9/11 — Blog — The Green B Letter

Some dates and days stand out in American history. They marshal the national spirit in a common bond, no matter how disparate our people. We celebrate July 4 for our independence; we mourn for lost soldiers on Memorial Day and pay tribute to all veterans on Nov 11. We know the Civil War ended in the Spring of 1865, as did Lincoln’s life by bullet. Jan 6 now connotes when our Capitol was besieged by rioters and insurrection filled the air we breathed. Surprise attacks inflicting thousands of casualties come to the fore of our consciousness on Dec 7, 1941, a “day that will live in infamy.”

Nothing stands in such stark relief to contemporary America as 9/11. Maybe because so many lived through it and so many died on it. Targets held no military significance, as did the Pearl Harbor surprise attack. Civilian planes turned into fuel-laden missiles with human shrapnel. It was terror yes, taking down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, nearly turning the Pentagon into a scrap heap, and a third plane pulverizing metal and bodies in a Pennsylvania field.

It was transcendental. These were not armed soldiers in a field of battle or huddling in redoubts and forts. The several thousand dead were secretaries and stockbrokers, computer geeks and maintenance workers. They were everyday people going to work, earning a living, an aggregate of the diversity that perished on 9/11 because that is what America is everyday, before and since. The people who died and the buildings that were targeted precisely were blown up because they represented e pluribus unum—out of many, one; our buildings the economic and political might brought about by a democratic nation and a multicultural demographic. Bin Laden’s attack was, at its heart, mass murder against a political system he didn’t like, a culture that wasn’t his, a system needing to be defeated to impose his will for his goals and his ego. No one epitomized pathological bullying and mass murder more than the personification of Islamic jihad, a figure who now holds his own place in hell’s pantheon.

We have always faced our enemies squarely. We fought the Nazis not on a racial or religious bias but a political one. Although there was a racist component ot some of our war propaganda, we fought the Japanese because they bombed our territory and killed our people. In all the years since, we never flinched in who our foes were, and why we went to war. It was the Germans; it was the Japanese, and they were trying to kill us and our democracy.

Twenty years after the worst attack on our homeland, twenty years commemorated year after year with the names of the dead read like a Georgian incantation at the Sacred Trough of Ground Zero, two rounds of silence at each plane’s time skewering the WTC buildings, and the reliving of private and public nightmares, personal anguish, charred lives of heroes still succumbing to their wounds; of men and women jumping 100 stories to escape the flames of death in one final defiant choice before falling.

In one of the most disrespectful assaults on our country, our values, our defense, our freedoms, the Virginia Department of Education has striven to obfuscate the truth, pander to a political agenda, and betray its fundamental mission: to teach. In yet another attempt to suppress Americanism in America, the VDOE published a webinar for 9/11 professional development video for classroom lessons commemorating one of our most tragic days. Somehow, the disclaimer of “these views are solely that of the Dr.Decuir doesn’t quite it cut it.

The purported central objective of “Culturally Responsive and Inclusive 9/11 Commemoration” is to prevent and protect Muslim students from bullying, which Prof Decuir sees as the tragic result of the World Trade Center and other targets attacked that day. Decuir cites a troubling statistic—Muslim students are the second most bullied group in school. She doesn’t cite her source, nor does she name the first. I would imagine LGBTQ or Jewish students might head the dubious list, since statistics show gay youth ae subjected to harassment, ridicule taunts, physical and verbal abuse. Jewish students are now among the most threatened of all. I also tried an in an internet search to see what other kinds of bullying and harassment Prof. Decuir has written about, but I came up empty. Perhaps my poor Google skills failed to turn up a Decuir body of work on how to protect LGBTQ and Jewish students in our public schools from the actions Decuir says is aimed at Muslim kids.

No child should be harassed, threatened, bullied or otherwise feel unsafe during the school `day. Schools have strong discipline codes, which include violations pertaining to bias and discrimination under the umbrella of bullying. Tweeners and adolescents have a strong mean streak compounded by numerous other teenage afflictions. Religion, ethnicity, physical appearance, jealousy—you name it, and kids will find ways to make you cry before you can get home and open the door. Schools do what they can with the resources they have and the authority given to guide youth in managing their conduct and social relationships in positive ways. Bullying has many definitions, explanations, approaches, to mitigating bullying. In a society valuing individual power, the job is significantly harder.

What you don’t do is change history, suppress the truth, rewrite events, conjure fact into fiction.. If you are fighting bullying. You must recognize the bully. Hijacking jets and turning them into missiles with human shrapnel targeting office buildings is the most malevolent, sadistic act of bullying—and war.

The video says “say what happened and that’s the end of it”, according to reports. (The video was pulled from You Tube before TGBL could view it). Let’s teach what happened that day – a good lesson for our kids, those who teach them, and those who tell teachers how to teach. The Fire Department lost 344 members to Bin-Laden’s inferno; NYPD lost 71 officers that day, 74 law officers total. Many more suffered chronic or life ending afflictions. Many responders are still dying from their heroism to this day. 2,605 civilians who kissed their families goodbye, wished kids to have a good day at school, planned their work as they headed into the Trade Center, The Pentagon, or sat on Flight 93. All for the last time.

Yes, the Virginia Department of Education, who promoted the video for 9/11 teacher training--let’s just say what happened happened. But that is far from “it.” Just talk to the victims” families, the responders relatives. It is not “it” when residents and workers and students in the areas still suffer the physical and psychological effects of the day that changed America, and the world. To obfuscate 9/11 reality, to erase Islamic jihad’s Pearl Harbor in the guise of teacher development, to minimize America’s suffering and instruct how to suppress its pedagogy in the name of reducing bullying defiles the legacy of every victim, and violates every educational principle in a free society.

To borrow from Lawrence O’Donnell, Asra Nomani, president of Parents Defending Education, (quoted from the Daily Mail) has the last word:

“As an American Muslim parent and journalist who has investigated Islamic terrorism for the past 20 years, it’s offensive, immoral, unethical, manipulative and dangerous.”