Remembering All That Was Lost On 9/11

Photo credit: Me taken in the mid 80's

Twenty years ago today the world as we knew it came to a screeching halt. It also marked the very first day of my teaching career. Six years ago today I wrote the this piece. At the time, public employees—especially teachers—were under attack from both Republicans AND some Democrats, and my family was preparing to say our final farewells to my cousin, Tony, a retired firefighter who was there for me SO many times in my life when I needed strength and wisdom, so my emotions were raw.

I repost this piece every year on 9/11 as a tribute to the world I knew as a child and as an adult, to all the lives lost and to those whose job it is to protect so that others might live.

I probably won't be watching any of the TV coverage. That day altered my DNA so I feel it in every fiber of my being. For all those who were directly affected by that day, I wish you peace and comfort on this day and every day.

No armed police in my school, please

"It'll be a sad day for this country if children can safely attend their classes only under the protection of armed guards." ~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower 

Credit: Targeted: Pro Guns v. Gun Control in Schools FB page

On January 8th, NJ.com reported:

A bill before the state Legislature would create a new category of police officer, stationing armed, retired cops under the age of 65 inside New Jersey schools.
The bill (S2983) establishes "Class Three" special police officers designated to provide security at both public and private schools. They would not replace school resource officers, who are specially trained full-time police officers stationed at some schools.  

The bill, drafted in the wake of the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was approved by the Senate Law and Public Safety Committee Thursday. It's unclear if it will get a full vote before the end of the legislative session next week.

The bill is sponsored by Senators Anthony Bucco (R-25) and Steve Sweeney (D-3).

Writing at Blue Jersey in response to this article, student activist, Melissa Katz, writes about how, if signed into law, this bill would exacerbate the school-to-prison pipeline that currently plagues many of our school districts serving students of color:

This bill will only further criminalize our youth, especially our youth of color. And what does “keep them safe” mean for students of color when practices such as increased police presence does the very opposite of “keep them safe” by, for example, contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline? The school to prison pipeline, as defined by the ACLU, refers to the “policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems (“What Is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?“). While schools that implement zero-tolerance policies are aiming to make their environments safer, research has concluded “schools with excessive discipline tend to be and feel less safe than schools that have developed rich cultures of support, dignity, and evidence-based discipline policies” (“Restorative Practices: Fostering Healthy Relationships and Promoting Positive Discipline in Schools, A Guide for Educators“).

Credit: The Hartford Courant

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, a survey of about 10,000 teachers across the country was conducted to see how they felt about a variety of school safety issues. The survey concluded that:

Most educators say they feel safe in school and believe their students feel the same. They do not, however, agree so unanimously that their schools are safe from gun violence. Although the reaction to the Sandy Hook shooting and other instances of school violence have been explosive publicly, the most common new safety measure being adopted is locking doors or keeping fewer open during the school day. The majority of educators feel an armed guard would increase school safety, though, do not desire to be an armed presence in schools themselves.

I seem to be in that 2.8% because I do not want armed police in my building every day. I wrote about it last month, on the anniversary of the Sandy Hook terrorist attack:

No longer do we only have fire drills, we now have lock down drills, where kids practice hiding from terrorist invasions. A far cry from the 1950's 'duck and cover' drills against nameless, faceless Communists who were thousands of miles away. We now have to hide from people who could be our neighbors: that strange guy, that angry teenager. 

Classroom doors in many districts must now remain closed and locked at all times. And that's so much fun in the warm weather when there's no air conditioning. Staff must use a key to lock and unlock every door in the building, even storage closets and copy rooms. 

Many districts now have high-tech devices that scan the drivers license of every visitor. And police regularly walk the halls. 

All this does not make me feel safer. Quite the contrary, I feel less safe because it reminds me we live in a very violent society. We have to do all this because some nut job with a gun could force his way into my school at any moment and blow us all away. We have to do this because a powerful minority is holding this country hostage just so their members have the 'right' to own WMDs. I'm sorry, I didn't sign up to be a prison guard, and my students aren't prisoners. But that's what it's become because elected officials are too afraid of losing all that NRA PAC money and possibly losing their next election.

All this is in addition to the metal detectors already present in many inner city schools.

Two months after 9/11, I flew to California out of Newark Airport. There was a massive security presence—as well there should have been. Armed National Guardsmen with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the terminals. I felt safe, but I also felt enormous unease because we were at war. 

While the US may not technically be at war with crazy loons who have unfettered access to guns, we are being held hostage by the NRA which prohibits us from enacting and enforcing meaningful gun legislation that will not take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, but will greatly reduce the chances of these crazy loons and other terrorists getting guns. Sadly, this pushes legislators to enact laws such as this that limit our freedom under the guise of 'protecting' our children.

Some of my political and spiritual heroes are those who preach(ed) nonviolence as a path to conflict resolution including Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, Buddha, Christ, The Dalai Lama, Albert Einstein and Nelson Mandela. In a world full of conflict, they preached that violence begets violence, and "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

Of the top 50 most dangerous cities on earth, four are in the US (St. Louis is in the top 20); three are in Africa; the rest are in Mexico, Central and South America. And the US has the most gun deaths of similarly-developed countries on the planet—by a huge margin. More guns equals more gun violence. It really is that simple.

The day that armed police are a mandatory presence in all schools is the day this country surrenders "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" to the NRA. We must not continue to put bandaids on gunshot wounds. This bill does just that.

Adding: I relate more to this...

Kent State

Than this...

Remembering 9/11

I've told this story many times, and on today's anniversary, I have to tell it again.

I took this picture somewhere around 1987

Having grown up less than 10 miles from Manhattan, I watched the Twin Towers being built every day as I walked to St. Stephen's School in Kearny. The Chestnut Street bridge offered the best vantage point. Every day, every week, every year they inched up higher and higher like two giant Lego towers, brick by brick, foot by foot. The audacity of their simplicity almost forcing them to lower Manhattan like the kid who is never allowed to sit with the cool kids at lunch because he doesn't look or act like them, but who inevitably leaves them all in the dust (in this case, quite literally).  

I had been to the observation deck many times; taken the PATH to NYC via WTC for as long as I can remember. On long, out-of-state trips I knew I was almost home, almost to Exit 15W on the NJ Turnpike or Exit 145 on the Parkway, when I could see them standing there like twin lighthouses at the southern tip of Manhattan, watching over commuters, guiding us home. "Yes, you've been to the 'other' world—the world without bagles and real pizza and Taylor Ham ('pork roll' to the rest of you). Now it's time to come home to the grit and the grime and the crowded and the busy and the endless days that dissolve into endless nights, and you know as crazy as it is to live here, you wouldn't want it any other way." Yes, I was home.

The Twin Towers were a part of the collective unconscious of everyone in that region just as mountain ranges are for those who live near them. They were always there... until they weren't. 

14 years ago today was my very first day teaching ever—except I didn't teach. Instead, I sat at the front door of Immaculate Conception School in Annandale all day and signed students out. From where I sat I had a direct view of Rt. 78. All day I watched as a constant stream of police, fire and rescue vehicles raced east from Pennsylvania and parts unknown to a scene unlike any most of them had ever seen or prepared for. At one point I held the hands of a woman who was in the car line to pick up her child. She was in a panic because her husband was an airline pilot and he was flying that day. She didn't know if he was dead or alive. I just remember holding on tight and telling her that he was alive, and hoping to God that it was true. 

9/11 was a gloriously beautiful late summer day. Not a cloud in the sky. The days that followed were the same—picture perfect—except for the fact that the soul of America had been ripped from its gut and we were all walking around like vivisections.

Having lived the majority of my life under the flight paths of Newark, JFK, La Guardia and Teterboro airports, airplane noise was nothing more than white noise. I moved to Hunterdon County in 1996 for a better, less hectic way of life. Oh well, you can take the girl out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the girl. The eerie silence that followed over the next few days as all air traffic was grounded was as unnerving as navigating Routes 1 & 9 at rush hour. I remember trying to play with my daughter in the sandbox. I remember trying to be 'normal', but there was no normal. Where were the planes? Where were the contrails? Where was the noise? It was as silent as a tomb because a piece of all of us died that day. As I write this, I hear the soothing song of the crickets—country living at its best. Silence that, silence the katydids, silence the birds, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in a different season for a different reason. That's what it was like.

I remember traveling the Turnpike and the Parkway for years after that day, looking for my lighthouses. Scanning the horizon from the Empire State Building south... south... south... Where were they? Gone. Ashes and blood in the river. Would I ever make it home? No, I could never truly go home again. None of us could. That life before 9/11 is gone forever. 

Many of the people who lost their lives that day were simply going to work. Office workers, street cart vendors, pilots, flight attendants, custodians, cooks, dishwashers, store clerks—they were true innocents. Some were accidental heroes like the passengers on Flight 92. All were in the right place at the wrong time. But many were public employees whose job it was to run into Dante's Inferno while everyone inside was trying to escape: right place, right time. 

I think of all the brave members of Engine 10 Ladder 10, the firehouse across the street from Ground Zero—especially the 5 who made the ultimate sacrifice. National Geographic made a powerful documentary about their bravery as they traveled into the heart of darkness. If you haven't seen it, please take some time to view it here:

They, along with hundreds of other brave men and women, were public employees who were just doing their job. They showed up for work every single day knowing that, at any moment, they might be called on to put themselves in harm's way. All in a day's work. How many of us would willingly take that job? And now we must add education professionals who are becoming first responders in the all too frequent and violent attacks on our schools.

When the attacks against public employees started raining down, the hipocrisy was undeniable. Elected leaders with a prescribed and scripted agenda villifying people whose job it is to protect and serve simply so they can push their agenda and protect those whom they serve. It's a sacrilige for any of them to partake of 9/11 activities. They might as well spit on the graves of those who died. 

My beloved cousin recently lost his battle with cancer. He was a retired firefighter with a heart as big as the ocean on which he loved to take his boat out to fish. He was as strong as he was generous and kind. It breaks my heart that he couldn't win that battle, but I'm so grateful that he wasn't called to the city that day. He had 14 more years to be a husband, father, brother, son, and all around great guy. I will miss him forever.

His memorial service will be later this month. I'm sure the members of the Maplewood-South Orange Fire Department will honor him. He deserves that and more, not only for the work he did, but for the work he didn't have to do. He didn't have to sacrifice his life. He didn't have to die in a burning building so others could live. But he would have if called to do so, because that was his job. 

Never forget...

They weren't as fluid and graceful as the marines at Iwo Jima. They weren't trained to fight wars, but they were the first to battle in a war that still wages today. They were awkward, exhausted, and filthy, covered in toxic dust and human remains. But just as their brothers did over 50 years before, they raised the flag and kept on going. One day at a time; one foot in front of the other against seemingly insurmountable odds, until the job was done.

Rally for NJ Public Education Part 3: ‘Bad Teachers’ & ‘Failing Students’ are the WMDs of Ed 'Reform'

Thirteen years ago, after the horrific attacks of 9/11, the Bush/Cheney/Condi triumvirate sold the nation on a war based on a lie: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was connected to the terror attacks. Even after it was proven they didn’t have WMDs and the terrorists were Saudis—not Iraqis—Bush and Company plowed on, squandering our budget surplus, putting billions on the nation’s credit card in hopes of gaining control of Iraq’s oil reserves, and sacrificing the lives of thousands of brave young men and women in the process.

In 2011 I visited the Washington, DC office of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg—a WWII veteran—to talk to him about education policy. Outside his office was a display called “Faces of the Fallen": 

"... a memorial to the service members who lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Begun in 2004, the memorial… consists of more than 100 placards, each containing the pictures, names, ages, hometowns and causes of death of service members who sacrificed their lives to serve our country.” It was, to say the least, a moving and humbling tribute to so many brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. 

While President Bush was perpetrating that lie on a shell-shocked nation, he was cooking up another one: failing students. More recently accompanied by ‘bad teachers’, these two phrases have become the WMDs of the war on public education. They have been manufactured and sold to the general public by business people and elected officials—both Republican and Democrat—in order to cash in on the $600 billion education industry despite the fact that there is an enormous amount of data generated by the US government and researchers from a variety of public and private enterprises that says the problem in America isn’t public education, but poverty.

While President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan were wringing their hands over the US scores on the 2010 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), Diane Ravitch actually analyzed the data and debunked the Chicken Little myth:

“American students in schools with low poverty… had scores that were equal to those of Shanghai and significantly better than those of high-scoring Finland, the Republic of Korea, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Australia… the scores of students in low-poverty schools in the United States are far higher than the international average, higher even than the average for top-performing nations, and the scores decline as poverty levels increase, as they do in all nations.” (Reign of Error, p.65) (Emphasis mine.)

American schools are not 'failing', the sky is not falling, but the ability of many Americans to provide for their families is. 

But why look at messy things like facts when rhetoric is so much easier to sell and profit from? While school district budgets across the country are being slashed, those same districts must come up with thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars to pay for technology and other upgrades to prepare for the onslaught of standardized testing despite no proof that it will improve student learning!

As the assault on public education marches on, two glaring ironies are emerging:

• While ‘reformers’ push for more ‘accountability’, testing, and standards for our kids, theirs go to elite private schools with low student-teacher ratios, rich curriculums, shorter school days and years, and no punitive accountability measures. 
• As educator/blogger Mercedes Schneider reports, the long overemphasis on standardized testing in other countries is backfiring as they graduate more and more students who are excellent at test taking, but who lack critical, creative, and higher order thinking skills: “Asian countries do better than European and American schools because we are ‘examination hell’ countries,” said Koji Kato, a professor emeritus of education at Tokyo’s Sophia University. “There is more pressure to teach to the test. In my experience in working with teachers the situation is becoming worse and worse.”

Click here for the answer.

Be sure to read Schneider’s entire post. It’s a veritable primer on the ultimate goal of education ‘reform’.

So again I ask: What will you do to help stem the tide of education ‘reform’? I know where I’ll be on March 27^th. I’ll be in Trenton with people from all across the state fighting to take back our classrooms from profiteering carpetbaggers. Please join us!

How does Gov. Christie sleep at night?

As governor, Chris Christie has done a lot of truly awful things to the people of New Jersey in the past 5 years, but even more egregious than promulgating the myth of ‘failing schools’, demonizing teachers and other public employees, leaving Sandy victims sinking without a life boat, calling a Navy Seal an ‘idiot’, telling the press to ‘take a bat out’ on a 78-year old grandmother (who just happens to be the Senate Majority leader), turning his back on the poor, minorities, the middle and working classes, seniors, the LGBT community, commuters, and the homeless, surrounding himself (there are still no dots connecting him) with irresponsible, vindictive, selfish and, dare I say anti-semitic, staff who would put millions of George Washington Bridge commuters at risk for juvenile, political sport, is the report out of the New York Times and picked up by Rachel Maddow Tuesday that he actually gave away pieces of the World Trade Center as political carrots to the top 20 mayors on his  ‘must-get’ endorsements list.

Governor Christie cares so much about winning that he’s willing to trade off pieces of hallowed ground—a burial site—for political favors. It's like FDR giving away pieces of The USS Arizona.

Everyone who lives in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut metro area has a 6-degrees of separation story about 9/11. Everyone knows someone who knew someone who lost someone or saved someone. When that anniversary rolls around, millions of emotional scabs get ripped off. On any given day, the site of the two reflecting pools, edged with the names of all the victims is quiet and somber. Flowers and other mementos are left on the perfectly engraved names by friends and family who never forget and who will never fully heal. For all intents and purposes, it’s a sacred site for many who never got closure, whose loved one’s remains were never found. And every piece of wreckage should be treated as if it, in some way, is imbued with their spirit.

Ever walk past FDNY Ten House? Engine Company 10 Ladder Company 10 is right across the street from the World Trade Center site. They lost 5 members on 9/11. On the front wall of the newly re-built firehouse is this enormous bronze tribute to the fallen heroes of that day: New York's bravest.  Wonder how they feel knowing that the governor of New Jersey has treated their fallen brothers and sisters with such disrespect?

                                

Three years ago while on the campaign trail, I stopped at a firehouse in the 16^th district where, unbeknownst to me, a piece of the World Trade Center had been presented a few days earlier. (I'm trying to find out whether that mayor was on Christie’s list.) I walked into the room and saw a hulking piece of twisted steel and immediately knew what it was. That’s the kind of unconscious hold those buildings had on the tens of millions of us who took them for granted every day. They were our beacon on the Turnpike, guiding us home from a long day’s journey or a long day’s commute. They were the watchtowers of the tri-state, standing guard over commuters and travelers alike. They were our Mt. Everest and K-2. They simply were… Until they weren’t.

I took this picture back in the '80s. It's been on my refrigerator for years.

And in a slow motion split second, they were replaced with smoke and ash and fire, and screaming and running, and tangled piles of twisted steel and broken glass, broken bodies and broken hearts, fighter jets chasing after ghosts, the acrid smell of jet fuel mixed with so much death… and all that fluttering paper.

And then came the eerie silence that enveloped us like a tomb. With so many airports, the sound of airplanes is like white noise to those of us living in this part of the country. When it stopped for several days afterward, the silence was deafening. And with it came the smoldering pile, the shattered lives, the numbness, the nation at war, and the thousands of brave men and women who would sacrifice their lives—and continue to do so—in a war that was started in the wrong country for the wrong reasons.

I grew up in the shadow of the World Trade Center. I watched it get built every day as I walked to St. Stephen’s School along Chestnut Street in Kearny, rising higher and higher over the New York skyline before the view of lower Manhattan was partially obscured by the garbage dumps that claimed the meadowlands.

My very first day of teaching ever was 9/11. I sat at the front door of the school signing students out all day. From where I sat, I had a clear view of rt. 78, and I watched as police, fire and rescue vehicles raced east to an unknown fate. I wonder how many of those brave men and women made it back home to hug their spouse or their children?

Governor Christie gave away pieces of our collective souls to win political favor, to win an election. How can anyone in their right mind call this leadership? How does Gov. Christie sleep at night?

Excuse me, as Rachel Maddow suggested, I have to go take a shower.

Note: I did an online search to find the list of mayors, and emailed Matt Flegenheimer, one of the writers of the NYT story, to see if he has a copy. As of this posting I have not heard back.