Jacksonville Visit

24 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Alcoholism, Extended Family, Family Intervention, Father-Son Relationships, Forgiveness, Intervention, Jacksonville, Jacksonville Florida, Love

Me and My Father Jimme, Mall, Jacksonville Waterfront, August 27, 2007. (Angelia N. Levy).

Me and My Father Jimme, Jacksonville Waterfront, August 27, 2007. (Angelia N. Levy).

Under almost no circumstances could I have ever seen myself visiting Jacksonville. A nuclear holocaust, the collapse of the federal government, a super-flu pandemic, perhaps. And that would be a hypothetical maybe at best. But I did visit, for the first time, eleven years ago this week, to see my father Jimme for the first time in since Christmas Eve ’94. It was a life-changing event, and for once, for the better.

It was a memorable visit because after three years of talking over the phone, I finally would get to see Jimme and his new family (see my post “Finding My Father for the First Time” from November ’11). It was a calm-before-the-storm two-day visit, nestled in between the sturm und drang of the ’02 New Voices Winter Retreat in Atlanta and my family intervention at 616 in Mount Vernon (see my post “The Intervention” from January ’08).

I honestly had few expectations. I knew Jacksonville covered a lot of acreage as a city, but was basically Georgia south more than it was a major city in Florida. I knew that the town had a high poverty rate, and I knew that they had the Jacksonville Jaguars. Not much more than that was in my memory banks as I touched down on my flight from Hartsdale International Airport to podunk Jacksonville’s airport on a rainy Sunday in January.

Glass extension of Jacksonville International Airport, January 24, 2013. (http://www.airport-technology.com).

Collins family members besides my father were there to greet me, including a couple of second-cousins. They were much more excited to see me than I was to see them, mostly because I hadn’t been prepared to meet extended family on this trip. They gave me a brief tour of the city — although I wasn’t going to see much in the rain (and there wasn’t much to see to begin with). Still, I was happy that they were happy and chatty and welcoming.

Meeting my father’s second wife Mary was interesting, if only because she shared my mother’s first name. Though loud in so many ways, she was also very kind, very Christian and very warm to me. Like most folks, she made assumptions about me that I couldn’t possibly live up to, like viewing everything in life through the lens of the Bible. It made for a lively dinner discussion on the subject my second night there. Ms. Mary has kept her conversations with me much shorter since that first visit.

But the most important part of my visit, though, was the two days I spent with my father. This was my first time seeing him completely sober since ’88, and this was nearly five years since he had given up drinking. The change in his physical appearance was dramatic, as he now only looked his age, and not twenty years older than his age. He looked better and strong than he had in years, maybe decades.

That wasn’t all that had changed. Me and my father talked about everything, from family to work, politics to writing, education and religion over those forty-eight hours. He shared his secret to his new diabetes diet – a case and a half of diet soda per day and no water intake.

My father, Silver Spring, MD, September 8, 2012. (Noah M. Collins).

I spend our last conversation telling my father about what I was about to do in Mount Vernon, that I was going to spend an evening airing out three decades of dirty laundry, for the sake of my younger siblings. That’s when he apologized to me about his alcoholism and all the things he had put me and my older brother Darren through growing up. I told him that I’d forgiven him a long time ago.

It was a touching moment out of several touching moments that visit. I left that Tuesday morning, in awe of the fact that sometimes people can and do change for the better, even miraculously so. Even in a place like Jacksonville.

The Falsehoods of a Civil Rights Movement Legacy

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Birthday, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Movement, Class Divide, Educational Aspirations, Estelle Abel, Generation X, Generation Y, Generational Divide, Generational Prejudice, Legacy, Martin Luther King Jr., Mythology, Myths, Police Brutality, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Poverty, Racism, Stop and Frisk

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial statue, National Parks Service, Washington, DC, August 2, 2012. (NPS via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as this is a 2D picture of a 3D sculpture.

Well, it’s not officially Martin Luther King Day yet, but since Dr. King was actually born on January 15, 1929, better for me to talk about him today than next week. Especially with President Obama’s second inaugural going on at the same time. But what a legacy! Yet his generation of civil rights activists and righteous protesters have done as much harm to his legacy as have conservatives invoking his “I Have a Dream” speech every time they’re called out on their bigotry.

Yeah, that’s right, I said it! One of the benefits — if you want to call it that — of being born in ’69 is that I’ve witnessed the devolution of the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders and followers into a gauntlet of gatekeepers who expect everyone from my generation to start every sentence paying homage to their sacrifices. I have no problems with that, at least in theory. But the reality is that most folks from the Civil Rights generation — at least the successful ones — made few if any sacrifices for “the cause.” They were in the right place at the right time with the right education and managed to find jobs, careers and positions of influence while the least fortunate of us all saw few material or psychological benefits from Dr. King’s ultimate sacrifice.

I’ve already talked at length about Estelle Abel, a former Mount Vernon High School Science Department chair (see my posts “My Last Day” from June ’11 and “In-Abel-ed” from June ’12 for much more). Her soliloquy about sacrifice and the Civil Rights Movement was supposed to make me feel bad about letting Black Mount Vernon, New York down because I only graduated fourteenth in my class out of over five hundred students. There are others, former and current teachers, professors, librarians, politicians, writers, producers, editors, pastors, politicians, bosses and charlatans who’ve made a point to discuss their elitist notions of the Civil Rights Movement and generation with me.

Hundreds of thousands descended on Washington, DC's Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963. (Marines' Photo via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Hundreds of thousands descend on Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963. (Marines’ Photo via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But most — if not all — of these folks are wrong about their glorified view of the Movement and its legacy four and a half decades later. For college educated, middle class African Americans, life has gotten better, even with bigotry, glass ceilings, DWB, a less stable economy, and the conservative backlash that has gone on unabated since the three years before Dr. King’s assassination. For Blacks not as fortunate, almost nothing has changed, at least not for the better.

Some of it, to be sure (and to cut Bill Cosby some slack), is because of individual choices and poor decision-making. Folks, however, can rarely make decisions outside of their own context and circumstances — think outside of the box, in other words — without a significant amount of help. Poverty in all of its forms is just as grinding now as it was a half-century ago. To expect people from the generations since Dr. King to suddenly forget their poverty, abuse, neglect and exploitation and give praise to a generation where many but far from most made sacrifices for the Movement is ludicrous.

I’m certain that had Dr. King lived over the past forty-five years, he wouldn’t have stood by to allow his generation to constantly criticize the under-forty-five as slackers and immature and unfocused, as folks more concerned with money than equality. King likely would’ve made the point that the post-Civil Rights Generations X and Y are merely a reflection of their upbringing, of their parents and teachers and mentors’ nurturing and training. He would’ve made the same point that others from his generation like the late law professor and scholar-activist Derrick Bell has made over the years. That fighting racism, educational neglect and economic exploitation requires more tools than the moral high-ground, protests, marches, a sympathetic media and obvious redneck tactics. The Movement is itself a shifting terrain that requires new tools and tactics to achieve small victories over a long period of time, longer than most folks from the era are willing to admit.

I actually don’t have a strong ax to grind against the Civil Rights generation. Without folks like Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, Medgar Evers or Ella Baker, I wouldn’t have found myself in a gifted-track program in middle school or high school in the ’80s. But let’s not act as if my life was a walk in the park. The legacy of the Civil Rights era never stopped a fist from being thrown into my face by my now ex-stepfather. It never kept us from going on welfare or kept two of my siblings from bring diagnosed as mentally retarded.

NYPD Stop and Frisk caption (actual details for photo unknown), August 2012. (http://thinkprogress.org).

Nor did the Civil Rights Movement’s legacy stop teachers and professors from putting up barriers to my success as a student or employers from putting up a glass ceiling in an attempt to slow my career advance. It never stopped me from being followed and frisked by police or harassed by overzealous security guards. It’s never paid one of my bills, kept food on my plate or kept me from experiencing homelessness. It’s never even been a source of pride, because that would mean that the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy would belong to me as much as it does to the people who allegedly marched with Dr. King.

I can’t wait for those who cling almost in desperation to the idyllic legacy of Dr. King and the cause to retire and fade away, for the ’60s to truly be over. Maybe that’s when folks from the post-’60s generation — folks like me who care about economic and educational equity, social justice and spiritual transformation — will be able to make an impact on our nation’s sorry state of consciousness without pouring libations to folks who gave up on Dr. King’s work ages ago.

Remembering Harold Meltzer

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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AP US History, Bitterness, Confirmed Bachelor, Death, Dedication, Egalitarianism, Eulogy, Friendship, Harold I. Meltzer, Harold Meltzer, Homophobia, Humanities, Humanities Program, Learning, Life, Mentoring, Metropolitan Opera House, Morison & Commanger, Perseverance, Politics of Education, Self-Discovery, Teaching

Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (Westchester Journal News).

Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (The Journal News).

Harold Meltzer, my favorite and best teacher of all, died on January 2, 2003 at the age of sixty-six, ten years ago last week. He was all too young and all too bitter about his years as a history teacher at Mount Vernon High School. But then, dealing with entitled parents and unrepentant administrators in Mount Vernon, New York for thirty-five years would do that to most people. Despite that, Meltzer was a rock, the first teacher since my elementary school years that I genuinely trusted with my family secrets and my inner self. He was the first and maybe only teacher I had in my six years of Humanities who actually seemed like he wanted to teach us (see my post “No Good Teaching Deed Goes Unpunished” from May ’11).

I met Meltzer on our last day of tenth grade, after three days of finals and Regents exams, on June 21, ’85. He had summoned fourteen of us to “Room 275 of Mount Vernon High School,” as the invitation read. We had all registered to take Meltzer’s AP American History class in eleventh grade, our first opportunity to earn college credit while in high school.

Meltzer started off talking to us about Morison and Commager — who I now know as the great consensus historians of the ’50s, until the social history revolution made their textbooks irrelevant by the ’80s — as we sat in this classroom of old history books and even older dust and chalk. Meltzer himself looked to be in his late-fifties (he was actually a day away from his forty-ninth birthday), tall and lanky except for the protruding pouch in the tummy section. His hair was a mutt-like mixture of silver, white and dull gray, and his beard was a long, tangled mess.

Met Logo and A full house, seen from rear of stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House (former bldg, 39th Street), for a concert by pianist Josef Hofmann, November 28, 1937. (National Archives via Wikimedia). In public domain.

The way he spoke, and the way his eyes looked when he spoke made me see him as a yarmulke-wearing preteen on his way to temple. The force with which his words would leave his mouth hit me immediately. As much as I noticed how frequently spit would spew out of Meltzer’s mouth, the rhythm of his speech was slow and sing-song, like an elder or grandfather taking you on a long, winding, roller-coaster-ride of a story. Most of all, I knew that he cared — about history, about teaching, about us learning, about each of us as people. Maybe, just maybe, for some of us, he cared too much.

But for at least for me, Meltzer’s eccentric space in which he told Metropolitan Opera House stories and talked about egalitarianism extended beyond the historical. He was the first teacher I had since before Humanities who’d ask me if things at home were all right, and knew intuitively that things weren’t. He was the first to ask me about how poor my family was and about hunger. And he was the first teacher ever to ask if I had a girlfriend. Needless to say, these questions were unexpected. Yet through these questions, Meltzer had begun to crack my thin, hard wall of separation between school and family.

Because Meltzer cared deeply about reaching students — about reaching me — our student-teacher relationship because a friendship after high school and a mentoring one as well. I wasn’t looking for a mentor, and Meltzer was only being Meltzer. Still, his stories about his battles with MVHS administrators, Board of Education folk, and with upper-crust parents who believed their kids were entitled to A’s just for showing up, were filled with lessons of perseverance, patience, and looking beyond everyday headaches in order to reach people. While this wasn’t a factor in my going to graduate school and spending a significant part of my life as a history professor and educator, these stories have helped me over the years.

1972 Dodge Dart Dark Green (similar to ’74 Dodge Dart Meltzer owned when I was at MVHS), December 25, 2009. (http://www.fotosdecarros.com).

But unfortunately, it was a factor in why Meltzer became embittered and took early retirement in June ’93. The end of the Humanities Program, the intolerance of some administrators toward Meltzer as a “confirmed bachelor,” the lack of decency — forget about gratitude — from many of his most successful students. Those changes, these things, all would take a toll on any teacher who’d stay after school day after day to run Mock Trial, to facilitate study groups, to work on letters of recommendation for students. But no, most of my former classmates who had Meltzer between ’85 and ’87, all they could say was that “Meltzer was weird” or that “I didn’t understand” his lessons.

I’m thankful that I did have Meltzer as a teacher, friend and mentor between ’85 and ’02. I’m thankful that I had a chance to interview him for what is now my Boy @ The Window manuscript in August and November ’02, just a couple of months before he passed (see my post “Mr. Meltzer” from June ’09). I’m glad that despite his physical and psychological pain, Meltzer welcomed me with open arms and answered my questions about his life and his career. I just wish that my former classmates and some of Meltzer’s more cut-throat colleagues had taken the time to really know the man.

The New Gameplan for Boy @ The Window

05 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Youth

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Book Publishing, Commercial Publishing, Editors, Fear of a "Black" America, Gameplan, Independent Publishers, Literary Agents, Manuscript Development, Marketing, Revising, self-publishing, Siege Mentality, Stubbornness, Writers, Writing

Siege of Burgos (Spain), 1813, by François Joseph Heim. Pic taken December 23, 2012. (1970gemini via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It’s a new year, and with the beginning of all years is a chance to execute new plans, or for most people, to make resolutions they often don’t keep. Such is the case for me regarding my coming-of-age memoir Boy @ The Window. Hopefully I’ll be in the first category of plans for my new year and not in the latter. After five years of beating my fists on the walls of literary agents, acquisition editors and commercial publishers, I have to do far more than hope.

And my fists have needed a few months to heal after the past few years. In all, I contacted somewhere around 140 agents, editors and publishers since the end of ’07 about Boy @ The Window. One in four asked to look at either the first few pages, the first couple of chapters or the entire manuscript. Only two of those agents agreed to represent the manuscript, and then, with major conditions. One went as far as to suggest that I only focus on my family life, as if my preteen and teenage years in Humanities had no impact on my development at all. The other thought I could sell Boy @ The Window better if I turned it into a work of commercial fiction.

I should’ve seen the writing on the proverbial commercial book industry wall long before today. Between the shifts in the commercial publishing marketplace since my experiences with Fear of a “Black” America between ’99 and ’04, the Great Recession’s impact on the industry since ’08, and the rise of the ebook in the past decade. All three pointed to one simple fact. If one wasn’t already a successful author prior to a decade ago, or famous, or with a significant connection to commercial publishing (e.g., a journalist, an editor, or even an editorial assistant), one would face a long, hard walk through the traditional route of publishing a book.

Boxer David Haye displays his bruised knuckles, January 12, 2011. (http://www.thesun.co.uk/)

Boxer David Haye displays his bruised knuckles (cropped), January 12, 2011. (http://www.thesun.co.uk/)

But I’d made up my mind the moment I began working on Boy @ The Window in earnest in the summer of ’06. I didn’t want to self-publish my second book, not after a year and four months of promoting Fear of a “Black” America. While on some level I successfully promoted my first book (I have receipts of my royalty checks to prove that), selling a thousand copies while spending $3,500 to do so for a semi-academic book on multiculturalism was nothing like I had envisioned the process back in ’99.

I persisted in the idea of traditional commercial publishing for the manuscript. I dutifully attended writers conferences, book fairs and other opportunities to meet other authors, potential agents and a few editors. I wrote and rewrote my query letter and proposal, with more revisions than I probably did on the Boy @ The Window manuscript itself. I sent out my letters, took phone calls when they came, reached out to folks for help. And all to end up concluding that I would be in need of dentures by the time a commercial publisher would lukewarmly pick up my manuscript for its list.

Now, even my harshest critics (myself included) consider Boy @ The Window a solid manuscript. So the issue has never really been the quality of the story or the writing. The issues come down to an industry in seismic flux and to me as a person. With my own career in transition and without the obvious examples of success (I’m not regularly booked for TV programs, I have yet to make my first $1 million), I can’t say that I’m in the public eye enough to sell 10,000 copies of my book per week for three weeks, and at least 5,000 a week for three months. That’s the industry threshold for groundbreaking nonfiction success these days.

So dreams of sugar plums or $100,000 advances aren’t exactly dancing in my head these days. But much has changed since I published Fear of a “Black” America in the past eight and a half years. For one, ebooks rule the book publishing marketplace, enabling any aspiring (if not talented) writer to self-publish or to publish independently. Add to this the mix social media, like my blog, Twitter, Facebook and other connections, and nontraditional publishing may well make as much sense as working with an agent.

Intermediate pass route game plan (with at least one running back as blocker), November 2011. (http://www.npengage.com).

This means much more work — and money — on my part, though. I’ll need to hire a copy editor, figure out artwork, finalize pictures, implement my proposed marketing strategy, plan a date for publishing to coincide with marketing, and so on. But I also realize that few commercial publishers do this work for authors anymore, anyway, as they’ve slashed their promotion and marketing budgets. The advantage, then, goes to people like me, with some means for publication and enthusiasm for my book.

I realized all of this at least two years ago. Apparently, so did my wife. When I finally decided to go this route for Boy @ The Window a few weeks ago, she said “I thought you should’ve done it two years ago, but you weren’t ready.” Meaning that I wasn’t ready to dismantle my siege guns and remove my land minds around the commercial publishing castle. Now that I have, I can say with a high degree of certainty that I will publish Boy @ The Window this year, 2013, short of an apocalyptic event.

Randomness & Faith

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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Agnostic, Atheism, Atheist, Belief, Bible, Buddhism, Evolution, Faith, Forgiveness, God, Grace, Love, Mathematics, Mystery, Physics, Randomness, Reason, Religion, Science, Scientific Method, The Universe, Youth

Randomness equation, Schrage random number generator, December 27, 2012. (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov).

Today’s my forty-third birthday (at least, as of 8:37 am EST). It means that I’ve been a spiritual believer of one sort or another for nearly thirty years. With so much that has happened in my life, there are many who wonder why I believe in God, or why I’m a Christian in particular. With my expertise as a historian, my background in math and science (and continuing study of such), there have been many who’ve mocked and questioned my faith in anything other than the randomness of the universe. With the world in seemingly endless turmoil, good people maimed and killed, and evil people able to get away with maiming and killing others, there are those who greet any profession of belief in a higher power with anger and bitterness.

To me, that’s too bad. I can see all sides of this argument. I’ve been a Christian for more than twenty-eight years, and before that, an unwilling, if outwardly obvious, Hebrew-Israelite. In that time, I’ve also been an atheist, agnostic and angry, a bit of a Buddhist and a Muslim to boot. I’ve gone years without prayed and prayed at least once every day for nearly twenty years. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover at least six times in three decades, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. I’ve gone to temple, to Roman Catholic mass, to church, sometimes every week for years, sometimes not at all for years. I’ve had crises of faith and been almost unquestioning in faith over the years.

An actual double-slit experiment (electrons or photons behaving as particles and waves, in two places at same time), December 27, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour)

I’m also a believer in science and the scientific method. I realize that even with all of the advances in biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics, that there is much more we don’t know versus all that we’ve learned in the past two centuries. But that doesn’t mean that I believe that the universe — that life itself — is some random event or a long-chain series of random events. I’m with evolution on everything except the random. I don’t think that the universe can be seen as random. Even as chaotic as our lives may seem, the choices that we make do provide order. It’s never been sheer dumb luck that has determined everything that has occurred in my life, as other people have made their own choices that can easily affect the range of choices in my own life.

Most of all, while I do believe that there are reasons behind the events that occur in our lives and in world, that these reason are neither random nor something that God somehow came down from on high to make possible. Whether it’s Hurricane Sandy or Sandy Hook Elementary School, the civil war in Syria or a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, somehow so many have it that either God’s angry with us or that God allows horrible things to happen to us. Or that there is no God, because a real God would prevent these seemingly random events from occurring at all.

All this proves one thing, and one thing only. That most of us have little understanding of faith, of God, or of the universe itself. Period. Even those of us who are experts in particle physics or theoretical mathematics don’t know enough to dismiss God or to prove their educated guess (otherwise known as belief) in the randomness of the universe. Most of us who do believe in God — at least, those of us who are Christian — treat God as if he were Zeus casting down lightning bolts to keep us in line.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble and bronze (restored), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble/ bronze, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I see God in the universe, in the creation and re-creation of life, and yes, even in the various tragic and apparently chaotic events that have occurred in my life and in this world. That I don’t think these events to be random doesn’t make me any less of a thinker. I just don’t accept the blind faith of scientists in the idea that maybe cosmic rays led to the mutations in the primordial soup of our ancient oceans that led to the spark of life and evolution. I also don’t believe that God is simply presiding over every event on our planet and in the universe, making life-and-death decisions that bring pain and anguish to our lives for enjoyment or as a form of punishment.

Rather, God for me has been about living life by principles like social justice, social and spiritual mobility, love, forgiveness, grace and wisdom. Explaining what may or may not be random, each and every conceivable mystery of the universe or of life? I know that this isn’t in the Bible. But I do know that the reasons behind why bad, ugly, even evil things have happened in my life don’t include the “random nature of the universe.” People made decisions, I’ve made decisions, institutions made decisions, that have had an impact on the course, speed and direction of my life over the last forty-three years.

So, even when I’ve found myself angry with God, I’ve also been cognizant of the role all and each of us play in the heaven and hell that tends to be our lives, separate and together, in this world of ours.

Newtown Calling

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Youth

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Adam Lanza, Bryan Ferry, Entitlement, Gun Control Debate, Gun Obsession, Gun Violence, Handguns, Mass Murder, Mass Shootings, Media Coverage, Mental Illness, Misconceptions, Newtown Connecticut, Newtown Shooting, President Barack Obama, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Second Amendment, Tragedy, Video Games

President Barack Obama tears up during White House press conference on Newtown, CT mass shooting, December 14, 2012. (UPI)

One thing that I can say about myself with confidence is that I’ve had some experience with violence and tragedy. A witness to domestic violence, a victim of child abuse, an observer of violent assaults involving knives and baseball bats. Knowing a couple of folks who committed suicide — one who jumped on my side of the office building in which I worked a decade ago — and watching a former boss flip out from a manic-depressive episode right in front of me.

Still, even with all of that experience, I don’t know anything about being the parent of a child killed in the midst of a mass shooting like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I can only begin to imagine that kind of grief, pain and anger.

So, it’s with that in mind that I write about the things that have been said by journalists, parents, politicians and others about this latest tragedy that have really bothered me. Despite the core-shaking event in Newtown last week, apparently there are people in this country who believe in guns more than people, who believe that some lives are worth more than others, that people with mental health issues are the perpetrators of most violent crimes. These people are wrong, wrong-headed, and the kind of people who seemingly want to steal my hope that we’ll do something serious about guns and gun violence in the US.

Mogadishu (Somalia) suicide bomb victims, January 24, 2009. (Ontdek Islam website).

1. The “I can’t believe that this happened here” response. Every time I hear someone say something like this, I think, “So it’s all right if a mass shooting happens in Mogadishu, Harlem or Southeast DC?” It’s one of the most entitled, elitist and bigoted things I’ve heard over the years. Tragedy happens everywhere, especially in a nation as fearful, violent, imperialistic and gun-obsessed as ours. And people’s lives are invariably screwed up by tragic events, regardless of race or location. Whether in a mostly White bedroom suburb like Newtown or on the South Side of Chicago.

2. “If the teachers and principal had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened” response. Really now? Folks whose job it is to teach should walk around with or have handy a handgun on the rare chance someone like Adam Lanza shows up? Gun enthusiasts can say this a billion times a day. But more people with guns doesn’t make anyone any safer. There’s about a generation’s worth of research showing this very fact. End of discussion.

3. “We need to get rid of violent video games” response. This is ludicrous. American history is replete with mass murders and mass shootings, from White “settlers” decimating American Indians to the Rosewood, Florida race riot of 1923 to Charles Whitman shooting and killing fourteen during his University of Texas clock tower rampage in 1966. Last I checked, Mortal Kombat and Halo 4 didn’t exist in 1877, 1923 or 1966. Violent video games aren’t the problem. Our violent obsession with guns and supremacy in life is the problem.

4. “We need a better mental health system in this country” response. This one is actually correct. At least, it mostly is. The assumption here, of course, is that people somehow snap in the process of taking their own and others lives without a coherent rationale. Psychological screenings (see my post “A Call for Psychological Screenings” from September ’12) and backgrounds checks with 100 hours of mandatory gun training would definitely help. But the vast majority of people with mental illness are NOT violent. There are plenty of “normal” folks who are anti-social, have borderline personalities, are psychotic, but function normally in our society. Until the day they get a hold of a gun or some other weapon, that is. Those folks, though, would likely not test as having a mental illness.

Sidewalk memorial with 26 stuffed animals representing 26 shooting victims, Newtown, CT, December 16, 2012. (David Goldman/AP).

Sidewalk memorial with 26 stuffed animals representing 26 shooting victims (cropped), Newtown, CT, December 16, 2012. (David Goldman/AP).

We need much tougher gun control laws, a total assault weapons ban, regulations on bullets sales, maybe even a repeal of the Second Amendment. We certainly need a system that promotes comprehensive mental health services from birth through death. But right now, we also need to stop engaging in clichés, to get the story right before reporting it first (hint, CNN), to step outside of our cloistered and entitled way of viewing the world. Newtown’s calling, but for me, so is Mount Vernon, New York, Littleton, Colorado, New Orleans, Washington, DC, Silver Spring, Maryland, Aurora, Colorado, Norway, Afghanistan, Pakistan and so many other parts of this world that have experienced violent tragedies.

December Doctoral Decisions

13 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Advisor-Student Relationships, Advisors, Bruce Anthony Jones, Carnegie Mellon University, Doctoral Research, Graduate Fellowships, Graduate School, Joe Trotter, Larry Glasco, Lawrence Glasco, Multiculturalism, PhD programs, Pitt, Politics of Education, Politics of Graduate School, Quantitative Analysis, Quantitative Methods, School of Education, Strategy, Tactics, Tokenism, Transfer, University of Pittsburgh

Saint Wolfgang and The Devil [Faustian Bargain], by Michael Pacher, ca. 1471-1475, Munich, Germany, February 19, 2009. (The Yorck Project via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It was this time twenty years ago that I decided to transfer from the University of Pittsburgh to Carnegie Mellon to complete my PhD in history. It was a solid tactical decision on many levels. The strategy, however, was a bust, although the reasons for this failure wouldn’t become apparent for several years.

I made the decision to leave Pitt based on at least three deficiencies. One, I was a doctoral student who’s dissertation research would be about multiculturalism, education, and a Black urban community (I hadn’t decided on Washington, DC yet). The only person in the history department with expertise in African American history was Larry Glasco, my advisor, and it had become obvious by the beginning of the 1992-93 school year that his interests had shifted to Afro-Caribbean studies, specifically Afro-Cuban history (see my post “Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis” from August ’11). Larry’s understanding of such things as Black migration studies, Black education and Black intellectual developments pretty much stopped with the year he took his job at Pitt, 1969 (the year I was born).

Two for moving on from Pitt came out of my interactions with other professors and grad students in the department and in the School of Education. It was obvious during the fall of ’92 that most of my professors found me an enigma, from Dick Oestriecher’s “exceptional Black man” allowances in class (see my post “Dairy Queens, Dick Oestriecher and Race” from February ’11) to some colleagues’ comments about how easy I made grad school look (especially since I had time to talk and go up the hill to shoot hoops).

Hammer & Sickle & Pitt Flag [symbolic of Pitt’s history department], December 13, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

I realized that in a department that placed a premium on American working-class studies, on the supremacy of class warfare and neo-Marxism above any other historical field, that my chances for graduating anytime before the year 2000 were slim. And forget about picking up a fellowship or grant to do my dissertation research or finding a job if and when I did graduate! There were still professors at Pitt — like Reid Andrews (now department chair) and the former department chair Richard Smethurst — who didn’t even think I was “grad school material,” and they said as much. I was an anomaly in an anomalous department (see my “Letter of Recommendation (or Wreck-o-mendation)” post from September ’10).

I did consider doing a PhD in education at Pitt, with possibly Bruce Anthony Jones as my advisor, or someone more senior like Bill Thomas. Bruce, though, discouraged me from that idea, as he was only an assistant professor at the time. It was obvious that Bill Thomas was a popular professor, so much in demand that I’d be lucky to meet with him three times in a semester to discuss his work, much less my own.

And I already had that kind of relationship with Larry. My third reason that led to my decision to transfer to Carnegie Mellon involved a very angry Larry at the end of November ’92. You see, one of the requirements for getting to the end of coursework status was the completion of a quantitative methodology course or the completion of a project in which quantitative methods drove said project.

I decided on the latter, but told Larry that between teaching four sections of US Since 1877 with over 100 students and taking three grad seminars with 1,500 pages of reading per week, that I wouldn’t be doing an independent study with him that fall. I said that I’d carve out time “on my own” to get started this fall, but wouldn’t be prepared to complete the quantitative methods project until the spring semester.

Cartoon on data points & regression analysis involving drug trials, December 13, 2012. (http://www.landers.co.uk).

So after I presented some of my early findings regarding 1910 census data and infant mortality rates among Black women in Pittsburgh to Larry’s History of Black Pittsburgh class, we met to discuss how far I’d gotten in my regression analysis. I hadn’t done much with the variables yet, simply because I hadn’t had the time in November to do any off-time work. Larry became furious, said that he was “disappointed in me,” and wondered aloud if I’d make it through this year as a grad student. When I pointed out for a second time that I was doing this work in my spare time — not as an independent study course, not for a grade — he finally remember what we had discussed in August.

Larry did apologize, profusely. But I was pissed. “You’re only advising one active student, and you can’t remember what I’m working on,” I thought. With Joe Trotter at Carnegie Mellon attempting to woo me into their program, with me already taking his grad seminar in African American history, and with the writing on the wall at Pitt (where I’d already earned my B.A. and M.A. in history), I set up a meeting with Joe in mid-December to explore the possibility of transferring.

Although it would’ve been a worse decision to stay at Pitt, leaving for Joe Trotter and Carnegie Mellon was just about the worst decision I’d made as an adult (see my post “The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style” from August ’11). For it set up so many of my other career decisions and choices I’ve made in the two decades since.

A school of education would’ve made more sense for me and the research I wanted to pursue, after all. But I would’ve had to think beyond Western Pennsylvania, taken a year off, and then pointed at Stanford, Harvard, UPenn or Teachers College as possibly better choices, better situations. Chris Rock is right. “Life is long, when you make the wrong decisions.”