I could care less about OBL's porn stash

I feel like we’re really scraping bottom now, people.

I clicked on CNN.com this morning to discover that the second hyperlink under “Bin Laden News” is titled “Porn said to be found in compound.”

Really?

I click on the link out of disbelief, and I proceed to watch a CNN reporter discuss a “large stash” of pornography that was discovered within the materials that US special forces removed from Bin Laden’s compound following his death.  The report even features comments from a former Navy SEAL about how this is “not surprising.”

Has the Bin Laden killing story lost momentum to the point that we now have to talk about a stash of porn?  Why is this information relevant to national security?  What does revealing this information do for the American public?  The US already attributes thousands of deaths to this man.  How does hearing about a porn stash in his house make anything better or worse than it already is?

This whole situation gets more embarrassing by the day.  Pathetic…

When did we stop teaching comma rules? Anyone? Bueller?

I’ve been teaching at the college level consistently since 2002.  Over the years, I’ve noticed a serious decline in my students’ writing.

Yes, I accept that spell check and grammar check functions have rendered us all idiots when it comes to the basics, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.  This phenomenon manifests itself the most with the comma.  People do not know how to use them.  They either over use them, or they don’t use them at all.

I read a lot of papers each semester.  Right now, I’m in the middle of a stack of 41 final papers, 1500 to 2000 words apiece, many written by graduate students.  Let me tell you something.  When the writer has misused commas, my focus on the content is completely blown.  It could be a Pulitzer-prize winning piece, but if the commas are loused up, I can’t follow the content.  Maybe that’s my issue.  I don’t know.

Is it too much to expect papers to follow the basic punctuation rules of the English language?  I’m not even talking colons here, people.  I’m talking COMMAS.  They look like this: ,

If any of my students are reading this, listen up.  If you take nothing else from my class, take this:

Two independent clauses joined by a conjunction require a comma before the conjunction.  End of story.  An independent clause has a subject and a verb.  I hope this helps.

In some cases, like when we use a word such as “therefore,” it’s usually a semi-colon.  If that’s too complicated, I’ll settle for the comma.

Sigh…

Sally Anal Grammar and Punctuation Pants is signing off.

Where's the gray in the American Crayola box?

I keep asking myself this question since the US media outlets began announcing that President Obama was preparing to make a special statement.  Ironically, I was watching Donald Trump start to rip Star Jones a new one on “Celebrity Apprentice” (which I never watch), and the first ticker break came through at the bottom of my television screen.  Then my boyfriend texted me saying that he was waiting for the President to speak before he went to bed.

Obama’s announcement of Bin Laden’s death came as a surprise to me.  I knew in the back of my mind that the US government still wanted to find him, but I didn’t worry about his whereabouts or what he’d been up to.  I’ve lived in New York City for almost twelve years, so the threat of a terrorist action has been part of my life here since 2001.  I don’t let it stop my day-to-day actions, but I’m aware that I choose to make my home in a city full of soft targets.  I live just a few blocks from Union Square (a major subway hub for seven trains), and then about two miles from Times Square and Ground Zero.

Sunday evening’s announcement and the subsequent celebrations broadcast by the media left me feeling more than unnerved and confused.  I watched the reports and followed some comments on Twitter.  My colleague Bryan tweeted that he was feeling uncomfortable with the scenes of celebration over Bin Laden’s death, and he retweeted some others expressing similar sentiments.  I went to bed feeling less alone about my views, yet still unsettled by the scenes of Americans celebrating someone’s death, even if it was Osama bin Laden.

Details about the killing of Bin Laden have come to light over the past two days, and those details seem to be changing moment to moment.  As I check in with various news outlets throughout the day, I can’t help but wonder why the US couldn’t get the details clear before saying anything specific.  Couldn’t the President have announced Bin Laden’s death and then shared specifics once they were verified by multiple US sources?  I was particularly upset to learn that children were present in the compound in Pakistan as the raid unfolded.  Equally disturbing is the digital sequence created by ABC News that shows a woman lunging at Navy SEALs, indicating her “reason” for being shot in the calf.

And now the country’s leaders engage in a debate over whether to release graphic pictures of Bin Laden’s corpse.  Sarah Palin tweets that Obama should stop “pussy-footing” around and release the pictures.  In a moment when a lot of people are expressing pride about being an American, I’m not feeling so proud.  Privileged to live in a democratic republic like the US, yes, but not particularly proud of how some of my fellow citizens are behaving.

CNN and The New York Times reported today about why college-aged young people led many of the public celebrations.  The Times article by Kate Zernike cites that these young people have grown up with the image of Bin Laden as the most evil person in the world.  Hence, the need to celebrate his death on Sunday evening.  However, I was also struck by the article’s mention of Neil Howe’s comment that this generation likes to see things in polarized terms (my words), meaning that evil is evil and good is good.  There’s no room for anything in between.  In other words, shades of gray are not so prevalent in the Crayola Box of Life for this young generation.  I would take this a step further and say that this sentiment is true for many Americans regardless of age.

Seeing the gray in a situation allows us to have compassion and empathy for the experiences of others.  Over the last three days, I’ve spent time thinking about how the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 might be feeling about the end of the decade-long hunt for the man who instigated the murder of their relatives. I also think about my brother-in-law, who spent a year in Iraq with the Army reserves, once the war in Iraq began.  He and countless others have invested time and energy into protecting our country from people like Osama bin Laden.

Yet I’ve also found myself thinking about what those children in that compound must have seen and heard as the helicopters came over the 13ft walls.  Or what they must have thought as the gunfire started and people were killed.  I shudder to think that it was happening in front of them, just like the fall of the Twin Towers happened in front of so many young people here in New York City.  And then I think about the woman, supposedly one of Bin Laden’s wives, who rushed the SEALs.  Really?  Really?  Was her action out of a sense of duty to a terrorist or out of a sense of love for her husband?  We won’t ever know.  But these are things I’m thinking about, the gray moments in these situations.

A friend told me that he posted an MLK quotation on his Facebook page in response to the celebrations, and someone accused him of being pro-terrorist.  I say it again: Really?  Really?

This is what I mean about gray Crayons in the Crayola Box.  There are multiple perspectives to every story and every situation.  Just because I consider these perspectives does not make me a terrorist sympathizer.  It makes me a human being committed to dialogue and understanding.  Maybe if we tried to think through actions like celebrating Bin Laden’s death with a little more sensitivity, we would avoid undoing the positive effects of the death of a terrorist who has directly or indirectly killed thousands of people.

When we publicly celebrate a death and chant things like “Osama Osama hey hey hey goodbye” I don’t feel like we’re living up to the ideals of our supposedly superior American society.  Actually, it just makes me feel embarrassed to be an American.

Where have all the adults gone?

It’s a been awhile since I posted here, as the month of April somehow got away from me.  This marks my attempt to get back on track.

Since the first rumblings of the “birthers,” I’ve been fascinated by how low people will go in order to undermine the strength of a particular candidate for the “highest office in the land.”  Of course, there are examples of dirt digging and mud slinging in every campaign process, but the fact that almost three years later the issue continues to re-surface makes me feel a bit like we’re on the playground at the jungle gym arguing over which girl is Sally’s best friend.

The fact that Barack Obama had to release his birth certificate yesterday and that Donald Trump held a press conference to claim his role in that process just makes me wonder how much lower the country’s leaders are going to go in this next presidential campaign.  Those of you who have followed this blog know that I’m not an Obama disciple.  However, the amount of valuable time and energy that people, namely Republicans and conservatives, have spent on this birthing issue illustrates just how dire things actually are in this country.  To think that the “intelligent” and “rational” people who are supposed to be the leaders of our country are baiting people around Obama’s citizenship and using that to further undermine his reputation calls into question what democratic representation should be accomplishing.  I do not claim to be the smartest girl in the class; I stopped thinking that a long time ago.  However, I do think that I tend to consider very carefully how people present information, and I’m not convinced that a vast majority of Americans necessarily do the same.  Hence, the danger zone created by our national leaders.  The either/or mentality that these men and women are spewing right now is epitomized by the current budget crisis on a macro scale and by this birth certificate crisis on a micro scale.  Yes, people are reaching across the aisle.  Yes, maybe the birthers have been silenced with the release of the certificate.  But how did we get to these points in the first place?

My message to our national leaders in this moment: put on your big boy and big girl pants, stop sniveling around the jungle gym about Sally’s best friend, and start spending time being the intelligent, rational adults that we need to represent us.  Otherwise, we’re going to be witnessing the rapid deterioration of the United States of America right before our eyes.

Empowerment as byproduct of artistic expression

Last week I was talking with a colleague about a piece of writing that we needed to evaluate for inclusion in an upcoming project.  We both read the work and each had some reservations about it for different reasons.  My colleague works as a writing and empowerment facilitator as well as a life coach.  Her response to this particular piece of writing was something like this:

“If this person was in my empowerment workshop, I’d say, ‘You go, girl.’  If she was in my writing workshop, I’d say, ‘Hold on here.  We need to talk about this.’”

It was a profound moment for me as a teacher of artists, as it became clear to me through this very simple, albeit paraphrased, comment that we sometimes do a disservice when we mix artistic training with empowerment.  Artistic expression is inherently empowering because it gives the artists a “voice” to express.  However, knowledge around artistic skills can also be empowering.  That old adage “Knowledge is power” should hold true for the arts and arts education as well.  Sometimes we get bogged down in using artistic expression as an empowerment tool, and we forget that rigor with artistic expression provides something for artists of all skill levels to work towards.  Maybe we should begin focusing on empowerment as a byproduct of the artistic expression that comes from rigorous artistic training.