2001-09-13 ± 5:33 p.m.
Ice Rinks in New York are now Mass Morgues...

imagine you're a teacher...a teacher of English to students from foreign lands. Primarily students from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador...but also from Peru, Cuba, Liberia, Croatia, Bosnia and Pakistan.

Imagine that your students understood at most 3 out of every twenty words that come slowy from your mouth.

Now imagine that you've just heard...in the five minute passing time your students are alloted...that your country has been attacked.

And your students settle in their seats laughing and speaking...Spanish and Urdu and Serbo-Croatian...and then they are quieted...as they must take an hour long state mandated test...even though it's not in their language.

And as they silently stare at their scan-tron sheets, the principal chimes in for the standard second period morning announcements. And as per usual, your students hear only a mass of sounds...familiar yet undecipherable. They continue staring...first at their test booklets, then at their scantrons. And as you try not to cry, they haven't a clue.

Forty minutes later...you try to explain...you draw pictures and say "Nueva York y Washington D.C....Terroristas." And some laugh and some gasp and others look blankly back into your disbelieving eyes.

And the next day a student shows up at your school...where 90% of the student body is from a foreign land.

And the student is wearing a shirt...

on the front it says "Fuck MidEast" and on the back it says "Towel Killer."

And your Pakistani students...in traditional Muslim dress (dress which signifies the awesome accomplishment of memorizing the Holy Koran in its entirety) tell you in broken English that people have been stopping them in the hall and telling them that their people did this. Telling them that all Muslims are to blame.

Your students jokingly ask their Muslim classmates "your cousin? your cousin do this?"

And your Pakistani students take their Latino peers to the world map on the wall and point...."Afghanistan no Pakistan."

you try to explain that religion and nationality do not determine guilt or innocence. That last time they pointed East...the culprit was from Michigan...the home state of their professora.

A Cuban student demands "they need take all the people from that place...send them back." And she can't imagine the irony of her utterance.

Tolerance is not enough.

Tolerance is not enough.

I've yet to decide what's worse...

what's already happened on the East Coast.

or what is about to happen from Coast to Coast.

A Bosnian student arrived to class (an hour early...as usual) armed with the Houston Chronicle and a color print out of the American flag..."Miss, can I put up in classroom?" And every part of my body, save my mouth, said "no."

"This" he said as he pointed to the full color front page photo, "this happen in my country too."

"I know Emir, I know."

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I do not aspire to be cast in a lawyer joke - 2004-02-10
update - 2003-11-04
girl...you'll be a woman...soon. - 2003-08-12