Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

“Faithful Reader” Says Real Education Must Come From Outside Education System
I read and enjoyed and learned much from each of the issues of your   excellent newspaper. The issue of a couple of years back on the history of education in New York State, was/is so invaluable that it should be reprinted every September, just as the new school year is starting, just to put that puzzle in perspective,
Should not an education provide a sense of identity as one of its primary goals?  I am calling the so-called educational system a puzzle.   The question is, how can one have a sense of identity without knowing one’s history?
For those who go thru the maze of the educational process’ slight of hand, enter without an identity and exit no more sure of who they are than when one entered. Is the question, “Is some miseducation better than none at all?”
And then again, the education system is doing as it was intended to do: confuse, mislead, under and miseducate, a certain population, of a certain  complexion.
Why would a system  that is an integral part of a larger system that  has mostly been antagonistic to the black constituency, provide the tools to slaves to liberate themselves and thereby weaken its own position. Not today or any other. That education for identity, education for liberation, must come from outside the  miseducation system.
Is the question of identity  even worthy of discussion? Are you, are we satisfied and content with the cooperation between individuals in our neighborhoods where we shoot and kill, maime and rob one and the other?  Where is the outcry?  Who is enraged enough to make the effort to contribute in resolving this emergency? Where is the rescue squad from within? Where are the ambulances?
Where are the lawyers? Where are the leaders as they call themselves? Where are the politicians? Are they standing at the edge of a cliff safely while directing the rest of us to the jump, saying don’t look, just jump to the rocks below?  Don’t mess with the status quo, bro.   What is that classic line elected officials utter after each outrage is committed against us, is it stay calm or don’t get mad, or peace brothers?  Are these folks holding us back from true progress? I am thinking of the soldiers of Zimbabwe who could not wait for the government to get them some land, what they do? Solve their own problems? Is our definitive leadership obscure and only observed by a few?
The different groups within the Diaspora, what about them?
Are we truly maximizing our efforts  for unity? Our enemies have some problems between them but they are as tight as a balled fist when it gets to what to do about you, black man and woman, think not?    
The brainwashing role as exemplified by mass media has convinced the populace that nigger, nigga, and bitches and hoes are acceptable terms.  These disrespectful terms will have a life of their own until an equally, persistent effort is made to eradicate their usage replaced by… My mother is not a ho and I am not a nigger, you dig.  Still, I am not happy with others having no respect for self or others.
What next?  The level of self -hatred as exemplified in the music and  usage of negative terms in the streets to describe one another as niggers, for example, is at unprecedented levels in our communities.
 I can only support that statement by saying I hear the “n” word being said now at this time more than at any other.
One remedy is a steady dose of the works and concepts of Amos Wilson, of Malcolm X, of Elijah Muhammad, of a Carter G. Woodson, of Anta Diop. Of course, my role is to teach history and discourage the usage of these terms as much as possible, as often as possible.
The history of education in New York State as outlined in your periodical once a year would do its part also, I would think, I would believe; would certainly play its role as it has, as it does with each issue, each month in helping clarify who we are and more importantly, who we should be, and be about as  individuals and community.
Please continue  the excellence of your publication, every one of your writers is truly an expert in her or his field.  I have learned much from each of them, and your paper in general.  Only one of your faithful readers.
Ken Hutson, Brooklyn, NY

By Peter Fry
The first thing you need to know is that people have been dealing with alcohol and drug abuse for a long time, and millions have been helped over the years. Since Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935, a great deal has been learned and the number of programs available have multiplied tremendously. Studies time and again have proven that treatment can indeed work miracles.
All substance abuse programs are based on one principle: a person cannot fight addiction alone. This usually means trained professionals, of course, but belonging to a community of people who are all struggling to recover from addiction greatly improves the chance of success. Alcoholics Anonymous and its spin-off Narcotics Anonymous consist simply of groups of recovering alcoholics or addicts who help each other remain sober and off drugs, one day at a time. In fact, the best way to begin the journey of recovery is to reach out to another person for help.
Therefore, the first step you should take in seeking help, whether for yourself or for another, is to talk with a professional. The Mental Health Association of New York City provides the 24-hour LifeNet Hotline (see end of the article) where a professional will refer you or the person you wish to help to a treatment agency. In Brooklyn alone there are nearly a hundred licensed programs, ranging from detoxification and in-hospital rehabilitation to long-term programs which address the causes of substance abuse.
Three types of long-term treatment are available, usually supplemented by self-help groups like Narcotics Anonymous. Outpatient programs provide treatment through visits on a regular basis, using group and individual counseling, relapse prevention workshops and education. The frequency of visits depends on the person’s progress through treatment. Long-term residential treatment provides intensive services for up to a year or more for people most likely to benefit from living full-time in a facility with a structured environment. Methadone clinics help those addicted to heroin by replacing it with the legal drug methadone under medical supervision, so that they have a chance to live as functioning adults.
Remember, though, that substance abuse cannot be treated by itself. Each individual has other issues entwined with their abuse of drugs or alcohol, and which, therefore, must also be addressed. Some young people who started drugs in their teens or earlier never had the opportunity to mature into responsible adults or obtain a proper education, job skills or a work ethic. Other individuals have a job history and family, but started abusing drugs or alcohol later in life. Some persons are HIV-positive or have Hepatitis C, a disease commonly affecting addicts. Women are far more likely to have been sexually or physically abused than men, and often are the primary caregiver for their children. Some men and women have emotional or psychiatric disorders which interact with their substance abuse to make a bad situation worse. Gays and lesbians, the physically handicapped and other special populations also have issues particular to their situation.
A licensed program will thus develop a unique treatment plan for each person based on their particular situation. However, some programs specialize: in Brooklyn, a number serve only women, and a few allow women and their children to live together in a residential setting. Adolescents, with their own needs, have their own programs. Others specialize in those with emotional or psychiatric disorders.
Finally, a word about the criminal justice system. Brooklyn stands in the forefront of providing alternatives to incarceration, programs which the courts or the district attorney can require a person to attend if they feel he or she needs substance abuse treatment rather than jail time. People on probation or parole can also be required to attend these programs, and New York State Prisons and Rikers Island provide treatment services to some of their inmates. After all, many do not face up to their problem until they have been arrested or imprisoned, and thus their time under court or correctional supervision offers a unique opportunity to engage them in treatment.
While it is never too late for anyone to get help, success can never be guaranteed. A good treatment program can only provide a person with the skills to embrace a life of recovery from substance abuse. In the end, it will be up to him or her.
For help and referrals to a program, call 1-800-LifeNet (1-800-543-3638) in English; or 1-877-Ayudese (1-877-298-3373) in Spanish. To find a program near you, go to www.samhsa.gov, or call 1-800-522-5353. For Alcoholics Anonymous meetings call 718-339-4777, and for Narcotics Anonymous call 212-929-6262 or 7117. For criminal justice clients, call the Serendipity I program for men (718-398-0096), or the Serendipity II program for women (718-802-0572).

By Errol T. Louis
Time for Tish to Face the Music
With less than a month to go before the Democratic primaries, a tough race is shaping up for the city council seat in district 35 (Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, Crown Heights and Prospect Heights). Incumbent Letitia “Tish” James is fighting off a challenge by Eric Blackwell over the issue of economic development in Central Brooklyn.
As Tish has known for months, her opposition to the Atlantic Yards project carries significant political consequences. Developer Bruce Ratner’s $2 billion proposal for a sports arena and more than 4,500 units of new housing – half of it specially subsidized to keep it affordable – is the best economic news to hit the district in decades.
But Tish never stopped trying to slow or kill the project, even as community activists with impeccable credentials announced their support for Atlantic Yards, including Rev. Herbert Daughtry, Bertha Lewis of ACORN, the Rev. Al Sharpton and James Caldwell. That gives Blackwell an opening to argue that Tish is out of touch with her district’s economic needs.
Tish has been dead wrong about Atlantic Yards, but strong on other issues. Most notably to her credit, she recently joined a bloc of councilmembers that cast a key vote to reorganize the city’s garbage-disposal system so that less waste will be trucked through black and Latino neighborhoods.
Look for Blackwell’s campaign to make the case that many of us have been screaming about for years: there is no more pressing challenge facing Central Brooklyn than the need for more capital investment, economic development and job creation.
** *
Keeping it Fake…in the Music Business
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s landmark $10 million settlement last month with Sony BMG for using bribery to manipulate the playlists of stations around the country – an illegal practice known as payola – provides an opening to reclaim popular music from the greedy, no-talent hacks at record labels and radio stations who are hastening the ruin of American culture.
It turns out that the monotonous repetition of awful music played on commercial radio stations is largely caused by companies like Sony, the world’s second-largest record label, that regularly paid millions of dollars in under-the-table bribes to radio hosts and producers to get specific songs played over and over, without regard to a tune’s worth or initial popularity.
The select handful of illegally hyped tunes eventually catch on from sheer repetition and sell well, but the overall result has been a tidal wave of mediocrity that causes record sales to drop year after year.
In the category of hip-hop music, industry insiders have long complained that payola bribery has fueled the rise of marginally talented gangsta rappers – who endlessly boast of “keeping it real” even while relying on corporate bribery to purchase airplay and popularity they could never dream of achieving honestly.
It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time in the music business, the key to success was “having ears” – spending long nights haunting bars, nightclubs and juke joints scouting new talent.
The legends in the business were men like the late John Hammond, who exchanged a Yale degree and wealthy pedigree as part of the Vanderbilt family for a life in the Greenwich Village jazz clubs, where he discovered and promoted a 17-year-old unknown named Billie Holiday in the 1930s, along with groups like the Count Basie Band.
Decades later, as a talent scout for Columbia Records, Hammond helped launch the career of another teenager named Aretha Franklin and had the ears to discover folk singers like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.
One of Hammond’s last finds before his death in 1987 was a kid from Jersey named Bruce Springsteen.
Clive Davis, another talent scout for Columbia, signed Janis Joplin, Carlos Santana and Billy Joel in the ’60s and ’70s, then formed Arista Records in 1974 and brought us pop giants like Patti Smith and Whitney Houston.
Arista was later bought by Sony, which last year fired 110 Arista workers and folded the label into RCA.
As corporate giants purchased and shut down independent labels, the men with ears have been replaced by lazy, greedy company men who see popular music as nothing more than a commodity to buy, sell and manipulate by any available means.
These payola crooks are denying the rest of us access to the real talent in our land – and breaking the law to boot.
As Spitzer’s probe continues, these frauds will be exposed, along with bribe-taking radio executives at stations in New York and elsewhere.
If we’re lucky, the scandal will start a revival of the music business as a place where extraordinary talent and unique voices can be discovered, promoted and shared with the world.

By Aminisha Black
Male Role Models Come in
Different Packages
In the search for nurturing role models, it’s important to move outside the dominant culture’s model of the cookie cutter syndrome, merely duplicating one model. Remember to look beneath the external trappings for signs that the person walks the talk and their practice demonstrates integrity, values young folk need to be productive, responsible citizens.
George Ragsdale, father of Alexa, 13 and George, 10, is a professional trumpet player. He also coaches the X-Men baseball team in the 78th Precinct Council League. George’s interest in sports started when his children wanted to play. He became a coach because in his opinion, the coaches – also parents, weren’t always that knowledgeable about the game. Also concerned with prejudices -not necessarily based on color but parents favoring their own child, he decided to coach. After his daughter stopped playing, he has focused on developing his son’s skills – signing him up with a traveling league in addition to playing with the X-Men. George volunteers in that league and works out every single day of the week at a batting cage with his son. When asked if he managed to avoid favoritism, he replied with pride, “I can show you plaques I received two years in a row from parents. Most coaches don’t get plaques from parents.”
The individuals George credits with being major influences in his life were his high school band instructor and his trumpet teacher. ” I was impressed by the way they carried themselves, their work ethics – they demanded respect from those around them ” George is obviously an achiever and when he spots an under achiever, “I look for his strong points and let him play positions that use those skills. ” As an end-of-game ritual, the entire team run the bases three or four times together and all chant X-Men! at home base. This ritual serves as both a wind-down and a unity/power play according to George.
Saying that youngsters need someone to nurture and inspire them, he requires his players to bring in their report cards. George, involved in every activity of his children, takes his band (The Disciples – a band he founded 10 years ago) to play for Alexa’s dance class rehearsals now that she’s left the sports arena. Kudos to George for being an involved father and for including other youth in the process.
Speaking of other youth – older, responsible youth make excellent role models. Makini, a single mom with two sons DJ, 9, and Kamani, 5, hired Jesse, the 17 year-old son of a colleague, to baby sit with the boys. His assignment began with DJ who obviously enjoyed hanging out with a teenager who he described as being “cool”. I was pleased to see that “cool” didn’t mean a do rag or drooping pants. After DJ went away to camp, Kamani inherited Jesse. He could hardly wait since his big brother had given Jesse big props. Living up to his reputation, he was a big hit with the five year-old as well.
Jesse, a rising senior at The Lab School, has a passion for ice hockey, a sport he’s played since he was eight years old. Although this was his first job as a baby sitter, he handled it like a pro, asking the boys for their input on activities and most importantly keeping them moving at a rate that didn’t allow for boredom.
Jesse said a male cousin, a student and a rapper who was shot and killed at the age of 23, had influenced him. He said his cousin always worked hard and was very modest about his accomplishments. He enjoyed the job, remembering the things he did at the age of five and nine while the biggest challenge was keeping up with them and finding a balance between firm and fun.
His message to adults about youth would be “Try to understand how kids are seeing things, their point of view. The world is rapidly changing and being a kid today is different than even 10 years ago”. When asked what we wanted to get from baby-sitting, he said, “A better understanding of kids and baby sitting in general”. He hopes that he gives them positive aspirations.
It’s a known fact that youth listen to other youth more readily than to adults. Finding positive youth who can model responsible behavior is a win-win situation for the youngsters and the teenagers as well. The village still exists. Long live the village!
Comments: parentsnotebook@yahoo.com

By Danielle Douglas
     Declaring himself the candidate of ideas, Congressman Anthony Weiner, 40, formerly threw his hat into the mayoral ring earlier this month. Although the congressman from Brooklyn has been campaigning around the city since the beginning of the year, Weiner’s congressional schedule has prohibited him from campaigning with the same regularity of his opponents. With the end of the congressional session, Weiner has stepped up his campaigning efforts, hoping to raise his profile among Democratic voters.
At a recent Independent Press Association event, the underdog candidate, who remains dead last in preliminary polls, tried to live up to his self-proclaimed title, “candidate of ideas,” with a presentation of his vision for the city.
Healthcare
“We have to stop the closure of hospitals throughout the five boroughs; the majority of the hospitals that are closing are disproportionately in communities of color and low-income communities,” said Weiner. The candidate wants mayoral control over the opening and closing of public hospitals in the city, which is now the responsibility of the State Department of Health. In fact, Weiner wants the state to relinquish much of its control over the city, allowing the city to oversee everything from the MTA to the raising or lowering of income taxes. Historically, initiatives which depend on politicians, especially those in Albany, giving up power tends to be dead on arrival.

Weiner also seeks to utilize state funding, which left $40 million unallocated after it’s first year of operation, to subsidize low-cost health insurance. Modeling his plan after the Brooklyn Healthworks, a local initiative that employs state funding to subsidize low-cost health insurance for small businesses in Brooklyn, Weiner hopes to yield the same results, with insurance offered at less than $120 for individuals and less than $350 for families.
Small Businesses and Unemployment
Citing small businesses as “the bedrock on which this city was built,” Weiner seeks to increase investments and build an incentive program for NYC businesses. Weiner plans to create a $10 million dollar fund to encourage new businesses with $100,000 to $200,000 seed loans, primarily benefitting businesses that don’t qualify for larger venture capital investments.
The congressman also seeks to provide street cleanup patrols, often seen in trendy Greenwich Village, for shopping strips in the outer boroughs. To aid local businesses in competing in the global market, Weiner plans to revive and expand the Digital NYC program, which originally offered landlords incentives to prewire their buildings for broadband and will now include a “ShopNYC.com” program to market merchant’s goods online.
When asked about the racial disparities within the disbursement of city contract dollars, the congressman danced a political shuffle. He urged city agencies and private companies to buy from local business, which just might be minority-owned, “giving [minority businesses] another pot to feed from.” Weiner also said he wanted an incentive program to bridge the contract dollar gaps, but neglected to provide specific information or a plan.
Education
One has to wonder if all of the Democratic candidates sat in a room one night and devised their education platforms together; Weiner, like his revivals, wants to recruit and retain quality teachers, remove disciplinary restriction for principals and revise the “cookie-cutter” curriculum.
To his credit, Weiner has called for some specific alteration to Bloomberg’s education programs that have not been addressed by his opponents. Weiner wants to eliminate parent coordinators, whose very existence he feels is counterproductive to affecting any real change since principals can hire and fire the liaisons they are less likely to criticize the school or the principal. By diverting the $43 million used to pay parent coordinators to create Centers of Parental Involvement in every school – a space where parents can access detailed information on their children’s progress – Weiner hopes to bring every parent into the schools not just a selected few.
A staunch critic of the mayor’s Leadership Academy, Weiner would prefer to use the private donations that fund the principals’ school to address the basic needs, from toilet paper to new textbooks, of students. Weiner is particularly critical of the fact that graduates of the academy were schooled at a cost of approximately $300,000 per attendee.
Weiner also wants to rehire 1,100 special education evaluators, laid off by the mayor to consolidate 32 special education district offices into 10 regional offices. Since the mayor’s reorganization, the backlog of students referred to special education but waiting to be evaluated, has dramatically increased from 12,997 to 28,640.
Transportation
To create a “comprehensive and reliable” transportation system, Weiner wants to expand ferry service and create a bus rapid-transit system. He wants to build ferry landings in neighborhoods like Red Hook, Long Island, Sheepshead Bay, Marine Park, Coney Island and Bayside to provide travelers with multiple options while spurring economic and residential growth. As a member of the Transportation Committee in Congress, Weiner plans to use his clout to obtain federal funding.
Improving the efficiency of the bus system, Weiner proposes a bus rapid transit system, which would create bus-only express lanes in heavily traveled areas as well as prepaid fares.
Weiner’s most attractive plan, a 10% tax break for anyone making less than $150,000 annually, is the linchpin of his campaign. He hopes that voters recognize him as a candidate whose ideas will serve the needs of the city’s economically, racially and socially diverse populations. “I’ve never won in a race where I wasn’t the underdog. I’ve never run in a race where I wasn’t out-spent. I’ve never won in a race where the political organization didn’t support my opponent, and I’ve never lost an election in my life, said Weiner.” We’ll see.