
The Office of Special Investigations will eventually determine whether or not there is sufficient evidence to charge Ms. Blythe with corporal punishment. If they do not, she will be allowed to return to her school. If they bring charges and find her guilty, she could lose her job and her teaching license.The legal process when Teachers are accused of hurting students is often a long and arduous one.Most educators accused of corporal punishment are not placed in re-assignment centers, or "rubber rooms" as they are commonly called, and most are found innocent.The school Principal or administrator must believe that a school employee could put a child in danger for the employee to be re-assigned while awaiting charges, unless that person has serious criminal charges pending, such as a drug-related arrest.Teachers like Ms. Blythe who are accused of violating a DOE regulation must have charges brought against them within six months. Others who have criminal charges pending can sit in the rubber room longer, sometimes for years. Teachers in the re-assignment centers are technically considered innocent until proven guilty, and therefore receive full pay and benefits while their cases play out.

A Grim Tableau

There is a rubber room in every borough, and on a late-March morning, the one in downtown Brooklyn was filled with more than 100 Teachers and administrators of every age and race. The window shades were pulled down in the long hallway of a room; fluorescent bulbs overhead brightened it. The backless benches that lined the tables held Teachers who were napping, working on personal laptops, and debating the latest developments in the Sean Bell police shooting case.An Assistant Principal with 28 years in the system sat at one table. A few tables over, six Teachers from Automotive High School tried to occupy their time. Some said they missed the company of a Teacher who had been recently released with no charges after spending 26 months at the center."It's just depressing in here," said Ms. Blythe. "The good ones, we just want to get back to our schools."A security guard sat at a desk near the front door where inhabitants punch their time cards, staying from 8:00 a.m. until 2:50 p.m. or 8:30 a.m. until 3:20 p.m. A DOE employee supervises the room, which is open the same days that school is in session.

Banished to Limbo

Most of the instructors say the experience is demoralizing and humiliating. "We are expendable," said a woman who has been a Social Worker for 27 years and has been in the Brooklyn center for about two months. "Once you go in, they forget about you."Some educators said they felt as though the union had forgotten about them as well. Last month long-time Teacher Hipolito Colon asked the United Federation of Teachers to recognize the centers as separate chapters of the union in an effort to get more assistance.The UFT's long-held position is that Teachers should be processed as quickly as possible.One Teacher, who has been in the center since the fall of 2004 and began teaching special education in 1985, said he was going to retire in June. "It sucks," he said. "A lawyer told me I'm going to be fired, so I'm giving up." It is his third time in the rubber room, and he has spent 7-1/2 years out of the past decade there. In the late 1990s, he was sent to a re-assignment center on an accusation of corporal punishment.

Targeted by Principal?
Angry at what he sees as an endless series of injustices, he said his last tenure in the classroom came after a senior transfer to P.S. 131 in Brooklyn. He amassed 26 letters in his file in 14 months. He believes the Principal was out to get him from the time he arrived at the school.A special education Teacher in the Brooklyn facility was there for the first time after 20 years of teaching. He was accused of a security breach for losing track of a student after classes with about 100 students were dismissed and the school's first-floor hallway became chaotic.He said he didn't see one student run through a gate that had been left open. As a result, the child was left unsupervised in the playground. "We get punished for things that are not our fault," he said, "If I'm having difficulty, I need support, and it's a management issue as much as anything else." He said in his case, a new Principal sided with an Assistant Principal who had been looking to fire him.A woman standing next to him wore a head band with bunny ears that stood up. When asked about her unusual choice of headwear, she said, "Why not? It's all a farce, everything that happens in here."Ms. Blythe said she hoped her case would be cleared quickly, but she was worried that the process would get bogged down. "Sometimes it seems like people assume that because you're in here, you must be guilty," she said. "But I'm going to keep fighting it. They're not going to get rid of me like this."

Parents believe New Visions is going to destroy their school

Oh, and New Visions is the organization opening the school which replaces mine!

See below:


Mon Apr 9, 2007 10:56 am

The Parents of P.S. 282K take their continuing battle to Save Quality Education at P.S. 282 tothe steps of the Department of Education!For Information
Please Contact:Kaitlin Byrd 347-563-5319
Susana Kufuor 917-355-1599

The parents and children of P.S. 282 will protest at the headquartersof the Department of Education (DOE) at 52 Chambers Street on Tuesday,April 10, 2007, at 9:00 a.m. Parents continue to protest the DOE'sill-advised decision to place a Middle School within the walls ofDistrict 13's number one elementary school in student achievement. TheP.S. 282 community has the full support of its local elected officialsin this fight. They, like we, understand that the plan will destroy:v Space – DOE and New Visions representatives have suggested thatP.S. 282 max out its class sizes to 35 to make room for the MiddleSchool in direct opposition to the Bloomberg Administration'soft-repeated objective of minimizing class sizes.v Loss of cluster classes – DOE and New Visions have suggestedthat science, art, and technology be removed from individual roomssuch as art rooms, science labs and computer labs that are an integralpart of instruction at P.S. 282K, instead being relegated to "carts,"which would limit time for learning and interaction.v Safety – Statistics show that Middle School children placedwith elementary school children leads to numerous social andbehavioral problems.P.S. 282 is located in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The principal and schoolcommunity encourages a multicultural learning environment.Administrators, school personnel and parents work together to create arich atmosphere conducive to learning. The PTA is outraged that theDOE could be so negligent as to introduce a course of action thatwould minimize and inhibit the effectiveness of successful programs.The school has an active PTA, a dedicated school leadership team,cooperative faculty and helpful staff who enthusiastically embraceinvolvement from the community at large. P.S. 282 interacts withseveral organizations offering a wide breadth of expertise andopportunity from banking to the arts. The DOE's plans to move forwardwith a Middle School will undermine student and administrativeadvancement and threaten the school's further achievement and success.PTA President, Xiomara Fraser says, "My son entered the school fiveyears ago when enrollment was low. Through committed parents, hardworking administrators and teachers, the school has managed tomaintain its academic integrity as it continues to increase itsenrollment."Assembly Member Joan Millman, in supporting the parents, stated:"Governor Spitzer's Contract for Excellence, which was recently passedin this year's budget, requires New York City to submit a plan toreduce class size," said Assemblywoman Millman. "To propose addingstudents to P.S. 282, a school where enrollment increases every year,is both short-sighted and subverts the important measure in theGovernor's plan. I urge the Department of Education to re-evaluatethis proposal find a more suitable location for the proposed new school."Council Member David Yassky, a long time supporter of P.S. 282 and theKahili Gibran Academy, said in a March 16th letter to ChancellorKlein, "…introducing older children into an elementary school will bedisruptive to current students…. Older students will certainly changethe dynamic of P.S. 282—and the addition of a new school will limitP.S. 282's ability to grow and offer more students a top-rate education."Susana Kufuor, PTA Co-president, said: "We are in the process ofconducting our own space utilization study to counter the DOE'ssuggestion regarding room at our school (P.S. 282). With every effort,the school community of P.S. 282 will continue to pursue an end tothis scheme."Copies of Council Member Yassky's letter will be made available tomedia at Tuesday morning's rally.A protest is scheduled to take place on Tuesday April 10 from 9-10amat the Department of Education, the Tweed building at 52 ChambersStreet in Manhattan.

We rule with quiet paws.

I don't agree with everything, but this is food for thought

'Education Standards' Are Not the Answer
By Andrew CoulsonSpecial to washingtonpost. com's Think Tank Town
Thursday, April 5, 2007; 7:03 PM

A growing bipartisan chorus is singing the praises of national education standards. Former officials of the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have joined the choir, as have both of the major teachers' unions.Cementing the coalition, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) have recently proposed a bill to create a national curriculum in reading and math. The bill's supporters rightly tell us that by the end of high school, American students have fallen behind their international peers. Dodd and Ehlers use that observation to conclude that we need such a curriculum "to compete in the global economy."But how exactly would homogenizing our curriculum and testing make us more competitive? "National standards would help propel U.S. economic competitiveness, because they would allow the country to set expectations higher than those of our international competitors, " write Rudy Crew and Paul Vallas, the superintendents of the Miami and Philadelphia school districts, in a recent Education Week commentary.This idea of higher standards has a certain appeal. In many other areas of life, higher standards are associated with better performance. It's much harder to qualify for a U.S. Olympic team than for a typical high school sports team -- and Olympic teams are demonstrably better. Japanese automakers generally set higher reliability standards in the 1970s than did American automakers, and they produced more reliable vehicles.But sports and manufacturing are competitive fields, while public schooling currently is not. Standards advocates mistakenly assume that high external standards produce excellence, but in fact it is the competitive pursuit of excellence that produces high standards.We understand this point implicitly in every field outside of education. We didn't progress from four-inch black-and-white cathode ray tubes to four-foot flat panels because the federal government raised television standards. Apple did not increase the capacity of its iPod from 5 to 80 gigabytes in five years because of some bureaucratic mandate. And the Soviet Union did not collapse because the targets for its five-year plans were insufficiently ambitious.Progress and innovation in these and almost all other human endeavors have been driven by market incentives: consumer choice, competition among providers, the profit motive. The absence of these incentives -- as in the Soviet Union -- has led to economic decline and collapse. Not surprisingly, the link between standards and performance in public schooling is noticeably weaker than it is in other areas, because government schooling is a monopoly, not a market.Existing federal education laws reaffirm the point that standards, in the absence of market forces, do not improve results. A 2006 Harvard University study by Jaekyung Lee found that the No Child Left Behind Act "did not have a significant impact on improving reading or math achievement, " and "has not helped the nation and states significantly narrow the achievement gap."The only industrialized nation the United States beats in 12th grade science is Italy, which has a national curriculum. Two nations that beat us at the 12th grade level in both mathematics and science, Canada and Australia, do not. While some nations with national standards also do well -- Japan, for instance -- it does not follow that they do well because of the standards.National curriculum advocates are thus wrong on both theoretical and empirical grounds. But it gets worse, because their recommendation would actually impede the very forces that could improve American education.Specialization and the division of labor are essential to the effectiveness of the market. If all schools conformed to a single curriculum, it would drastically reduce their ability to compete and thus their incentives to improve. Instead of a diverse menu of schools specializing in fine arts, applied sciences, or international relations, families would be offered a uniform educational gruel.Michael Petrilli, a scholar at the Fordham Foundation, recognizes the role of competition in education, but contends that national standards are necessary to facilitate it. "In order for any market to work effectively, " Petrilli claims, "consumers need good information, " and in his view, that information can only be delivered by a national system of standards and tests.Yet around the world, free education markets are already thriving with no such standards in place. One such market exists in the United States: after-school tutoring. Tutoring services like Sylvan Learning Systems (a rapidly growing U.S. company) and Kumon (a Japanese firm with millions of students in scores of countries) have arisen with no government involvement whatsoever. And Japanese and Americans alike acknowledge the contribution these services have made to student achievement. Toshio Sawada and Sachino Kobayashi of the Japanese National Institute of Educational Research remarked that without their nation's multi-billion dollar tutoring industry, "the [international] success of Japan in the area of education would be unthinkable. "Few American wonks and pundits realize that there is a vast body of international academic literature comparing market and bureaucratic school systems, and that it favors markets in academic achievement, efficiency, responsiveness to parents' demands, and even the maintenance of physical facilities. As I noted in a 2004 review of that literature, the statistically significant results for achievement and efficiency favor markets by a 10 to one margin.By contrast, there is no evidence that imposing government standards improves the performance of true education markets. On the contrary, by placing all intellectual eggs in the same basket, a single national curriculum would hobble competition and magnify the damage done by every bad decision.As Jared Diamond so compellingly argued in his Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, diversity is as important to the health of human societies as it is to the survival of ecosystems. We need education diversity as much as we need biodiversity. A dynamic, competitive system is better able to survive mishaps than a monolithic, centralized one.It is ironic that standards advocates exhort us to improve our schools in response to competitive pressures from abroad, but then discount the ability of the same competition and consumer choice to drive improvement at home. It is the competitive pursuit of excellence spurred by market forces that drives up standards, not the other way around. The sooner we realize that, the better off our children will be.Andrew Coulson is director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and the author of Market Education: The Unknown History. He blogs at Cato-at-Liberty. org.

Clutch-Rod?

Yesterday, A-Rod hit a walk-off grand slam. It won the game.

Could it be that he is finally over his problems and is now HERE in the flesh and spirit and can be the player we expected?

Joe Klein defends Nancy Pelosi on Time.com

April 6, 2007 2:12
The Pelosi Flap
Posted by Joe Klein Comments (59) Permalink Trackbacks (0) Email This
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, with typical judiciousness, gets the Pelosi trip quite wrong. First, George Logan was not a member of the Congress when he made his "pacifist" trip to France. (He was elected to the Senate three years later, in 1801.) Second, Pelosi did not make the trip to negotiate with Assad, but to talk with him. Third, this is not a "wartime" situation--in fact, we continue to have diplomatic relations with Syria. Fourth, as others have noted, numerous Republican members of Congress have gone to speak with Assad. In fact, it was a Republican, Chris Shayes, who first told me that I should go over and interview Assad. Fifth, the media coverage of this on CNN and elsewhere has been abysmal. (Do you think CNN would repeatedly call itself the best political team on television if it actually was?)
Finally, what is the real scandal here: that Pelosi spoke with Assad or that the Bush Administration won't?...Or, as I reported last week, that the Bush Administration won't even let the Israelis talk to Assad?
And even more finally, the Assad family is a mafia, brutal and corrupt. I've recently received an email from the family of Dr. Kamal Labwani, a gentle and civilized Democracy activist I interviewed in Damascus just after he was released from prison. He had a question he wanted me to ask Assad: "Mr. President, you're a doctor and so am I. Why did you put me in jail?" I asked and Assad said, "I'm not in charge of everything in this country!" Hmm.Labwani is not only back in prison now, but in isolated detention and his health is declining. This is completely outrageous...and, I believe, all the more reason for Americans to talk to Assad and try to shame him into releasing Labwani and other political prisoners. It's a long shot, but it certainly can't hurt. If we can talk to Hosni Mubarak--another free-range oppressor--there's no reason why we can't talk to Assad.

Martin Luther King's Speech Against Vietnam

Copied from the posting on Truthout.org

Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church - the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate - leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years - especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked - and rightly so - what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath - America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission - a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men - for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators - our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change - especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy - and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us - not their fellow Vietnamese - the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go - primarily women and children and the aged.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them - mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force - the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to build on - save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front - that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them - the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This Madness Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.
Protesting the War
Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken - the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
The People Are Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept - so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force - has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world - a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter - but beautiful - struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side; Some great cause,
God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.

Mayor holds parents committee hostage

Below is true enough to almost be so.

April 5, 2007 (GBN News): A potential confrontation was averted early today when 12 members of the Chancellor´s Parent Advisory Committee (CPAC) were released by the N.Y. City Department of Education after being held captive at Tweed Courthouse for over 24 hours. The committee members had gone to the DOE headquarters for a meeting, but apparently made a wrong turn down a restricted hallway and were immediately seized by school safety officers. The captives were the subject of intense negotiations between the DOE and those attempting to obtain their release.The Tweed Courthouse has been disputed territory since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city schools in 2002. CPAC, an elected group of parents which is supposed to advise the Chancellor on educational issues, is technically a part of the DOE. However, the capture of the committee members is only the latest in a series of frustrations as CPAC attempts to gain access to officials and information at Tweed.During the negotiations, Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg had been intransigent, insisting that DOE territory was intentionally violated. "We welcome parent involvement", the Chancellor stated, "but Tweed is not their place. If they have a problem, they should see their parent coordinators". Mayor Bloomberg added, "We value our parents, but they should be at PTA bake sales, not trespassing on our property. Tweed is for business people, who know best how to run the schools."Upon the release, a statement was issued by Chancellor Klein´s office, stating, "While we are entitled to put the trespassers on trial, the DOE has pardoned these CPAC members and gives their release to the parents of New York City schoolchildren as a gift."However, while the release of the captives was portrayed by the Chancellor as a magnanimous gesture, it appears that there may have been a more practical reason for the change of heart. According to a source at the DOE, with the recent elimination of the school lunch budget by corporate "turnaround" consultants Alvarez and Marsal, the DOE was unable to obtain funding for the detainees´ meals. Apparently, even the DOE was unwilling to run afoul of the Geneva Convention by "not meeting standards" for care and feeding of prisoners.Posted by Gary Babad on the NYC Parent Blog at 4/05/2007 09:45:00 AM