Incredible

This article moved me to tears.

Myths Over Miami

Caring is Creepy

I've never been a fast reader (easily distracted, hello?). Doesn't mean I don't care about things with the same conviction as others. Just on a different frequency (and sometimes in a different time zone), I'd like to think. Illiteracy, next to poverty, is one of the saddest tragedies this century faces. First we take away a man's basic right to subsist (Late Latin subsistere to exist, from Latin, to come to a halt, remain, from sub- + sistere to come to a stand; akin to Latin stare to stand), next we neglect his intellectual need to read. Yeah, there's a need for speed, but there's a need to read. Big Jim's not "big" on the novels, but he tears through newspapers and he never graduated high school.
The first letter I wrote for Amnesty International was on behalf of a group of youngsters from Turkey who were caught "speaking out" against their leader at the time. I will dispense with the details (as I cannot remember them, that is why there is a job for historians, politicians . . . etc.). If I were presenting this as an academic somewhere, I would do my research. But I am amongst friends, and I'd like to get at the source of the problem. So yes, caught in the depths of Socratic method, these youths ranging from the ages of 6 to about 14, I believe, were carted away and thrown in prison. Promises were made by the police that they could see their parents if they signed a confession. Not a single one of them could read. They ended up signing confessions that condemned them to prison. I wrote a paper about our responsibility to try to end world hunger. In that paper I hoped to show that at the very least we need to start acknowledging that how we "define" certain things, classify them, in some sense judge them has to come under scrutiny. We can't be afraid to be wrong about tradition. There is no greater source of rebels and idealists than the youth. So there, on that day, on those park benches in the hearts of those youths burned a fire for change. But because along with a basic right to subsist, children are not being provided another basic tool of survival, basic skills in reading and in writing, this fire for change is easily snuffed out. The written word has existed . . . how long historians? Yeah, it's that important. I cry when I think how much darker my world would be without reading and without writing. My mother read to my brother and I every night. Every night whole new worlds were introduced to us.
I was taught the art of imagination. I learned how to dream.



Ameliorate.
Provide the world with legs to stand, next provide them with wings to fly.
Be happy (not as a pig content with what one has) but as in Aristotle's Eudaimonia. Flourish. Inspire and aspire.
By our hands, be we whole.

Before the Story . . .

They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring.
They say he kept an eight-inch cockroach on a leash and that rats stood guard over him while he slept.
They say if you knew he was coming and you sprinkled salt on the ground and he ran over it, within two or three blocks he would be as slow as everybody else.
They say. Jerry Spinelli, "Maniac Magee."



Hey so I told people I was buying this book to give to a coworker's kid. By that I meant, I was going to read it again before giving it away. Share the love.