Leonard Pitts: What Are We Saving the Children From?

by Leonard Pitts
in the Miami Herald

Well, that was close.

Surely, we are all relieved that at least some children were protected this week from the diabolical Barack Obama. It was touch and go there for awhile after the White House announced its plan for the president to give a back-to-school address to America's kids. They might have gotten away with it, too, but for conservative pundits and politicians who spent last week raising a ruckus about this scheme to indoctrinate our youth into the president's socialist cult. They were able to convince an untold number of schools to prohibit Tuesday's speech from being shown on campus and an untold number of parents to keep their children home.

By this decisive action, untold millions (thousands?) of our kids were saved from exposure to subversive sentiments like ``pay attention,'' ``listen to your parents'' and ``every single one of you has something to offer.''

That mission accomplished, one wonders if conservatives will be equally energetic in rescuing kids from other things that threaten them.

Our children need all the help they can get, after all. They are coming of age in an America where, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four girls between ages 14 and 19 is infected with at least one of four dangerous sexually transmitted diseases (human papillomavirus, chlamydia, genital herpes, trichomoniasis). An era where, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, more than 13 million kids live below the poverty line. An era where, according to the Education Department, despite noteworthy progress in recent years, one in four public-school eighth graders lacks basic grade level reading skills, and one in five fourth graders can't do the math.

What's arguably more frightening in the long view is that they're coming of age in an America so hyper-partisan, shrill, silly and incoherent that a pep talk to school kids -- surely the most plain vanilla presidential duty this side of pardoning the turkey at Thanksgiving -- gets treated like it was Osama bin Laden giving an al-Qaeda recruitment speech in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11.

It is an absurd controversy, but in a nation of birthers and truthers, death panels and tea parties, absurdity has become our default setting -- as has political violence, whether rhetorical or real.

Last week, for goodness sake, we heard about a healthcare reform proponent biting off the finger of someone who disagreed with him. Meanwhile in Arizona, an alleged Christian minister made headlines preaching and praying for the president's death.

If America were a person, you'd sedate it. You might even have it committed.

This is not politics, it's a temper tantrum, a national hissy-fit that calls into question -- and not for the first time -- whether a nation so vast and varied still can, or still wants to be, a nation.

A few days ago, a woman running for office in Pennsylvania e-mailed me about her encounter with a voter who objected to the idea of, as he put it, paying for his neighbor's health insurance. She reminded him that to live in a society is to be interdependent. We all pay for libraries, we all pay for national defense, we all pay to school our kids. Except, he said he doesn't want to pay to educate someone else's kids, either. We are not interdependent, the man insisted. We are alone, each man in it by and for himself.

You might call that view an aberration. My fear is that it is a harbinger. My fear is that we are a people stampeded by and toward political extremes, and that in our shrillness, our ignorance, our paranoia, hatefulness and fear, we dig a trench through common ground and make this nation ungovernable.

If we want to save our children from anything, maybe we ought to save them from that.

Countertweet

How Twitter warned of death threat at St. Louis school

By David Hunn and Jeremy Kohler

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

03/05/2009

The death threat that made a St. Louis school clear out its classrooms and send home students Wednesday had something to do with poet Langston Hughes, and how he is portrayed in an online encyclopedia.

It also had a bit to do with Twitter, a trendy Internet technology that turned a friendly troop of academics from across the country into unknowing sleuths.



It started Tuesday night, with a teacher in Virginia asking her husband for help preparing for class.

And ended Wednesday morning with one relieved school principal.

"It was so amazing," said Katrice Noble, principal at Lift For Life Academy charter school, just south of downtown St. Louis. She was the subject of the death threat.

But it was Jeremy Boggs, 29, a history student in the Ph.D. program at George Mason University, who saw the note first. Or at least the first who did something about it.

Boggs was watching "American Idol," the pop-star reality show, Tuesday night.

His wife, a teacher, asked Boggs to look up Hughes — she was gathering material on the famous poet and playwright.

Boggs found him on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows readers to
add to entries. And there was the note, about halfway down the page, sandwiched
between sections on the poet's homes and his death, and written in bold,
all-capital letters.

"I'M GOING TO SHOOT EVERYBODY AT THAT (expletive) SCHOOL," it said, in part.
"ESPECIALLY KATRICE NOBLE."

Boggs, an alumnus of Virginia Tech, site of the 2007 student shootings that killed more than 30, was unnerved.

"This really freaked me out a little bit," Boggs said.

Sure, he thought, maybe it's a kid pulling a prank. Still, it named the school, the principal and — it would appear — even the student making the threat. "You can't just dismiss it," he said.

So he sought advice from colleagues.

On Twitter.

"Found vandalism on Langston Hughes article where author threatens to shoot people at a school," he wrote, according to Twitter, the online site that allows users to broadcast 140-character messages through cyberspace and with cell phones. "Should I just remove it?"

His message instantly reached across the Midwest.

And, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, it found Marjorie McLellan.

McLellan, a history professor at Wright State University, was writing a grant proposal for Dayton public schools on her computer, when she saw the tweet from Boggs.

"I think you need to report that to editors and police — he names a name," she wrote, according to a log of the conversation on Twitter. "Probably just vitriol but you never know."

Over the next several hours — and entirely via the 140-character tweets — six or seven colleagues figured out who Noble was, where Lift For Life was, and how to reach out to authorities.

They called or e-mailed the school, police and a reporter at the Post-Dispatch.

Still, it was late, and the group's efforts mostly found answering machines.

In something of a last-ditch effort, McLellan called a small-town Ohio police department with a reputation for being tough on Internet crime.

And it was a detective, then, from Xenia, Ohio, who finally got through to Noble, at her desk at Lift For Life, Wednesday morning.

Noble called local police.

But by then police here had gotten the other messages. Before Noble could get up from her desk, St. Louis officers had arrived at the school's doors on South Seventh Street.

Noble called for an early dismissal. Students filed back onto buses. School leaders started talking to students who may have been involved. Police combed the building, and found no immediate threats.

Noble was grateful to the Twitter troop.

"What if things had not gone so smoothly?" she asked. "And we had not taken that precaution?"

But Noble still had her own bit of sleuthing to do.

She called a sixth-grade English teacher at Lift For Life.

Doing any units, she asked, on famous black figures in history? Any students studying Langston Hughes?

Yes, the teacher replied. And yes.

By day's end, police had pinned down the computer used to send the message, Noble said.

It appears to be a student, who wrote and signed the threat in his friend's name. Just a prank between buddies. "They do things not realizing what they've done," Noble said.

The principal said she'll talk to the student and his parents today.

And in what may be the only tragedy to linger, it is likely she'll have no choice but to expel the prankster from school.

Tweet, tweet

I won't Twitter my life away
By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Today, I make you a solemn promise: I will never Twitter you. Or is it tweet? I'm never sure.

And here, let me pause to help the technologically illiterate catch up. One uses Twitter to send tweets (no, I am not making that up!) i.e., electronic notes, to one's online friends, family and other subscribers. A tweet, which is limited to 140 characters, (i.e., shorter than this very sentence) is supposed to bring interested parties up to date on what you are doing, seeing, thinking, in that exact moment.

When I first heard of this latest advance (?) in interpersonal communication, I pegged it as a fad that would be big among high school and college students -- i.e., young people, who frequently have the attention span of a squirrel on cocaine. Last week's presidential speech to a joint session of Congress shows how wrong I was. It turns out that, as the leader of the free world was addressing them on matters of urgent national importance, some of our elected representatives were hunched over their handheld devices madly tweeting, like 5th graders passing notes in the back of the class.

For instance, The Washington Post reported that Republican Rep. Robert Wittman tweeted the following urgent observation: ``I am sitting behind Sens Graham and McCain.''

''Place is on fire,'' said Rep. Denny Rehberg, a Republican from Montana.

Which is not to imply that only pols have gone Twitter mad. CNN's Roland Martin is stuck at an airport in Chicago, trying to get to snowbound New York City even as I write this: ''No flights allowed in,'' he tweets. ``I was on plane in Chicago, we pulled out, got word, now back at gate.''

NBC's Ann Curry, meantime, is in New York enjoying the snow: ``All stars are not the proper shoes for NYC today. But seeing this dark city frosted in white is worth my cold toes.''

And you and I need to know this because . . . ?

No, we are not being forced to look. But if you choose to, please reflect on the fact that life is short and you just spent some irretrievable fraction of yours learning that Roland Martin's flight is delayed and Ann Curry's feet are cold.

In the '90s, you often heard people complain of how memoir writers and afternoon talk shows had turned our public spaces into a communal confessional, intimate secrets once necessary for whispering now shouted into the ether like an order at a fast-food joint. Ten years later, we are not just sharing secrets; we are sharing lives. And not the good parts, either, but the banal, the mundane, the everyday.

I'm darned if I can see the fascination. I mean, I'm not surprised that technology allows this. But I am surprised that people -- by the thousands -- buy in to it.

Take it as one more example of the medium becoming its own message. After all, every new advance in communications from telegraphs to Twitter has been sold as a means of perfecting human relationships, allowing us to interact more easily, understand one another more readily. But it hasn't happened yet.

Indeed, you have to wonder if, as communication becomes ever easier, we have not gone in the opposite direction, crossing the point of diminishing returns as we did. More people have more ways to reach more people than at any point in history. But it turns out -- read a message board or an unsolicited email, if you don't believe me -- many of us don't have a whole lot to say. Unless, that is, you find some socially redeeming value in banality, cruelty and crudity, which have become ubiquitous.

You have to wonder what that says about us.

Now here is Twitter, which encourages you to narrate your life in real time as opposed to, well . . . living it. I'm sorry, but include me out.

I will never Twitter you.

In the first place, you have better things to do. In the second, I am not that interesting.

No one is.

Pitts: History 'last refuge of the failed president'

By LEONARD PITTS JR.
in the Miami Herald

``History. We don't know. We'll all be dead.''
-- George W. Bush

Dear President Bush:

I am glad you are, at 62, still a relatively young man. I am glad you are in robust health. This means there is a good likelihood of your being with us for decades yet to come, and I dearly want that. You see, history's verdict is on the way, and I want you to see it for yourself.

We've been hearing the ''h'' word a lot from your surrogates, your supporters and you as you make your final rounds before handing over the keys to the new team. History, we are told, will render the truest verdict on your time in office. History, it is implied, will say you were a far better president than we ever gave you credit for.

You said it again Monday in your farewell press conference. History will have the final say.

It is a curious position for someone who has been, as the quote above suggests, rather dismissive of history's judgment. It occurs to me that, as patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, so history is the last refuge of the failed president.

But you and yours keep returning to it, reminding us how Harry Truman left office not much more beloved than you are now, but history took another look and decided he was a better president than anyone thought at the time. Frankly, the very fact that you and your team repeatedly invoke the 33rd president in defending your legacy is rather telling.

That's not a defense, it's a Hail Mary pass. It's hoping against hope. Truman enjoyed an extreme makeover, yes. Most presidents do not.

Yes, history does refine our initial assessments of a given president. But those refinements usually move in increments.

You would need more than increments of movement, sir. You would need a football field. I don't see it happening.

Credit where it's due: you were the best U.S. president Africa ever had. Your work to reduce AIDS rates on the mother continent never got as much attention -- and praise -- as it deserved.

But there the list ends: I find it impossible to think of another praiseworthy achievement. The failures, though, rush readily to mind: Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Justice Department scandal, torture, Iraq War, Social Security, immigration . . . You leave a legacy of regression and division, and a nation worse off by multiple measures than before you took office.

But you know what, sir? That's not even the worst of it. No, the worst is the way you turned our government into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, the way you disdained objective truth in favor of ideological fiction, the way you treated dissent as disloyalty, the way you repeatedly poured sewage on our heads and swore it was water from a mountain spring.

So yes, I'm happy you'll likely be around 20 years from now. Because, contrary to what you seem to think, it doesn't take centuries to get some initial sense of history's verdict. That takes about a generation. Meaning that when history weighs in on your presidency, you'll probably be here to see it. And I don't think you're going to like it.

Yes, I'm stepping out on a limb here. The future is, by definition, unknowable. But it is simply inconceivable to me that history will judge you anything but harshly. Frankly, I think it will judge us all that way, will marvel at the things we let you get away with, the principles Americans can betray, when they are scared.

As with the internment of the Japanese during World War II, and the McCarthy excesses of the 1950s, I think fear will be the defining statement of this era. Fear, and the terrible things we did, condoned and became as a result.

Godspeed, then, Mr. Bush. Good health and long life. I hope you live to hear history itself tell you what an awful president you were.

Thank you, Mr. Pitts

Unity, hope must conquer division, hate
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
The Miami Herald

The killers would have worn top hats. Having already murdered 102 African Americans, 14 by beheading, they would have driven at top speed toward Barack Obama, leaning from the windows of their vehicle, dressed in top hats and white tuxedoes, firing guns.

That was the plan, according to law enforcement officials who disrupted it a few days ago. Now the alleged conspirators -- white supremacists Paul Schlesselman, 18, and Daniel Cowart, 20 -- are in federal custody, an appropriately bizarre coda for the presidential campaign of 2008.

I mean, it's fitting, isn't it, that the campaign end with yet another appeal to fear, yet another portrayal of the Illinois senator as Not One of Us? It makes sense, after two years of viral e-mails, blog postings, talk radio rants and Fox News reports depicting Obama as a Communist socialist radical Christian secret Muslim black militant-marrying atheist-raised terrorist fist-bumping America-hating Manchurian candidate trained to subvert the United States from within.

Well, if that's what some folks think he is, let me tell you what I hope he is.


I will preface with a line from Gil Scott-Heron. The singer and poet used to say that people often asked him what he thought of the 1960s. His reply: I personally think the '60s are over.

Me, I'm not so sure. Indeed, when I consider the four presidential campaigns preceeding this one, it's hard not to regard them as an extended debate over that era. Those campaigns, after all, turned largely on questions of drug use, feminism, Vietnam, draft dodging, anti-war protests and other issues Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey would have found instantly recognizable.

I'm reminded how a young man told me a few years ago that he loathed Bill Clinton because the former president was -- and I quote -- ''a hippie.'' I was floored. Love Clinton or loathe him, that is, putting it mildly, an unlikely description of a man who spent the hippie era as a Rhodes Scholar and Yale University student of law.

But it makes sense if you buy the premise that we have been re-litigating the '60s here, seeking a balance of values between the freedom some of us won and the ''good old days'' others of us lost, between the whispered promise of change and the shouted, strident threat.

Indeed, if you buy the premise, then John McCain's recent attempts to conflate Obama with William Ayers are hardly surprising.

Whatever you think of the '60s, though, one thing is undeniable: They tore us apart, ripped American society to pieces and threw those pieces in the air so they rained down like confetti, falling into new configurations, nothing where it used to be. It was an angry time, those who found stability -- identity -- in the old configurations fighting those intoxicated by the possibilities of the new.

Which is why some regarded the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy with such ineffable hope. His was a promise to reconcile the shredded pieces, to make them -- make us -- whole again. Then he walked through that hotel kitchen, and we lost everything that might have been.

Forty years later, we are still angry, still sifting through confetti pieces, trying to find a way to make them whole. And here comes Barack Obama wanting to be president.

He has an economic plan, sure. He has a healthcare plan, yes. He has a promise to end the war in Iraq, fine.

Those are important matters, certainly. But when I look at this guy and reflect on the hate I see in my country, the lack of purpose I see in my country, the division and fear I see in my country, those concerns feel distinctly secondary.

You know what I hope Barack Obama is? I hope he is reconciliation -- the end of the 1960s at long last. And the beginning of something new.

A Halloween Story

Fear has profoundly changed us
By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Meanwhile, back at the War on Terror . . .

You remember the War on Terror, don't you? It was in all the papers. Back before presidential politics sucked the air from the room and your 401(k) shrank till it was worth maybe dinner and a movie, it was considered quite the important news story. Abu Ghraib? Extraordinary renditions? Fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here? Surely you recall.

I only ask because of a news story that broke last week to a yawn of media disinterest. The Washington Post reported on two secret White House memos explicitly endorsing the use of waterboarding -- simulated drowning -- on so-called high-value terrorism suspects. This is, says The Post, the first time the still-classified memos have been disclosed. They were written in response to requests from then-CIA Director George Tenet, who worried his agents might be hung out to dry if the practice were discovered and the people or their representatives demanded someone's head.

According to The Post, the White House issued written authorizations in 2003 and 2004. Yet in 2006, President Bush told the nation, ``The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it -- and I will not authorize it.''

Which was, of course, a lie.

You'd think the latest proof of that lie -- yet another smoking gun to stack with all the others -- would merit attention. But a computer search Thursday turned up only seven newspaper stories mentioning the memos. Searches of the CNN and FOX news websites also came up dry, though the story did appear on MSNBC's site.

If you think my point is that the media missed an important story, it isn't. No, the point is that normal is not where we thought it would be.


You remember how it was just after Sept. 11, 2001, right? Some of us vowed we would never enter a skyscraper again. Some of us didn't want to leave our houses again. The minutiae of popular culture became staggeringly unimportant. Humorists like David Letterman and my colleague, Dave Barry, wondered if they could ever return to the business of laughter.

We were scared dry. And some of us said: Get used to it. This was the new normal.

But skyscrapers did not close from lack of use. We did not become a nation of agoraphobics. We did not lose our interest in singers and movie stars. Letterman and Barry went back to work.

Fear, which had cut through us like a hot poker, became instead a low-grade fever, ambient noise, wallpaper, something you feel without feeling, hear without hearing, see without seeing.

Then you look up one day and realize how profoundly that fear has changed your world. People are imprisoned without charges or access to attorneys, and it's routine. People are surveilled, their reading habits studied, their telephone usage logged, and it's commonplace. People, including children, end up on a secret list of those who are not allowed to fly, nobody will tell you why, there is no appeal, and it's ordinary. We swallow lies like candy, nod sagely at babblespeak, and it's unexceptional.

Torture is inflicted with White House approval, the president lies about it and it's just another Tuesday.

Once upon a time, Americans were fond of looking upon backward nations, upon places where law was whatever the king said it was, and noting with pride that we do things differently in our country. But that was a day long ago and a country long gone.

If we miss the one or mourn the other, you'd never know it to look at us. We live through what feels evermore like a Joe McCarthy fever dream. We feel without feeling, hear without hearing, see without seeing and do not protest what we have become.

Because this is normal now.