I like sitting down listening to Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and thinking whether they had a worry in the world while smoking their drugs in their recording sessions. At the time of that song’s creation, they were already considered geniuses, so they didn’t really have “bosses,” or anyone to really hold them accountable outside of their mothers. The same can’t be said for the average worker in NYC these days.

Lately, the biggest talk amongst administrators in any sector containing unions has become accountability. Bloomberg and Co. have brought the discussion of accountability to the schools, and 3 reorganizations later, he’s made every principal into the schools’ CEO, thus deflecting responsibility off himself and his administration and concentrating it on the principals. Unfortunately, they also forgot to clean up the previous schema so the residue of years of failure still exist. We still have the same issues, just much more uncertainty, much more profit made off individual schools through “not-for-profits”, and teachers whose job security is in free fall. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be held more responsible for the parts we play in children’s education; everyone, though, has to do their part to make equity and stability a factor in our children’s success. We’re farther from that than before the 3 reorganizations.

Thus, if they can restructure education in that way, then public transportation is a walk in the park. Bloomberg intends to reorganize the hierarchy of the subway, breaking up the system by train lines, and establishing managers for each, with the premise that the manager now has more incentive to maintain order within his or her line. Yet, the decentralization of the subways again serves to distract the average rider from the messy administration that the Mass Transit Authority has established over the last decade or two and place more attention on the workers themselves. The MTA has such a history of mishandling money and providing spotty service on many of the important bus and train lines in the city that they probably never sought out any other solution but dispersion (They could have just removed the offending administrators and effectively cleaned up the department, but I just ride, vote, and pay taxes. what do I know?). Look how well it’s worked for schools (in Bloomberg’s favor).

So the principals hold teachers accountable, the managers will hold train workers accountable, the mayor and co. will hold the principals and managers accountable, but who holds the administration accountable? Not only is this a citywide predicament, but a nationwide problem too. While innocent workers from here to Iraq and all points in between left and right are held accountable for their acts, our administrators have no qualms burning secret videotapes of Al Qaeda interrogations. The more we demand from our administration, the more we probe about their torture and water boarding, the more we hold them accountable for their actions, the more they burn and blackout their documents, inciting even more questioning.

Yet this is the example that the country sets for their city counterparts, which continues to spell opaque terms for people like you and me, wherever we work …

jose

I’m a resident Lower East Sider. I don’t teach around here, but my heart, soul, and body still resides here. So when news from this area comes out, my ears perk up. We’ve had some of the more peculiar and iconic events happen around these parts, yet they hardly get recognized because 1) people didn’t care too much about our hood or 2) it’s become the mecca of immense gentrification, which is happening around here and the neighboring East Village.

The latest tragedy here is that of Jayson Tirado, who was shot by an off-duty police offer on Sunday, October 28th, 2007. Tirado, and the off-duty police officer, had an argument while in a traffic jam in Upper Manhattan. Officer Sean Sawyer, the cop, turned himself after shooting up Tirado’s car, which also had 2 of Tirado’s friends. As of now, the local papers have called it a serious case of road rage, but most people around my way call it another case of police brutality, as Tirado had no weapon on him and there was no real reason to do anything to him. He pointed his finger at the officer, but that was really it.

Of course, the officer, who is Black, claimed self-defense, so he’s not in jail right now, but it got me to thinking about the various stereotypes we hold against young men and women in our neighborhoods, and how we can transform those if we saw beyond the surface just a little bit. This was a husband and father of two, and someone who his family loved very much. They came out in packs for the man at his funeral at the Ortiz Funeral Home on 1st and 1st, and yet, because he listens to a certain type of music, hangs with a certain type of people, and wears braids in his hair, he’s already pegged as a drug-dealing young dropout low-life.

It’s easy for Black and Latino conservatives or semi-conservatives will look at the man and say, “Well he shouldn’t have been wearing those braids, and rocking those clothes, or being who he is.” Imagine if someone told you you couldn’t be who you were, even if you weren’t hurting anyone. But his image alone seems to disturb the self-righteous into that type of thinking.

As someone who chose a more academic and hence alternative route, I, too, was brainwashed into believing guys like him were holding our community back. Then again, I also grew up in a time when people compared this side of the neighborhood to Beirut, with people shooting people from behind an edifice, and blue caps lined the cracks on the concrete. And people who looked like Jayson were conduits for that type of behavior. Then again, people who were in Sean’s profession often instigated that violence, leaving some of these materials under park benches readily.

What changed my mind after looking at all these images weren’t the cases of Amadou Diallo (who used to work at a deli I frequented),  Anthony Baez, Abner Louima, or Timothy Stansbury. It was when my brother told me that a family friend, 17 year old kid at the time, had gotten slashed in the face. I said, “Wow, that’s what you get for being up in the street like that.” And my brother goes, “Yeah, well it’s ’cause he beat some dude in basketball and he slashed him. That’s how much you know.”

Shit. Here I was thinking I was lifting my people, but I was really leaving them behind, and that’s disheartening. Since then, I’ve made real concerted efforts to become more knowledgeable about what happens in the community. While I can’t discuss some of the things I do, I’ll say that a simple conversation with neighbors, waving to people I never used to talk to, and things of that nature have really made me proud of being from this still poor neighborhood. I’m not proud of the negative things that come out of the ‘hood, but I don’t disown it for the sake of appeasing some authority.

In many ways, that’s why the hood hates Bill Cosby, but appreciates Malcolm X. We stick by our local leaders, but hate people like Oprah who come out against hip-hop like they’re saviors, and appeasing their masters by selling us out. If I could borrow a comment from one of my favorite sites to visit:

“… Bill doesn’t talk, he preaches. He doesn’t agitate, he sermonizes. A lot of us are sick of it and here’s why. First, if you want to motivate someone, you don’t scold or make them feel bad. You nurture them, you take take positive behavior, build on it. How does Bill attempt to motivate? By finding the worst examples and bashing black folks over the head with it– in front of white audiences on Meet the Press. Second, Bill is educated and already knows that we’re talking structural vs cultural arguments, with what comes down to one feeding on the other. People are poor and feel hopeless, and they do what all poor people do– blame and take it out on the closest people to them– ” - mac

I don’t know much about Jayson’s life other than what the local media’s distributed, but I can tell you I feel for his family and I send my condolences. It’s not everyday when someone’s death helps refocus another person’s life. Thanks.

jose, who’ll always be from the hood …

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” signs off his show with,

“That is Countdown for this, the _ _ _ _ th day since the declaration of ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq. I’m Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck.”

As of today, it’s been 1,572 days since that day (5/1/2003), 1,608 days since the start of the war (3/20/2003), and 1 president. We still have the same commander-in-chief. No impeachment, no revolt, and no resignations. How proud we must be to have a leader who produces tangible results. How can any pro-Bush pundit so much as smirk at the idea of this administration? Even after we’ve still established no connection between Iraq and the conspirators of 9/11, even after we’ve lost practically all of our civil liberties (on the surface; times like these make me wonder if we ever had any), even after there’s still no evidence of weapons of mass distractions, and even after every other (sane) country’s governments have abandoned this “war,” even after every story they’ve told the American public since the start of the war has contradicted their previous statement about the war progress, even after Bush and Co. tried to color code peoples’ fears and insecurities, even after in 1994, Dick Cheney was quoted as saying,

“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place?….It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.“
It’s amazing how much we go about our daily lives like there aren’t people dying out there. Unfortunately, because many of my friends and co-bloggers are much more concerned with how this president looks and acts, they don’t get to see the bodies getting shipped back lifeless. That’s stuff that most of us don’t want to hear until it comes within our radius. I’m under the belief that most soldiers would rather be home now; there’s no reason for any of them to be there, they’re under exile in a land much farther away than we can research on Google Maps and yet we’ve allowed ourselves to become complacent about the issues surrounding the war. As long as there’s no audible noise or agitation, we’d rather be sedated about everything going on.

Right now, it’s so cool to hate Bush. That pisses me off; we needed to hate Bush before it became trendy. When I ask some people why they hate him, they discuss his appearances and speeches (or lack thereof), but never his policies and actions. People who really do their research are convinced he’s nothing more than a figurehead, the tip of the pyramid; if you knock down just the tip of it, the rest of the structure stays intact. A lot of the media is finally starting to do their job and publish stories that put pressure on the administration we have, but ever since the emergence of blogs, the stories of Bush’s lies have been written.

It’s been 1,572 days since Bush jumped out in his emperor’s clothing and talked about his mission accomplished. Indeed, the groundwork for the empire that he and his associates wanted to create has been accomplished. He did some of the things his father couldn’t, and every (scripted) press conference he has shows him as a rather cocky man. How can he not be? He has legions of people dying for his own agenda.

I understand that many of you will consider my point of view radical, a statement that makes no sense since everything I’ve said is more aligned with the fact. All I know is that, if the deaths of our loved ones won’t lead people to revolt against a government that should be more afraid of us than some of us are afraid of them, then will books, movies, word of mouth, and technology help us do so? I don’t know. I guess we’ll see. We can keep writing and polemicizing, but we need to exert that force into our daily actions, too.

jose, who hated bush before it was cool to do so

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been reading 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez (great book, just takes some getting used to), and the central theme of the book is the idea that life simply works in cycles: it doesn’t just move forward, but plays hopscotch with its past.

While that may not seem like a detriment in the general sense, the characters might have had a better chance of preventing the tragedies that occur in their lives if they actually took the time to learn the lessons form the past. As this town of Macondo changes, the family Buendía develops a pattern of misfortunes that only give credence to the last one. The matriarch of the family, Úrsula, observes that the many characters in in her family are really doppelgangers of their ancestors. (Won’t spoil the rest for you, really. Just go read it.)

It made me wonder how the past entraps us as a society, especially in light of the recent Virginia Tech tragedy. Unfortunately, not only did the killer fit the “suicidal and ostracized loner” profile, he also laid his plans out for the media to see. I have to ask, when will we come to a consensus on the way to make sure these events don’t happen? Unfortunately, the shock factor has died amongst some of this country’s citizens for various reasons, and it will only continue to dissipate …

Not only do I see this as a security issue, but also student development issue. If, for instance, institutions of (any level of) learning took a hard look at themselves and decided to take preventive measures against these incidents from happening, we would most likely see a change for the better in the student population as a whole, not just those who are at risk for passive-aggressive behaviors.

More importantly, though, those of us who aren’t part of the infrastructure of these institution (as in people like you and me) need to become aware of ways to prevent our loved ones from becoming a Cho Seung-Hui or one of the Columbine shooters. Unfortunately, the hateful speech made against Cho spurs on the very violence and isolation that begot this incident to begin with.

Somewhere, Márquez must be observing us the way he observes Macondo …

jose, who wishes the families of the tragedies his deepest condolences …