The Park Bench

Bird

Last year around my birthday (June 2), I got a letter in the mail from my mother's old college room mate, Mary Ruth, who was always known by the nickname "Scooze". I thought it might just be a regular card, but inside was an amazing historical present — a letter from my mother dating from 1956, soon after my birth, that had been preserved all these years.

I put it in the desk drawer to be sure to save it, but somehow it floated away on the flotsam and jetsam of all my numerous papers and books and letters which I still seem to have even in this digital age, and I couldn't find it for awhile. Today, looking for the laundry card, I suddenly found it again — that's how it always works!

So I decided this time, I better preserve it better!

Here's the letter from Mary Ruth dated June 27, 2009:

Dear Cathy.

This ancient (1956) letter from your Mom to me "surfaced" in a long-forgotten box recently. It could not be just pitched or shredded — it's (almost) an historical bit of memorabilia. So, here you are! …A nice note you'll enjoy. (I hope).

I'm off for Michigan Monday 29th. Have a good summer.

About 2 months ago I did call your #, spoke with your son, asking him to let you know about the letter. I'll bet the message was lost. Anyway…here 'tis.

Mary Ruth

(an "MSC" roomate along with Marilyn).

P.S. Your Mom was such fun! A terrific sense of humor.

And here's the letter, postmarked July 5, 1956 at 5:00 pm from Andover, NY, less than 5 weeks after my birthdate June 2. I was born in Wellsville, NY, nearby, while my dad attended Alfred University on the GI bill, after serving 4 years in the Korean War. The letter is written on the small, flowery notepaper that people favoured in those years, and tucked into a very small and narrow envelope with a 3 cent stamp of the Stature of Liberty with the phrase "In God We Trust". The return address is just "Box 223".

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I'm finding it a bit hard to weep for this $470 million mess-up by the city.

That is, sure, nobody wants to be hard-hearted about charity programs that actually help families with disabled children or troubled youth who have broken the law.

But why can't we have some scrutiny, sunlight and accountability on these myriad charities that suck down city dollars? Of course, I'm scratching my head, as I have for years, why these jobs of caring for the poor that should be funded by any liberal democratic society are not in the city government's hands, but are farmed out through a complex contract system to various non-profits that exist usually solely on such government contracts. I guess it's supposed to be more "efficient" to put these services into the private sector, but has anybody checked lately to see if in fact they are less costly and more effective than actual state-run offices?

Every time I read another "gotcha" and "I told you so" about ACORN, which was a typical bloody battle between the left and the right, I have to say — but what about the "progressive ideology" of ACORN that surely needs questioning, but what about many aspects of what amounts to Shakedown Street, as even the liberal New Yorker once famously called it, but what about some sort of cost/benefit consumer rights analysis of these public functions performed by private entities that in fact don't get the bulk of their income from the private sector, like many religious organizations do.

Of course, these various charities of uneven quality in their performance are a legacy of the 1960s and 1970s when American cities, after devastating race riots and the sex, drug and rock n' roll revolutions, put into place various poverty "entitlement" programs to essentially transfer city wealth to the poor to improve their lives. This wealth transfer may have lifted some people out of poverty, but many remained entrenched in the system and generations later, have little hope — or motivation for — escaping it.

There's a reason why these limping white liberal programs persist and continue to sprawl: white liberals (and increasingly black and Hispanic liberals) get jobs in these programs — and aren't the consumers of them.

If any of these white liberals had to send their children to any of these city programs for one day — so unlike the "better" schools and programs they feel *they* are entitled to by their zip code and condo purchases — we'd likely see massive reforms of them — pronto.

Consumer control never happens with these charities because the beneficiaries of them are in too dire straits to conceptualize what is wrong with them — and not motivated in some cases to disrupt the cosy relationship, either.

If you've ever been to Family Court downtown, you'll be amazed at the spectacles. A 10-year-old or 12-year-old boy charged with possession of a weapon or holding up a convenience store or stabbing a playmate. His weary mother, with usually 2-3 or more toddlers in tow. Sometimes a grandmother along for the ride. With the free daycare provided by the court, the day that mother brings her older miscreant to justice might be one of the few days she can go out to lunch without kids clinging to her so that it almost becomes a festive occasion. Standing around the mother are four city employees or city-paid workers: her social worker, the boy's social worker, a free lawyer, and an advocate from some other city social program designed to help families avoid incarceration.

Naturally, you wonder if you gave a one-time grant of all those people's salaries –or perhaps, even one quarter of all those salaries — to this family, whether they might be doing better. But the real problem is obvious: not a father, not a male friend, not a grandfather in sight — the only males in the room are the few who willing to take the lower-paid city jobs as social workers or free lawyers.

Much of the time, Family Court or even real court down the street will sentence the youth offender to some kind of program for "at-risk youth". "At-risk" is one of those liberal euphemisms that covers a multitude of sins. If a child is already in that category and in a program with that moniker, he's not merely "at risk," he's been risked already by the adults in his life and already exposed to crime, corruption and abuse and "risk" doesn't begin to describe it. Liberals came up with this fake term because they wanted to avoid pejorative terms like "juvenile deliquent" from the 1950s. One could analyze whether children and their parents or parent, rather, would do better if there were more of a stigma, but the situation isn't always of their making.

From Family Court, the child is likely to be assigned to one of several programs run by non-profits to handle such cases. The child will be required to go after school or during the day or risk re-arrest. But there's a lot of latitude, as managers of such programs take their time in filing a case back with the court. Some times a judge will rule for a few days of "jail therapy" under the old "scared straight" concept that liberals resort to when all their other liberal concepts fail them, but then relent and put the child back in a "program" after a hearing.

What do kids do in these programs? Well, I know of one that was absolutely appalling and I hope to find time to write to the city fathers analyzing this mess and see what could be done. The kids are brought in and put in front of a bank of computers. They are given a brief pep talk about the need to get their lives back on track, then left to do anything they like on the computers — play games, surf the net, or go and click on various websites to "earn dollars" under a scheme either the adult leaders or youth participants teach newcomers. They play for hours, and wait to see if some other activity is organized.

Perhaps once a month, the children are taken to a park or outside the city for a bike-ride, but most of the time, they are left in the room with computers, and interrupt their game play only for a once or twice a week course. And what is this course?

Graffiti. I kid you not. In the sort of contorted politically-correct thinking for which New York City education can be infamous, youth program planners decided that rather than try to take hardcore multiple-offense youth criminals — yes, criminals, because they are now not merely "at-risk" but are now *a risk to other people* — and try to teach them a trade — perhaps even something like computer operation or repair — they give them what could only be charitably called "gut courses". Instead of placing some demands on them to make up for their bad behaviour and actual crimes, they try to "meet them half way". A child is then taught — if he didn't know already — how to make a graffiti instrument out of a deodorant bottle. The tubular wick inside, once used up, makes a great substrate for ink, and a great magic marker sort of drawing tool. They are taken to city sites where presumably nobody will care that much if there is graffiti, like under a bridge, and told to be creative to their heart's desire.

Another course involves…design of video games. Except the concepts of computer applications and 3-D graphics required to design something as intricate as a video game are too hard for young kids, especially those who likely flunked out of school, to pick up. So it becomes another session in playing games, not learning anything. And please don't give me any palaver about "serious games". Even if used — and they are not — the cohort of people you are trying to reach with them are…not white liberals. Teaching them that oil companies are evil and pollute the environment might make for great political
propaganda to a captive audience, but these are people whose aspirations are — grimly — going to have to include at best things like getting a job at the gas station or perhaps even in car repair. 

One day a youth offender in a city program of this nature steals the cell phone of the adult supervisor. No adult running the program is able to secure the exits and he and his friends skip the program with the phone. Despite efforts to question witnesses, nobody will say anything. (I could point out the Catholic School method of dealing with a question like this: everyone is held after school until the children report what they know about the thief.) The kids wander back in a few days later, and no one questions them, despite the fact that one of them has to be in possession of a new cell phone. No effort is made to check their backpacks. The children are sent back to their video games…

Other programs exist where a fullly-benefited and payroll-taxed fairly well-paid social worker will actually come to your home. Even twice a week. Even for two or three hours. These people have difficult case loads — but not really an overload, as the supply of fresh graduates of college with degrees in psychology and social work seems unlimited and for a first job, the pay is great and the city coffers available for funding such people seemingly bottomless.

Like all social work programs, these lavish and intrusive arms of the state do have some sort of quality control mechanism in place — but it's a silly, mechanistic, pro-forma questionnaire administered weekly by bored clerks in call services who have no direct relationship to the program in question and don't know the people they are hearing evaluations about.

Again, all it would take is a week of a few smart white liberals — I think even liberals would be appalled, but conservatives would be apoplectic — to start pruning and repurposing these sort of programs so they have some impact evaluation: ok, we spent millions of dollars on "at-risk" youth. Did we reduce *society's* risk from their crime? Did any of them graduate high school and go to college? These are simple metrics that surely we can agree on, right?

By the time a youthful thug reaches the age of 19 and has flunked out of school, however, he's already spent a life in every conceivable taxpayer-funded program from "Head Start" which was supposed to prevent such outcomes, and been given every conceivable label from "differently abled" to "learning disabled" to "challenged" to "at-risk" to even "gifted" — but misunderstood. Millions have already been poured into him and the team of benefited, payroll-taxed employees that surround him from the city hospital neonatal unit to his casual nearby-school dope-smoking sessions while indifferent teachers with the job description of a  warehouse manager wait for him to see his way clear to maybe wandering back inside to class…

Scrutiny and revision of these programs is WILDLY in order. With scrutiny, eventually would come better practices and outcomes. Right now, however, they are able to wave the emotional-blackmail cards of "we are helping underprivileged minorities and disabled children!" and get skittish liberals to keep away. The liberal ideology brought these programs into being; but the same liberal ideals of democratic participation and concern for people have to be triggered to reform them. This means review of salaries paid, review of how contracts are publicized and administered, creation of an ombudsman system where people could file complaints about how they function and settle disputes, random intrusive inspections, including by "mystery shopper" type clients (it shouldn't be only conservative bloggers who pose as clients to check out these programs; inspections have to be built into the system given the serious allegations of corruption).

Norman Thomas High School, a left-behind school, must be closed. Slated for closing among 19 schools by the Department of Education, Judge Joan B. Lobis of State Supreme Court in Manhattan has ruled that education officials engaged "in significant violations" of state education law and "failed to follow proper process in closing the schools". I now see why this school with little PTA activity and minimal parental engagement suddenly was able to produce street demonstrations agitating for its right to stay open — it had a lot of help from socialist organizers — outside agitators.

I wish the judge had been as attentive to all the violations of children's right to education and to the outrageous abuses by those in charge of this school as she was to notions of political correctness when she made this decision. I wish she had not been cowed by politicized groups agitating with their own agenda and bringing other agitators out of state to put pressure on authorities, waving the "racism" flag. I wish she had called up the District Attorney's office and seen all the orders of protection by Robert Morgenthau's office issued to my son after he was beaten black and blue by gang members in this school. I have friends who knew the real Norman Thomas, a socialist and pacifist who worked for a non-communist socialist movement in this country, who were inspired to years of justice work from his teachings. He would be turning in his grave if he saw the appalling injustices done in his name today. His name can always grace a new school, opened with less children, and less abusive conditions. The socialists rabidly clamouring to keep this school open and cynically playing the race card should stand down and let impartial authorities and the broader community see what is really going on here.

My son was "safety-transfered" to Norman Thomas  — brought from another violent " left-behind school" (as we parents have taken to calling them) in 2008. While I was aware that Norman Thomas had a bad reputation as itself a "left behind" school with frequent police calls, it was my understanding it was improving and reducing problems and had an X-ray machine set up at the door to screen for weapons. We didn't have a lot of choice in safety-transfers — there are a limited number of schools and if you want one within some reasonable commute, your choices are extremely limited. We chose Norman Thomas because it was within walking distance from our home and because I thought that would help me keep an eye on my son better — he had built up a record of truancy, constantly reluctant to go to school because of violence and the unwillingness of other children to learn and teachers to manage, setting himself up in a cycle of failure, too.

Norman Thomas is a big, tall black box, a large office tower looming on the horizon of midtown Manhattan. It is a multistory school placed inside a major office tower in the center of Manhattan, likely because it had the space to accommodate nearly 2,500 kids (!). This building *has no windows* on many of the floors. It has so many floors that it has *escalators* running between the floors — the presence of so many stair wells is one of the reasons why kids have a place to hide, skipping class and smoking pot.

The escalator proved a fearful hazard for the vice principal in charge of security, a soft-spoken Haitian man — he was pushed down the stairs several years ago by thugs in the school and  his leg was broken. While this story was covered in the news at the time, it is little known, even to other school principals. This dedicated man returned to service, attempting with his quiet air of authority and experience to maintain law and order. But he has little help or sympathy.

Somewhere in the mix of this plan to put 2,500 mainly minority children in the center of Manhattan is some faded 1960s hope of 'integration". Perhaps by bussing black children for as long as an hour away from their homes in the Bronx and Queens into one of Manhattan's most affluent districts, some of the opportunity and wealth might "rub off".

It doesn't. No integration is actually taking place of course; when my son arrived to speak to the vice principal on his first day of school — the man whose leg had been broken by thugs in the school — he delicately told him he would be part of a "small white community" there. How small we had no idea — in fact, most of the time, my son never saw even one other white or Asian child — the school is overwhelming black and Hispanic, with only 34 white children and 103 Asian children listed.  Even if these figures are incorrect, any cursory visit to the school tells the story: this is a school with near invisibility of whites — whites who have fled to the suburbs, to private schools, and to the very few public high schools of excellence in this town.

That's the dirty little secret of our public schools — they really are not integrated — they are basically now overbalanced with only token white presence except for a handful of schools. A few top schools have something remotely like balance, with perhaps 40-50 percent white participation, but many schools are simply all-black. Black children with good grades have a hard time getting into those top schools — by the way, as do white children coming from the Catholic school system as I've discovered — there just aren't enough good schools to go around.

The reality is that these all "minority" schools, often with black and Hispanic administration as well which was supposed to help root them in the community and make them work better, are failing. And the failing is not a problem of racism; it's a problem of class — the persistence of an dysfunctional and entrenched underclass of blacks and Hispanics in our city, where one in five get food assistance, that "progressive" policies are not curing and haven't cured in the 25 years they've been experimenting on our children. It's time to stop. The black gang violence is the chief problem facing above all fellow African-American and Hispanics who want to learn — they are the ones *first* targeted in these schools that no longer have white children in them and have only very small groups of Asians who refuse to mix with others. Until we can squarely look at this problem as a society, without fear or favour, we will continue doing a disservice first and foremost to the *black children* who bear the brunt of the violence daily.

Looking at the demonstrations and agitation around this issue of school closure, I see there are no shortage of local and international politicians and "community organizers" willing to play the race card and back the union and school leaders in covering up what's really happening in this school. I will demand scrutiny from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; from congress people; from other community leaders who will be willing to put education and not identity politics first.

I will tell one story of what it has been like being one of the very few white liberal parents in these schools — a liberal whose child has been literally mugged by this reality. I am naming the races of the people involved not as a "racist," but so that we can see that racialist analysis based on paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s is not getting at the reality of what is going on today, a reality more complicated than an Ivan Illich book or a marxism.com tract — of the kind that my son was once surprised to receive as a handout in his history class, not because the teacher was teaching a variety of perspectives, but because she was teaching *one*.

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Whenever I see these sort of blanket calls to solve global problems by mouthing global platitudes, I wince. Like this one by television journalist Ann Curry, where she writes, "@libbey Wouldn't it be something if women in America spoke up for equality for women everywhere? The world would change."

Following the herd, we're supposed to go to the Half the Sky link and…consume. Watch, click, watch, read.

Then we are to, er. somehow "speak up for equality for women everywhere". How? Ok, I'm for equality for women everywhere. Done. *Looks around*. Did anything change? Oh, I know she means well, and it's all good, raising awareness.

To be sure, @AnnCurry's answer to @libbey came in response in fact to Nicholas Kristof in fact writing about one woman in Pakistan. But he doesn't provide any suggestions for actions…nor do the people commenting on his column who lurch around from the topic of health care and the need to "educate" people in the U.S. about it, and trying to link this up with the problem of the feudal/tribal male-dominated culture of Pakistan. No concrete remedies here, just a lot of ranting, raving and…reading.

I guess I prefer trying to focus on more concrete cases and issues, however. For example, right now in Khartoum, there's a woman, Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein — a former UN employee, as it happens — who was jailed for daring to wear pants in an Islamic society where that is heavily discouraged. She faces 40 lashes of the whip for this bravery. Amnesty International has taken up the case — but seems to insist that you first register with their site before they'll give you information and let you take part in an action on the case.

So how about going to the Government of Sudan's website yourself directly, which actually has a handy complaint form or contact the Minister of Justice or write the president or ministers on e-mail and politely express your protest against jailing a woman for what she decides to wear in public.

And I will research what could be specifically done for Mukhtar Mai besides merely being inspired about her and reading about her…until she is jailed or shot like other women leaders in Pakistan…