On a Friday afternoon in early February, 16-year-old Jessica Kjellberg is navigating the crowds at New York Comic Con, the giant annual gathering of comic fans in New York. She’s heading back to her special gig at the Griffons [sic] Claw Armory booth, a New Jersey–based purveyor of steel swords, as well as more fantastic movies and comics-inspired weapons. In an effort to look vaguely medieval, Jess, who has wide-set blue-green eyes and an athletic build that hints at the many hours she spends practicing kung fu and sword-fighting, is wearing tight black pants, black lace-up boots, and a black corset-style top embellished with red embroidery.

Jess had come across the company’s booth at a previous convention and, impressed by the quality of the steel broadswords, asked to help out. She’s not sure what she’s being paid, but money’s not the object. She just likes being part of the action. Many of the other teenagers at the convention, which attracts people from all along the East Coast, are playing hooky. Not Jess — even though she’s been setting up the booth since 9:30 that morning. She and her twin sister, Caroline, live in the East Village with their mother, who runs a luxury skincare company with the girls’ aunts, and their father, a copyright lawyer, who performs in a band on the side. The twins haven’t been to school since third grade.

Technically, the state of New York considers Jess and Caroline homeschooled, but that term, with its connotations of conservative Christians chanting Bible lessons at the kitchen table, or parents drilling their offspring in preparation for the National Spelling Bee, doesn’t capture what the twins actually do. For lack of a better term, Jess and Caroline describe themselves as unschooled, which is to say that they — and not their parents — decide what, when, and how they will learn.

This year, Jess is doing several school-like activities: Latin and math lessons with tutors, an introductory sociology course at Hunter College, and a lot of reading (she’s up to “J” — Julius Caesar — in The Complete Works of Shakespeare). She gets excited talking about, for example, how Latin is like a puzzle, but she confesses, “Weapons are my life.”

Last year, Jess spent between three and eight hours a day training one-on-one with her martial arts instructor. The year before that was largely spent hanging out with The New York Jedi, a group that performs Star Wars–inspired light saber battles at events like Comic Con. The Jedi have a show this afternoon, and a member of the group stops by the Griffons Claw booth. He’s dressed in a floor-length black leather coat and has a vague Kiss-like look — white face, black clown lips and eyes, crazy hair with sparkles. He complains he doesn’t see Jess enough. She brushes that off, but the fact is, she’s been focusing a lot on academics this year, plus training a lot in martial arts and taking up fencing.

“I’m just going to give you a call at like, 2:00 in the morning,” he says, half-joking.

Jess smiles and does some excited little bounces. “Do it! Do it! Do it! I love spontaneity.”

An adjustment for parents

An hour or so later, Isabel Ringer, Jess’s 12-year-old friend and martial arts student, bounces up to the booth, with her mother, Kayte Ringer, trailing behind, looking tired. Isabel, a tiny, pixie-like girl with green eyes, fair skin, and a heart-shaped face, quit school two days ago. She can’t stop grinning as she chats with Jess about a cartoon portrait she’s had done at another booth and about the history of Japanese weaponry — many have their origins in farm tools, Jess explains, because for centuries only samurai were permitted to carry swords.

 On day three of the no-school experiment, Kayte says she feels like she’s flying by the seat of her pants. Jess, who Kayte calls “our heroine mentor,” has been talking up unschooling, and Isabel likes the idea, but Kayte isn’t sold yet. It heartens her, though, that Isabel’s stomachaches and migraines have already vanished.
 
 “I see how happy she is,” Kayte says, gesturing to her daughter, who is still absorbed in conversation with Jess.
 
 Isabel had languished at school for years and had been begging for an out, especially after starting martial arts lessons with Jess. She didn’t mesh well with either the cliquish kids at a prestigious progressive school on the Upper East Side, or the learning-disabled ones at another private school. For the past five years she had suffered from chronic stomachaches and migraines that Kayte, after putting her through a battery of medical tests, finally chalked up to anxiety. But Kayte, a single mother who runs an integrative body therapy practice, called Rolfing, out of her West Village apartment, could not see how she would find time to homeschool Isabel. Then, at a parent-teacher conference a couple weeks before, the teacher said Isabel, who is a night owl and would arrive at school exhausted, seemed out-of-it and “traumatized.” Kayte had had enough.

 “All they kept saying was, ‘she’s too fragile,’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘well, maybe we’re too sensitive for school.’”

 In honor of the convention, Isabel is wearing a royal blue fake velvet cape that trails behind her as she walks, a choker with a large sleigh bell attached, and a fleece hat with floppy bunny ears. She’s supposed to be a Sith, one of the Star Wars “bad guys.” Despite a battery-operated light saber bought at last year’s convention, she doesn’t look remotely menacing, though she seems entranced by the weapons in the booth, running her hands over a mock dagger, which Jess offers to buy her. Kayte makes some mild protestations about having weapons in the house, but Isabel grins and says, “It’s not your house, it’s my room!”

 Kayte pauses and sighs. “This is all so new to me.”

 She seemed to be talking about the world of Star Wars, comics, and martial arts enthusiasts, but she might have been talking about unschooling, too.

Helping kids find their milieu

As schools nationwide have cut recess, mandated weeks of test preparation, and lengthened the school day in the name of accountability, unschoolers seem to take pride in going against the grain. They champion flexibility, creativity, and so-called “child-led learning.” Some eschew textbooks, grammar lessons, workbooks, tests, and anything else that resembles school. At its core, though, unschooling is about helping kids find their own milieu rather than requiring them to fit in with a school’s rigid structure and norms. If that milieu is plodding through workbook after workbook, then so be it.

No one knows how many families unschool, because no national agency collects such statistics and because unschoolers themselves debate what constitutes “real unschooling,” since each family’s approach varies. The number of children educated at home, however, has risen from an estimated 850,000 in 1999 to 1.5 million — or nearly 3 percent of the school-age population — in 2007, the last time the U.S. Department of Education surveyed parents and kids. The survey does not ask about unschooling in particular, although advocates of unschooling maintain their approach is growing more popular.

Homeschoolers of all stripes credit John Holt, the educator and advocate of progressive education who coined the term “unschooling,” with starting the modern home education movement some 30 years ago. But until recently, unschoolers stayed largely beneath the radar. New York University sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens, in a seminal academic study of homeschooling, argues that in the 1990s conservative Christians came to dominate the movement, not so much because they constituted a majority, but because they formed efficient, well-organized advocacy groups that skillfully explained their methods to legislators and the media.

In the past two decades, however, unschoolers have grown more visible. A genre of unschooling self-help books, online forums, websites, and blogs has sprung up, with parents detailing their experience and offering advice to others. Annual unschooling conferences for parents and kids attract hundreds. For teenagers, books like the The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by former middle school teacher and unschooling advocate Grace Llewellyn advise kids to take control of their own learning.

Llewellyn also runs the Not Back to School Camp for teens aged 13 to18, which boasts no set bedtime, very few mandatory activities, and a self-consciously tolerant outlook. Both Jess and Caroline Kjellberg have attended. Like their peers, unschooled teenagers congregate in Facebook groups and post YouTube testimonials. One teen, putting a self-ironic twist on a sometimes-voiced criticism of unschooling’s laissez-faire approach, calls her blog “I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write.”

The Internet, of course, has encouraged subcultures of all sorts. It has also subtly normalized one of the basic tenets of unschooling: that pursuing one’s own interests, however narrow, is both worthwhile and doable. Even as public schools push for accountability and the college admissions process grows increasingly cutthroat, the Web is ushering in a new wave of amateurism and, perhaps, a renewed respect for the autodidact.

In recent decades, the concepts of self-directed learning and multiple intelligences have gained mainstream acceptance, while books like Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class champion the cluster effects of a deep and talented pool of creative workers, demonstrating how they help shape the character of a city and define a lifestyle. In parts of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, where coffee shops are packed with freelancers, many scarcely a decade older than Jess and Caroline Kjellberg, tapping on laptops and jabbering on iPhones, one might wonder whether, for a certain kind of kid, school may be obsolete.

An unconventional education

Eighteen-year-old Cullen Golden may well be that kind of kid. Except for the fact that he lives with his parents and nine-year-old sister in their apartment in the East Village, he could be any of the thousands of young, aspiring filmmakers in New York City. He collaborates with homeschooled and unschooled friends on goofy but imaginative short videos that he uploads to YouTube and posts to his website and Facebook page. With his fellow unschooled friend, 17-year-old J.T. Schafer, Cullen has been working on a Lord of the Rings–style film they half-jokingly refer to as “The Epic Movie” for three years. They filmed it last summer at Cullen’s parents’ house upstate, but have to reshoot. After some prodding, they confess they forgot to turn on the button on the camera that would allow them to play the film in widescreen, a must for picture quality. Also, Cullen, who for the past couple of years has taken playwriting classes at the MCC Theater, a hip off-Broadway venue in Manhattan, thinks the script needs reworking.

Cullen, who has round blue eyes, a gap between two of his top teeth, and long reddish hair he often wears in a ponytail, has never been to school. His parents, Lori Johnson and Joey Golden, who had moved to New York from Detroit to pursue acting careers, settled on unschooling by accident, after deciding, Lori says, that sending Cullen to school felt like saying, “Here, raise my child for me.” (Although both Lori and Joey acted extensively when Cullen was young, Joey now works for a firm that designs websites for big businesses and nonprofits). At first, Lori tried to make Cullen do spelling and math worksheets. It never worked — there was always something more interesting.

“Every year,” Lori says, “we’d be like, ‘It’s March! Should we be trying to do something that looks like school?’”

After Cullen’s younger sister Addie was born, things got more hectic. Cullen did all kinds of activities, from soccer to avant-garde dance, but throughout, he’s been able to pursue filmmaking with an intensity he doubts would have been possible if he had gone to school or if his parents had insisted on a more structured homeschooling approach. In addition to filmmaking and playwriting, he plays in a guitar quartet; composes flowing, lyrical guitar pieces, as well as some more satirical ones; and shoots stylized photos of cityscapes and nature scenes. He also plays a lot of video games, something his mother has learned to live with. In addition to playing them, he’s the “ideas guy” for J.T., a computer whiz who designs his own games. For awhile, Cullen studied with a math tutor whom he raved about, but last year got too busy.

Cullen knows he’s had an unconventional education but acts nonchalant about anything he may have missed. If he doesn’t know some things high schoolers are expected to have learned, he says, “It’s not lost. It’s not like [because] I didn’t learn it when I was little, now it’s all over.”

Unschooling not an excuse to sit around all day

The notion that learning continues after childhood or adolescence is not a radical idea. After all, an entire industry of for-profit and not-for-profit continuing education programs rests on that premise. Unschoolers are full of anecdotal success stories about brilliant kids who did not learn to read until their teens (Cullen, his mother says, did not read confidently until age 11), but researchers have no data with which to measure how unschooled children perform academically compared to their peers or how they fare in later life. Some states — New York included — require homeschooled children to take standardized tests in certain grades, but the federal government does not collect that data, so there is no way to know on a national scale whether encouraging children to learn at their own pace hurts them, helps them, or makes no difference at all.

Because of the lack of data, experts hesitate to draw sweeping conclusions, but they do say that unschooling’s potential to give a kid either a great, diverse education or a limited and weak one depends a lot on the family’s resources. That’s hardly surprising — there’s lots of data correlating SAT scores with parental income. Maurice Gibbons, an early and influential champion of self-directed learning and the author of a 2002 manual on encouraging high schools to take charge of their education, raised that concern.

“If you have a really rich home life and lots of activities and lots of books around and lots of materials, I could see that as a fascinating possibility,” he said. On the other hand, he said, “I wonder how someone living in the projects, how they would do with unschooling.”

There’s also the question of geography. The Internet has undoubtedly made it much easier to discover and explore diverse passions, but having ease of movement and access to the resources of a big cosmopolitan city such as New York helps a lot. Being old enough to get around by oneself expands one’s choices, too. Even the most ardent unschooling parent has to broker compromises between siblings. Jess Kjellberg, for example, can hop on the bus from New York to Philadelphia to visit her boyfriend. Her friend and Latin buddy, Joe Lodin, 16, never attended school, but he pegs the beginning of his unschooling to when he could get around by himself, often catching the train or the bus from Westchester to Manhattan.

“Now,” he says, “I will consciously think I have an interest in x, and then I will do all the research on x and then see if x is available in a class nearby.”

 Most of the discussion of unschooling in the popular media has focused on younger children, perhaps because reading and basic math remain such touchstones in education policy. But unschooled teenagers occupy a fuzzier terrain. On the one hand, adults tend to think of teenagers as self-absorbed and hormone-addled. On the other hand, it’s not beyond the pale to think that self-motivated teenagers might take it upon themselves to, say, study Latin, as Jess Kjellberg and Joe Lodin have, or delve into anarchist political economics and music theory, the way Caroline Kjellberg has. The question is whether this laissez-faire approach can work for just any kid. 

 Gibbons suspects not. As kids get older and parents get more hands-off, he says, “It really does leave all initiative and methodology and direction to the individual student.” Some teens, just like some children, are capable of challenging themselves, he says, but others many need a push.
 
Grace Llewellyn turns that argument on its face in her 1991 book The Teenager Liberation Handbook. Teenagers, Llewellyn writes, are inherently creative and motivated; they just need to channel their energies. They are also a lot more levelheaded and reasonable, Llewellyn says, than adults give them credit for. Caroline Kjellberg puts it more bluntly. Unschooling is not, she says, “an excuse to sit around all day eating Cheetos and smoking weed.”

Still, can’t having near-total control over one’s schedule feel kind of overwhelming?

“I’m perfectly capable of handling it — everyone my age is perfectly capable of handling it,” Caroline says, pointing out that, until a little more than a century ago, girls her age were getting married, starting families, and heading households. That’s a long row to hoe compared to deciding whether to do some computer programming or go to play rehearsal.
   
What about college?

To say that unschooled teenagers have a lot of control over their schedules is not to say that every moment is a pleasure, though you might get that impression from reading the popular unschooling guides.

“They talk about how wonderful every day is because they’re very unstructured,” Caroline Kjellberg says. “And [how] every day they get do to these fabulous things and every day they’re so happy to be alive.”

The reality, she says, is that unschooling is just life. Sure, it’s great to decide what you want to do, but there are days when things don’t go your way. She wishes unschoolers acknowledged that more often.

“Everything is supposed to be this very, very loose, extreme hippie kind of thing, and if you’re not like that or if you have days where you think maybe it’s not the best thing, it can get kind of confusing,” she says. “’Cause it can be like, ‘well, am I a real unschooler? Well, if I was a real unschooler, would I be like this?’”

Jess is more of an evangelist, though she’s under no illusion that unschooling is all endless joy. There’s something to be said for delayed gratification, for doing things now that will help you out down the road.

“I know there’s a lot of stuff that, like, I need to know and should learn,” she said one day last fall, shortly after plunging into algebra and world history courses after a year off from doing martial arts (she later dropped the world history, which she deemed too much busy work). “I’ve sort of waited until now, but I’m really motivated. This is the most academics-heavy year I’ve ever had,” she added, giggling, as though it were almost a little silly. “But I love it.”

Jess has since decided she wants to enroll in Hunter College next year. The SAT math is not her strong suit, so she has enlisted her Latin buddy, Joe, to tutor her at a pizza place in Morningside Heights. After a year at Hunter, she hopes to transfer to Brown University — she likes the idea of having no required classes. Her sister, meanwhile, is taking advanced placement courses in English composition and American history, in part because she appreciates having something to keep her on track, but also to earn some “completely, indisputably objective grades” to show to music conservatories when she applies next year.

“The fact that you took a class doesn’t mean you know anything. It just means you took a class,” Caroline says, but that’s the way college admissions works. To get in, both girls know they will have to play the game.

Cullen Golden isn’t sure he wants to play the game. At 18, most of his peers, even the ones who are unschooled or favor relaxed homeschooling, have already applied to college. Recently, while Cullen, J.T., and two other friends were hanging out, the conversation turned to college admissions. At his parents’ urging, J.T. said he had applied to 10 schools, though he expected to defer and was holding out the possibility of pursuing an as-yet-undetermined “big project” instead of college. Cullen kept quiet throughout the conversation. His eyes darted a bit, like he didn’t want to have to do any explaining.

Asked about it later, Cullen sounded more confident. He’s considered film school, but is not sure it’s necessary and has yet to take or prepare for any of the admissions tests many schools require. Last fall, he and his mother scoped out the acclaimed Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where they viewed some student films. Cullen was underwhelmed.

“They seemed very planned out, very basic,” he said. “That was kind of weird because I was like, ‘What are you teaching them?’”

He figured he would wait it out, see what he could keep learning on his own. His playwriting teacher is giving him help on how to write a screenplay and, on the suggestion of a friend’s filmmaker father, he sent his resume to a film production company, hoping for an apprenticeship. Cullen’s mother, Lori, isn’t sure her son needs to go to college, either, but she does not want him to feel he can’t go.

A couple of years ago, when kids his age were frantically cramming for college admissions tests, getting expensive tutors, and memorizing test-taking strategies, “it just seemed like ‘what a weird thing to do,’” Lori says. “But that’s almost an unfortunate thing because maybe it closed some doors for him.”

 Cullen frames the issue differently. “It is interesting,” he said recently. “Some of the people I know who aren’t in college are kind of not really doing anything.” He doesn’t want that, but says as long as he has projects like the Epic Movie he and J.T. are working on, he’ll be fine.
 
 “I think the best thing to do is keep pushing forward,” he says. “Just keep doing stuff.”

Ever-changing interests

The week after the comics convention, Jess Kjellberg and Isabel Ringer have arranged for a martial arts lesson. They used to meet at a regular time, but since Isabel left school, everything is up in the air; they finally settle on 5 p.m. A friend of Isabel’s from camp comes along. The winds are gusting past 30 miles per hour, so their usual sparring on the pier a block from Isabel’s apartment will be too difficult. The girls traipse upstairs to the apartment, which is large for New York standards, and drop staffs, sticks, coats, and a steel broadsword on the living room couch.

While the girls spar, Isabel’s mom, Kayte, goes on the computer and scrolls through the homeschooling paperwork she has to file with the state. She has no idea how to do it and was up half the night reading books on all different kinds of homeschooling. They’re stacked on the kitchen table, along with some classics she hopes she and Isabel can read aloud together: Tom Sawyer, The Jungle Book, and others by Hans Christian Anderson. Jess, who’s letting Isabel and her friend practice on their own for a bit, spots The Unprocessed Child, a mother’s memoir of unschooling her daughter which she had lent Kayte. “Go unschooling!” Jess says, with only a tiny trace of irony.

Kayte says she doesn’t know what to do. It’s day seven of the no-school experiment.

“It’s more me. She’s better adjusted to it. She’s fine with it,” Kayte says. “She acts happier by the day.”

After a bit, Isabel and her friend scamper upstairs so Isabel can put on black kung fu pants to match the ones Jess is wearing. Jess browses martial arts videos on YouTube while Kayte hovers, waiting for her next client.

“She told me today she hates workbooks,” Kayte says of Isabel, sounding at a loss.

“Yeah, I went through a phase like that,” Jess says, nonchalant.

“I left a note by the computer,” Kayte says, “saying ‘Do you want to write an essay on Jane Eyre?’”

On the wall behind the computer is a big poster that reads, “Isabel’s Home School Wish List.” French, piano and voice lessons, cooking, a fashion design project, martial arts with Jess, the city homeschool association’s spring play, gymnastics, lots of other stuff. Isabel has amended it to include pottery lessons and “band” — the rock group she plays in with two girlfriends. Kayte inspects it.

“We were going to do another one, because it’s already changed,” she says.

Jess doesn’t miss a beat. “It always changes,” she says.

 Two weeks later, things have indeed changed. Isabel kept amending her wish list until it spilled over onto sheets of paper that have collected on the piano bench.
 
 “I can’t really make up my mind,” Isabel explained. “I get really excited about one idea, and then that leads to another thing and that leads to another thing.”

 Reading about the Greek god Dionysius recently, she stumbled on something about a potion and immediately became obsessed with mixing imitation versions in preparation for her magic potion–themed 13th birthday party next month. Kayte, though, had been waking up at 3, 4, and 5 in the morning, worrying. Her attempts to spark an interest in “the classics” had fizzled, finally, with Gulliver’s Travels.

 But seeing Isabel sit still for hours, stringing intricate beaded charms to decorate the potion bottles, Kayte felt better. She’d rarely seen her daughter focus like that before. She reminded herself that Isabel had started reading and writing stories for fun, and now, was asking about computer graphics lessons at the huge Apple store down the street. They made a big pot of chili, and Isabel, who hadn’t had an appetite for months, kept going back for more.

Kaitlin Bell

In the fall of 2002, I was teaching third grade at an independent, coeducational elementary and middle school in Manhattan. As October rolled by, I asked a student what he was going to be for Halloween.

“I’m going as an Indian,” he said, excitedly. He seemed to be looking forward to the upcoming candy fest. But to me, his response was a flag — a big red flag with “teachable moment” written all over it.

Zoom ahead several years to a graduate-level class about “otherness” at the New School for Social Research in New York. One Monday evening, our discussion turned to multiculturalism, terminology, and political correctness in schools. The question on the horseshoe-shaped table was does the term “multicultural” actually impede our ability to connect with “the other” in our lives? 

As a teacher-turned-graduate student, I listened intently to my classmates sound off on the hot button issues: Multiculturalism is inappropriately associated with racial diversity, given the fact that the two are very different concepts. “Diversity Day” and “Multicultural Month” too neatly divide from the rest of a classroom’s curriculum the fact of diversity. Schools should abolish programs devoted to multicultural awareness and instead, simply be diverse institutions. Terms used in schools should reflect the latest in social thought, otherwise how can we raise kids who will become conscious and sensitive adults?

When I became a schoolteacher in 2001, multiculturalism and diversity curricula were considered good things. Multicultural activities and books were part of the curriculum. Diversity coordinators were being hired in many of the private schools, and teachers were applying to attend national conferences on diversity. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) offered Diversity Leadership Awards each year.

But now, in graduate school, I listened to my classmates (much younger than me, just out of college, and with no teaching experience) and wondered about their thoughts. I didn’t necessarily disagree with them. My classmates, however, were demonstrating a typical problem. In graduate school classrooms, think tanks, non-profit organizations, and government offices, issues like diversity in schools are debated all the time. New terminology replaces the old, things become politically correct or incorrect, theorists publish controversial articles, minority group representatives speak about rights on the evening news, and social movements sweep along. We adults absorb the latest in what we should and should not to say.

Teachers try to stay updated. But could I have kept my eight-year-old students aware of the changing thought about, say, the issue of how to refer to American Indians? Aware enough so that in that one moment in time — the Halloween costume remark — we all would spew the most fashionable term?

A glimpse into the classroom

Though private and public efforts to jazz up schools do make a difference in keeping classrooms and curricula up-to-date, many classrooms — and I’ll speak only of my experience in two Manhattan private schools here — are a little bit like museums of childhood. Mine certainly were. It starts with the stuff you can still find in classrooms. A tinkerer like me might like to grind the old pencil sharpener, with lead marks dating back 40 years. (We had an electric sharpener, too, but it broke far more often than the grinder type did). A book collector could pore over yellowed copies of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Winnie-the-Pooh. Who can deny the charm of framed children’s drawings whose creators are now middle-aged?

Then again, picture the classroom as a landfill. Many classrooms are stuffed with musty piles of papers. Chipped paint reveals layers of unfashionable color choices, as if you could peel back each one and reveal the philosophy of the day on the walls. If you hunt, you can still find a slide rule or a U.S.S.R. picture book. Some classrooms are just not cutting edge, regardless of what the admissions brochures say. Ideas and the materials used to teach them, for better or worse, tend to endure through generations.

The age of things extends to ideas, of course. Lesson plans that worked are recopied, while lesson plans that didn’t are filed into three-ring binders and kept for reference. If there’s a binder for “Diversity Day,” it gets recycled year after year. My classroom was chock-full of evidence of the greatest ongoing education experiment: trial and error. Like a museum (or a garbage dump), a classroom encapsulates nuggets of human thought.

It’s not that the curriculum is totally immune to the changes “out there.” In fact, like vaults run by pack rats, classrooms serve as the perfect repository for the ideological debris of political campaigns and social movements. What starts as dialogue or dissent in think tanks and graduate classrooms is inevitably dumped into teachers’ laps along with the immediate events of the day. Teachers must marry the politically correct, culturally sensitive world with the violent, offensive world, and translate the result into a civically and environmentally responsible yet age-appropriate curriculum.

Consider the teacher’s task after hurricane Katrina, or during last fall’s election, when Martin Luther King’s image could be viewed regularly on the news and the name Lincoln was dropped into more conversations than I can recall in recent history. Consider the teacher’s task on September 11, 2001. That, in fact, was my fourth day of teaching: streams of soot-covered office workers filing past the school, panicked parents trying to push their way upstairs to collect their kids and take them home, the head of my division explaining to students that “bad things happened to America today, but you are all safe.” 

Again and again, new worksheets are created, new lesson plans put into place, new safety plans written, new “current events” times carved into the school day.

The questions at hand

So when my student said, “I’m going as an Indian,” what should I have done? My graduate classmates might have offered multiple choices: Remind him that a recent trend is to use the term “Native American”; explain that an even more recent trend is a backlash against the label “Native American,” against labeling at all; tell the boy he ought to use the officially recognized term “American Indian,” but compliment him for getting it close; use the moment to explain that dressing up for Halloween as an ethnic or racial identity instead of as a mouse or a pumpkin could be considered offensive, because reducing said identity to costume pieces perpetuates negative stereotypes. I did work through several options in that moment in 2002, but by the time I was ready with a response, the boy was long gone, off to the book nook where, I can imagine now, he pulled The Indian in the Cupboard from the shelf.

But I was new to teaching then. I have quicker reflexes now.

What am I getting at? Something I wish I had gotten at with my graduate classmates. That teaching is already a difficult job. Keeping eight-year-olds up-to-date on the political and social changes in our world, contextualizing those changes for them from the previous status quo, as politically incorrect as it may have been, and creating anew each day a curriculum that matches the latest in current events? We do our best.

I sat down with two teaching buddies who still work with the elementary school set and asked them about politically correct terminology. I’ll call them Scott and Amanda. Both work in private schools in Manhattan, both have graduate degrees in the field of education, and both were eager to discuss how, as teachers, they handle changing thought on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.

“Would it faze you if a child said, ‘I’m going to be an Indian for Halloween’?”

“Deep inside, I’m feeling, uh-oh. This could end up being very stereotypical,” said Scott. “It raises questions of what representations on Halloween are inappropriate.”

Scott’s school allows costumes on Halloween, though within reason. Students are sometimes pulled aside and asked to alter details of their dress — I remember the debate over a fake cigar, complete with burning end, one year. Amanda’s school has a no-costume policy, though parents provide candy parties in the decorated classrooms.

“I think I would ask the student about his costume,” said Amanda. “Like, what are the things we learned about Native Americans that you incorporated into your costume?”

“So a gentle change of term?” I asked.

“I actually use the terms ‘Native American’ and ‘Indian’ interchangeably,” said Scott. “I think it’s important to understand the history of the words.”

In the moment the student told me he was “going as an Indian,” I didn’t know the history of the words, nor was I up-to-date on the latest best term choice. So I did what I always tell my students to do: I researched.

A brief history of names

It appears that when Christopher Columbus hit land and was hit with the urge to do what all explorers do — name things — he might have had one of two thoughts. Either he rejoiced, “We made it to the East Indies, or India, or somewhere over yonder! Check out the Indians!” (Sarcasm mine.) Or, improbably, he mused, “These spiritual people are with God, with Dios.” That seems like a long shot to me, and I could not find any sources to back it up save for some hobby historians writing about it on the Internet.

Either way, or for some other reason that never seems to have made it into our history books, the label “Indios,” and then “Indian,” was attached to Seminole, Pequot, and Sioux alike. “Indian” became the catchall word for anyone explorers and settlers met along their journey. It gained recognition worldwide, and some languages even adopted new words to differentiate between Indians of the Americas and Indians of India.

Then came the 1960s. Indians, along with non-Indian supporters, voiced objections to the term they’d been labeled with for centuries. Aside from the fact that it could have been a colossal geographical mistake by Columbus, the term “Indian” had become a bit of a joke. The dawn of film and cheap plastic toys had given Indians a bad name. Cowboys and Indians were so strongly made representative of good and evil, civilization and savagery, respectively, that many people believed the only way to erase the stereotype was to erase the name.

Thus Indians were reborn again, this time as “Native Americans.” “Native” because their ancestors were here before anyone else, and “American” for obvious reasons. Sensitive anthropologists informed the government of this new label, and the government promptly absorbed it into its classification system.

The term “Native American,” however, provoked some questions of logic. What makes a person native? Birth? If so, there’s a whole bunch of us in a big happy native, if not Native American, family. And “American,” like “Indian” before it, supplanted the beloved tribal names that existed long before Vespucci did.

By the 1980s, many acknowledged they preferred the old way. But the term “Native American” has nonetheless stuck around, to the dismay of some. Comic George Carlin bites at the “pussified, trendy bullshit phrase.” Cherokee writer Christina Berry requests that “Indian” be used but with contextual sensitivity (avoid the worst: “Injun” and “redskin”). Lakota activist Russell Means wants his people to call themselves “any damn thing we choose” and refuses to be classified as “Native American.”

In addition to “Native American,” the vast machinery of label production has spit out “Original Americans,” “Indigenous Americans,” “Amerindians,” “First Americans,” “First Nations,” and “Aboriginal Peoples,” to name but a few. The vast machinery of academic and activist opposition has spit back a reproach for each one, though you can’t completely fault those who try out “Native American Indian” or “Aboriginal American Natives” in a misguided attempt to get it right at both ends.

The U.S. government officially uses the term “American Indian,” while the Canadian government has adopted the term “First Nations” in place of “Indian” and lists the name under the umbrella term “Aboriginals.” The term “Indigenous Peoples” encompasses a wide range of tribes in Mexico and Central and South America.

When I sort through the often contradictory materials, the phrase that comes to my mind is political scientist Walter Connor’s “terminological chaos.” And this chaos is faithfully documented by the caretakers of education, in the filing cabinets and on the bookshelves of American classrooms.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom

Both Scott and Amanda teach social studies curricula that rely heavily on the heritage of the American Indians. November is both National American Indian Month and Alaska Native Heritage Month, and much of the commemorative excitement plays out in their classrooms. Scott’s school invites the Red Hawk Council Dancers every year, who, if I remember correctly, explain to students that what they have seen of American Indians in the movies isn’t always true. Scott also takes his students to the Museum of the American Indian. They don’t know the museum is one among many getting heat for not returning Indian artifacts to the tribes who claim them.

A bulletin board announces “Native Americans!” in bright red punch-out letters and is tacked full of “indigenous artwork.” I remember devoting a stretch of wall to the “False Face Society,” lined with Iroquois-inspired masks made of paper and markers, only to learn that I may have been making a major cultural intrusion by allowing my students to create their own false faces. For a long time, I reminded my students to walk “Indian file” (one behind the other) and sit “Indian style” (knees bent, legs cross), because I had grown up with these terms. I grew out of them, however, and started to say simply “single-file” and “cross-legged.”

Amanda reads The Indian in the Cupboard to her students.

“Do you adjust the term as you read?” I asked.

“No. The books are dated and are still in the classrooms,” said Amanda. “People don’t get brand new materials with the latest political material in them. They’re not interested in the idea that there’s a controversy over a name.”

Amanda said that even in middle school history classrooms, where her husband teaches, “Half the books say one thing, half the books say the other.”

There are a few resources a teacher might use to make sense of the terminological changes for his or her students. In 2002, a book called Contentious Issues by Márianna Csóti appeared in the United States. It’s a book about big ideas for little kids, as the title suggests. One section of this stereotype-destruction manual reads like a laundry list of terms you can use to get beat up at a bar: “Paddy, Paki, Sambo, Spade, Spick/spic, Spook, Taffy, Wog, Wop.” What comes between “Paki” and “Sambo” is “Red Indian,” an archaic British phrase that is still used by some to distinguish between American Indians and Indians from India. Many condemn the term as disparaging on the basis of race, and others wonder why black and white remained okay whereas red and yellow fell into disrepute. Csóti encourages adults to be clear with children about terms. “Red Indian” is racist, “Indian” is politically incorrect, “Native American” is “not wholly acceptable,” and the child’s best bet is to go with “Indigenous.”

I can only imagine what reaction the book would receive in my graduate school classrooms. Outrageously offensive? Possibly harmful, feeding the fire by putting words in kids’ mouths? Perpetuating a classroom environment in which difference is too starkly highlighted? Politically incorrect?

To me, it’s a saving grace kind of book, something to help put all the rapidly changing thought into one place. I asked my teaching friends about it.

“I have an increasing apathy toward political correctness,” Scott told me. “There’s always something new. I want to understand and be compassionate and considerate, but in the end, it’s about the values you project as a teacher.”

Scott was faced with a teachable moment himself when reading Runaway to Freedom by Barbara Smucker with his students.

“The book used ‘nigger’ quite often,” Scott said.

Runaway to Freedom is a historical fiction novel geared toward kids in the nine-to-12 years category, and it reveals, in context, how the word “nigger” was used in the 19th century.

Scott continued. “I asked my students, ‘Do you all feel comfortable going on with this? We have until tomorrow to decide if we’re all comfortable. Go home and talk about it. If anyone has any concerns, let me know.’ I checked in with the administrator, too.”

In the end, Scott’s administrator approved, and his students decided it was okay, that they would learn about the word in context.

“I was actually really moved by the book, but it was hard to read,” said Scott. “We agreed we wouldn’t actually say the word, we would just say ‘N.’ The kids took it very seriously.”

“It’s about teachers with good intentions who want to do the right thing,” said Amanda. “You can’t shield students from the idea that bad words exist, or that there are really ugly moments in American history.”

“In the end, the lessons you’re teaching — about different cultures and the history of a place — are about understanding the humanness of things,” she added. “They’re about building understanding for otherness.”

Suzanne Farrell

Celia McWee, 83, looked forward to Saturdays for 13 years. This was her favorite day of the week because she would use it to make herself pretty for her Sunday morning visit. But she wouldn’t go to church. She would visit the state prison. She would drive three hours from Augusta, Georgia, to Ridgeville, South Carolina, to visit her son, Jerry McWee. Jerry had been on death row since he robbed and killed John Perry, a grocery store clerk in rural Aiken County, in 1991. He was executed on April 14, 2004. He was 52.

“Saturday was an exciting day because it was my day to choose the outfit I was going to wear, to go to the beauty shop because I wanted to look my best for him,” she said, crying. “And Sunday going up there was exciting because it was something to look forward to. But on the way back, it was nothing but tears.”

For as long as her son was in prison, her weekly schedule kept her going, she said. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she would not leave the house until she received her son’s phone call. Tuesdays and Thursdays were her days to go grocery shopping, do the laundry, and vacuum. And then came Sundays, when she would share a ride with other inmates’ mothers to the prison. She would meet them at a gas station in Columbia, South Carolina.

Although her son was executed four years ago, not a day goes by that McWee does not recall the sound of his shackles dragging on the floor of the prison each time she visited him.

“The noise that most stands out in my mind is when they would bring them from one building to the other, and we could hear them walking with those chains around their ankles and around their waist and their wrists,” she said. “That is torture. I mean, to see your son being brought in worse than you do to a dog.”
 
McWee’s house is filled with pictures of her son. She proudly reminisces about the day Jerry got married and when, despite having only a high school education, he joined the police force. Then she shows a black-and-white print of Jerry in an emergency medicine technician (EMT) uniform. After two years as a police officer and five as a firefighter, Jerry had decided to make his life all about helping others in need. That is when he went back to school to study emergency medicine.

“He was the kind of guy that would go out of his way to help others,” she said. “He was a people person like me, used to helping the ones in need. Never would I have imagined this could have happened to my family. Everything was so nice and dandy, and it took so little time to turn things around. It is true he is in a much better place now, but I still feel he should be with me instead.”

McWee’s feeling is common to many relatives of inmates executed by the state. They are trying to recover from the trauma of waiting many years for their loved one’s scheduled death. But often their suffering is made worse because many people still do not recognize their pain as legitimate. 

Zipped wounds

Like McWee, Bill Babbitt had a tough recovery. His younger brother Manny, a decorated Vietnam War veteran severely affected by post-traumatic stress syndrome, was executed at San Quentin State Prison on his 50th birthday — May 3, 1999. He had been charged with robbing Leah Schendel, an elderly woman who died of a heart attack during the crime in Sacramento, California.

What makes Babbitt feel better is touring the country to talk about his brother’s “unfair” execution; Babbitt is a member of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR), a group founded in Philadelphia in 2004. The group offers support and advocacy for victims.
   
He gives his testimony using what he calls “the power of remembrance,” letting his “zipped wound” open, and pouring out what he thinks needs to be said about Manny’s case. He is trying to educate the public about why the death penalty was unnecessary in his brother’s case. Yet many still consider his efforts to be those of a “second-class victim” who is defending a criminal, he said.

“My job is to educate and tell them, ‘Hey, you lose a rabbit or a dog or a cat, and you grieve over it,’” he said. “‘Manny was a human being. Why should I not grieve over him just as well?’ It is the unfairness of that I have to talk about.”
 

A trail of victims

The families who survive the state execution of their inmate relative are still not specifically referred to as “victims of abuse of power,” as defined by the United Nations General Assembly’s 1985 Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power.

Article 18 of the declaration defines a victim of abuse of power as a person “who, individually or collectively, [has] suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of [his or her] fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that do not yet constitute violations of national criminal laws but of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.”

In some countries, including the United States, killing by lethal injection is not considered an abuse of power. The declaration does not include the death penalty as a “violation of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.”   

“But these people [families of death row inmates] have, in many ways, suffered a trauma, and their experience, in many ways, parallels the experience of survivors of homicide victims,” said Susannah Sheffer, director of No Silence, No Shame, a project of MVFHR.

The problem is that people don’t think of the inmate as someone who might have a family who will grieve when he is executed.

“Families of the executed are invisible victims, hidden victims. People are not even thinking through the fact that when an execution is carried out, it’s going to leave a grieving family,” Sheffer said. “A lot of people hold the family responsible, [a] kind of ‘guilt by association.’ They think this [the inmate] is a monster, so the parents must have created that.”

Jerry McWee’s mother said she is haunted by the image of her son strapped on the execution bed, blowing her the last kiss. She also said she was not the only one to suffer from her son’s death.

“It is a horrible, horrible experience to have to go through for years. It not only punishes the inmates, it punishes so many people,” said McWee. “One of Jerry’s daughters, Misty, exactly one year after his execution, tried to commit suicide. She cut her wrists, because she said she had to be with her father and that she did not belong on this earth.”

The legacy of guilt

Babbitt has been battling feelings of guilt instead. Babbitt turned Manny in to the police, and later he was not able to stop his execution. Babbitt believed his brother’s death was particularly unfair because his brother suffered from a mental illness. It was out of desperation and fear that his brother would commit more crimes that Babbitt decided to collaborate with the police, who promised him his brother was going to be fine, he said. 

That is why he told Manny to go out to play some pool, when in fact the police were waiting outside of his house to arrest him. But Babbitt did not expect Manny to be convicted and sentenced to death. The hardest part of all was having to explain to his mother why he let that happen, he said.

“My mother loves me, and I know she has forgiven me for turning Manny in. The problem is I have not forgiven myself for promising Ma that Manny would not get executed,” he said. “I took a gamble with my brother’s life, and I lost.”

Since the day Manny was executed, Babbitt has not felt strong enough to see his family, even on holidays. He believes he is not “worthy of their love and trust anymore,” he said. He feels uncomfortable around them even though they forgave him for what he did.

“If it wasn’t for my faith in Jesus, I would have killed myself. But I didn’t want my family to have to go to another funeral. I had to be strong and live to tell that story,” he said. “I will see my brother again when my time is up on Earth.”

No Silence, No Shame

Babbitt and McWee know each other well now. They met at No Silence, No Shame’s first gathering for families of death row inmates in Texas in the spring of 2004. The conference was organized to allow people who share the same grief to share their stories with one another.

According to Renny Cushing, director of MVFHR, the project is now trying to “put a face with the name of the family of the condemned prisoners,” by bringing the testimonies of these family members into courts. Cushing said the hope is that juries judging a death row case will consider these testimonies before announcing their verdict.

Cushing is also a survivor. In 1988, his father, Robert Cushing, was killed through his screen door at his home in New Hampshire by two bullets fired by an off-duty policeman. Officer Robert McLaughlin Sr. had a dirty record: He had killed his best friend, had taken part in an armed robbery, and had arrested an elderly town woman for no good reason, according to Cushing in his testimony in "Forgiving the Unforgivable” on MVFHR’s website. Cushing and his brother had been keeping an eye on the officer ever since, and McLaughlin didn’t like that pressure, said Cushing. That is why McLaughlin went to the Cushing house that night — to settle the score, so to speak, but he shot the wrong person, said Cushing in the testimony.

“If the state is going to kill someone’s father, we would like to have the court think about what that would mean, and the people who are most effective [at] talking about that are individuals [whose] father was executed when they were children,” Cushing said.

On average, 50 to 60 people are executed every year by the government, and they typically have three family members each. That means 150 to 240 more victims are created annually, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

No Silence, No Shame is trying to reduce those numbers by making the public aware of these survivors’ experiences, to show the ripple effects of the death penalty.

Studying loss

Sandra Jones, a research sociologist and professor at Rowan University in New Jersey, released a study on the issues of grief and loss faced by the families with a relative on death row.
     
Jones spent years building relationships with families of death row inmates. She has taken it upon herself to bring kids of inmates to see their fathers in the Delaware County Prison in Pennsylvania when their own family members refuse to do so.

She became particularly close to Brian Steckel’s family. Steckel was convicted of raping and killing 29-year-old Sandra Lee Long. Jones witnessed Steckel’s execution in 2005. She is now writing a book about her personal experience with death row inmates’ families. She said the government ignores these families because it feels guilty.

“If the system gave these families the attention they deserve, it would come across [as] really hypocritical, because they are the very system that is killing their loved ones,” she said.  

She also explains that the reason death row inmates’ families are often forgotten is that the survivor victims themselves do not want to be put in the spotlight, since they feel guilty for and are ashamed of their loved ones’ mistakes.

“The family gets criminalized along with their loved ones, and stigmatized to the extent that they don’t feel comfortable coming out and demanding attention because they feel guilty. They have a lot of guilt and a lot of shame. They [ask] themselves what they could have done differently,” she said.

“Writer Elizabeth Sharpen sometimes refers to them as the ‘double losers,’” Jones said. “A lot of these guys on death row have murdered a wife or an uncle or somebody within the family, and so the surviving family members are put into this position where if they support and grieve the loss of the loved one on death row, they are made to feel they did not really love the one who was murdered.”   

Losing a child to the death penalty becomes a never-ending loss, one “similar to having a disabled child that you are grieving for every unmet milestone he misses throughout life,” said Jones. It becomes a “wound that never heals and keeps opening up with every failed appeal.” 

Between losing a child to a murderer and losing one to death row — as is the case for McWee — the latter seems to be the more painful of the two because of the “never-ending wait.”

Having to wait for your son to be executed is “horrible, because you know it is coming, but you don’t know when,” said McWee, whose son, Jerry, was executed 14 years after her daughter, Joyce, was murdered by Joyce’s husband on December 31, 1980.

“[My daughter’s murder] was a shock, but [it was] nothing compared to the death penalty hanging over your head for 13 years,” she said. “News of her murder came unexpectedly, [but] the wait is horrible. One day he called me at 12:30, and he said, ‘Mother, I have been served.’ I had no idea what he meant. All I knew was that lunch was served at 11:30. So I said, ‘What [do] you mean, you have been served? What did you eat for lunch?’ So he said, ‘Mother, you don’t understand. I have been served with my death warrant — they have given me my day of execution.’”

Murder is murder

Even murder victim families sympathize with state execution survivor families, finding it unjust that their pain is labeled differently from theirs.

The Rev. Walter Everett, a pastor at St. Jones United Methodist Church in Sunbury, Connecticut, lost his son, Scott, in 1987. Scott was murdered by Mike Carducci in Easton, Connecticut. The pastor has been part of MVFHR since it was founded. He said he feels close to parents whose children are on death row.
   
Everett said it is important to educate people about the death penalty without making a distinction about different victims. He travels around the country to speak about the experience he shares with many families whose loved ones have been executed under the death penalty.

“I see them just as much a ‘victim’ as I am. That person, regardless of what their son or daughter has done, or their loved ones, they still love them, so they become a victim when that person is killed,” he said. “Since I got to know several people whose family members were executed, I see the pain they have gone through, and I believe their story should be told as much, because their pain is just as deep as my pain.”

Everett took part in a vigil in California to stop the execution of Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old, and at that point blind and in a wheelchair. Allen was put to death on January 17, 2006, for planning three murders from his cell while serving a life sentence.

“I went out there and I met his children. Lovely people. And they hurt, they pained as he went through that,” he said.

Former death row inmates who have been exonerated share the belief that their families’ grief rarely receives attention. Since executions now take place behind closed doors, the system has become “sterile,” said Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person on death row to be exonerated because of DNA evidence.

Bloodsworth served nearly nine years in a Maryland prison for the 1984 rape and murder of nine-year-old girl he had never met.

“They don’t want to show the ‘crying mother’ over the executed son. No matter what he has done, he is still paying for that, and they don’t show that part of it,” he said. “She has got no say. She raised a murderer. That is how they are looking at her, and that was not her fault, necessarily.”

Bloodsworth regained his freedom on June 28, 1993, but his mother, Jeanette, did not live to see him walk out of prison. She died earlier that year. Bloodsworth was taken in chains to see her body, but prison officials refused to allow him to attend the funeral.

“My mother went through hell watching me. I was her son, and I was going to be executed, and nobody cared about a word she said. I thought that was a terrible way to have to treat somebody,” he said.

Rob Warden is the director of the Center on Wrongful Conviction in Chicago, and has been a legal affairs writer for more than 25 years. He said that while the stories of inmates’ family members are not necessarily ignored, the focus is often on the person “walking out of the door.”

“The stories of relatives of wrongful conviction in general tend to be overlooked,” he said, “because they are so overshadowed by the poignancy of the innocent person or the person who was executed himself.”

This does not imply that these stories should not be told. On the contrary, they should not be forgotten, Warden said.

“We should understand that when we execute somebody, no matter how heinous that person might be, it is over for that person,” said Warden. “But the pain that is inflicted on parents, or siblings, or children, is permanent. It is everlasting. It will be there. It is ongoing.”

Federica Valabrega

Many descriptions of Sri Lanka today are of the “paradise lost” variety: What was once a stunningly beautiful island with sparkling beaches and lush jungle is now a war torn country mired in a protracted ethnic conflict. The 25-year war between the government of Sri Lanka and the rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has killed 80,000 people by some estimates and displaced hundreds of thousands, continues to grind on and hinders the tropical island from ever reaching its potential splendor.

There’s little truth to these descriptions, commonly found in tourist’s guides and the odd magazine piece. Death did not suddenly arrive on the doorstep of the paradise island 25 years ago. On the contrary, before Sri Lankans were killing each other in war, they were killing themselves.

In the early 1940s, Sri Lanka’s suicide rate was fairly average, but over the next decades it started to creep upward, gradually rising from roughly six people per 100,000 to nearly 10 people per 100,000 by 1961. Shortly thereafter, the number of suicides took a shocking leap, doubling between 1961 and 1971, and doubling again between 1971 and 1983, the year the civil war began. By 1995, 47 out of 100,000 people were killing themselves each year — one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

To get a sense of what these statistics really mean, consider that in the period between 1990 and 1995, it’s estimated that approximately 38,500 Sri Lankans took their own lives. That’s nearly half as many as have died in the entire war in a single five-year period. Some people argue that the killing of ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka should be called “genocide.” But is there a word in existence that captures the tragedy of tens of thousands of people killing themselves? “Epidemic” doesn’t begin to accurately relay the horror of it.

Judging by the suicide rate, Sri Lanka is not a country of particularly happy people. But the reasons for this can’t be blamed on the civil war, the most publicized aspect of Sri Lanka’s recent history and the easiest culprit. The burgeoning suicide rate throughout the 1950s and 60s doesn’t support a direct correlation. Other theories, such as a high number of failed love affairs in the country or a widespread inability to deal with negative emotions, seem to fall short of being able to explain the magnitude of the problem.

Further complicating the matter is the fact that indicators used to measure a country’s general happiness, like gross national happiness (GNH) or subjective well-being (SWB), show that Sri Lanka scores are average. According to these scales, which take into consideration levels of poverty, health, conflict, and education, Sri Lankans are less happy than people near the top — Americans and northern Europeans — but more happy than Indians, Russians, and most of Africa.

Measurements of happiness such as these should be treated with suspicion; they aim to capture through statistical analysis what is essentially intangible, a state of being within the human heart and mind. But with very broad strokes they can give a view of how people see themselves. Are they satisfied with their lives? With their work, relationships, and health? Overall, Sri Lankans score the same SWB rating as the Portuguese, and yet their suicide rate is much, much higher.

One of the more disturbing yet compelling explanations for the high number of suicide deaths is the use of severely toxic pesticides in Sri Lankan agriculture. In 2007, a team of doctors presented a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology which claimed that the increase in suicides coincided with the rising importation of deadly pesticides, such as methamidophos, monocrotophos, and endosulfan. When ingested, these chemicals act similarly to nerve gases developed during World War II and are extremely fatal. During the years of Sri Lanka’s soaring suicide rate, pesticide poisoning accounted for two-thirds of these deaths.

In 1995 and 1998, the Sri Lankan government enacted bans on importing highly and moderately toxic pesticides into the country, and within a few years the number of suicide fatalities decreased significantly. It’s unclear whether the number of attempted suicides decreased at all, but today the suicide rate hovers at around 22 per 100,000 people — nearly double that of the United States, but half of what it was during Sri Lanka’s peak. The researchers behind the epidemiological paper attempted to isolate factors other than these import bans to explain the decrease in suicides, but couldn’t find any. “We found no evidence that the trends were specifically associated with beneficial changes in levels of employment, alcohol sales, divorce or with periods of civil war,” they wrote. 

In myriad ways, the implications of these findings are troubling. If the mere presence of deadly pesticides was responsible for the start of the suicide epidemic in Sri Lanka, it could be inferred that the suicidal impulse had been there much earlier but the methods weren’t nearly as effective. It could also be inferred that the ban on pesticides and subsequent decrease in suicide deaths has merely stanched an ongoing tragedy. From what limited current data exists, Sri Lankans still seem to attempt suicide in relatively large numbers, but the fatality rate is lower.

The sources of this epidemic remain unexamined in part because psychological research in Sri Lanka is a relatively new and undeveloped field. There have been few if any widespread studies by experts from within or outside the country that attempt to document and analyze the underlying causes of Sri Lanka’s suicide rate.

“We have many who are interested in the field, but have little systematically collected knowledge of ‘Sri Lankan’ psychology,” said Dr. Shamala Kumar, a university professor of psychology, in an interview with a Sri Lankan newspaper in November.

In a sense, experts have so far only managed to explain how Sri Lankans killed themselves in such great numbers in past decades. But the emotional, psychological, and philosophical heart of the problem remains a mystery.

Maura Roisin OConnor

Where to begin? Any street here in Ho Chi Minh City hits you with so much in one minute.

You cower from the onslaught: braying horn honks shattering nerves, motorbike engines sputtering and growling, and any number of the 10 million Saigonese moving, squatting, smoking, spitting, buying, selling. 

A swarm of kids tumble out of school, mindless of the ceaseless maelstrom of traffic in the street. The red neckerchief of state obeisance, dutifully knotted around their necks hours earlier, is now used to play-whip a friend. 

And, most difficult of all for an Englander like myself, nowhere is there no people and no noise. There is only the millions of people; the bike fumes; the money passing hands; the beggars, with tireless hope, thrusting out empty paws; and the burgeoning vehicle hierarchy: a drip-drip influx of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and Mercedes Benzes beeping the bike-riding lower classes out of their way, only to ultimately be rejoined by them at the lights. For with four million motorbikes in this city alone, we are too many, and the archaic road system here cannot cope with our luxurious metal excesses. Communism’s nouveaux riches are as vulgar and cocooned from reality as ever. 

Here, in the city formerly known as Saigon, lives are lived on top of one another. Hard-won possessions and houses are guarded by ever-watchful owners, utilizing a variety of padlocks, barbed wire, iron spikes, or walls lined with broken glass. It’s a mindset that dates back to April 30, 1975 — the day of the city’s fall or liberation, depending on your perspective. And that perspective depends, at least in part, on your roots.

The Red thread

The communist nature of daily life here is something you could easily miss when passing through as a tourist on the group tours, with the state-owned tour companies and hoteliers pointing out all the glorious deeds of once-dear leader Uncle Ho. Yes, you’d see red flags, yellow stars, and the lime-green uniforms of army-cum-police on every street. You might even see some of the old Tannoy speakers on street corners in Hanoi, and experience the misery of being woken by the blare of propaganda at 6:30 a.m.

But it takes time to see how communism and a closed society has imprinted itself into the habits and thought patterns of the people through education, controlled media, and fear. Who would dare discuss politics when the man beside you in the coffee shop could be a plain-clothes policeman?  People still disappear to be “re-educated” after visiting the wrong websites, such as Vietnamese pro-democracy groups in the United States, for example.

Four years of teaching and writing in Vietnam has put me in proximity with this much-exalted “youth.” From 2004 to 2008, I taught students from across the entire age spectrum; that’s preschool (kindergarten) through to adults taking night school classes after work. But the majority of my time was spent in private language institutions, teaching high school kids aged 12 to 18. They are a unique demographic, brought up on brainwashing, educated in a doctrinaire manner to revere Uncle Ho and to never question the status quo.

The adolescents I taught are still very much a product of their closed society. From my tentative discussions with them in class, I learned that they are rarely exposed to the choices and responsibilities of their Western counterparts that engender maturity. Their parents generally seek to protect them from “social evils” — drugs, prostitution, sex — sometimes forbidding them to date boys or girls until they’ve graduated from university. One of my female students — an 18-year-old named Vinh — once told me that, over the weekend, her mother had listened in on her private phone call and locked her in her room when she heard her discussing boys.

But despite the iron-rod parenting and societal frowns, Vietnamese teens are still having sex, and doing so in ignorance of safe-sex practices. The country has one of the world’s highest abortion rates, at 1.4 million annually. Due to the lack of privacy in Vietnamese society — children tend to live with their parents until they marry — couples often head at night to ca phe oms (literally, coffee shop hugs), which have lightless rooms out back for making out.

Yet the closed society is open to bizarre paradoxes. Slushy romantic notions of love are idealized, and every teenager knows the lyrics to the Titanic theme tune, “My Heart Will Go On.” Students in their mid-20s will giggle at words such as “hot” or “sexy.” Trying to have a debate on gender, race, or sexual politics is fraught with difficulties, and a discussion of politics in general is simply not possible.

The doctrinaire education system has created a population that lacks a vital vocabulary for critical thinking. It’s staggering, the lack of responsibility and social awareness the youth here has. I could cite several examples from my time teaching high school graduates English: the 18-year-old girl, Na, who told me that the first time she had raised her hand to ask a question in class was in mine; one student’s reaction to my circuitous questioning regarding ideas about freedom of the press:

“Who controls the media in Vietnam?” I asked her.

“The government,” she replied.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“It’s a good thing.”

“Really. Why?”

“Because our government wouldn’t lie to us.”

Where would one begin? For if the children are receiving English lessons in a private school, it often means their parents are paid-up members of the Party.

This education system, serving only those in power, is starting to take its toll on foreign investors, who are experiencing firsthand the problems that inculcation and rote learning have in the workplace. Vietnam has experienced phenomenal gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the past decade, making it the second fastest growing economy in the Southeast Asia region. There is a growing gap, however, between skilled jobs and a skilled workforce able to make decisions, take responsibility, and lead.

Human resources headaches for foreign investors

Vietnam is at a crossroads. The country became a full-fledged member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on January 11, 2007, and is opening up to a market economy. However, WTO commitments restrict the hiring of foreign workers in some areas, notably the service sector. Therefore, the inability of the current generation of graduates to solve problems and make decisions through critical thinking is now surfacing as a headache for foreign investors in the human resources sector. At the Vietnam Business Forum in Hanoi last December, the Australian Chamber of Commerce (AusCham) bemoaned the fact that few graduates had the necessary skills to enter the workplace without additional training. AusCham cited a lack of focus on analytical skills as one of the major shortcomings of Vietnam’s higher education system.

In March this year, according to the European Chamber of Commerce (EuroCham), foreign investors bemoaned the shortage of skilled workers to fill roles in their companies. EuroCham board member Mark Van Den Assem was quoted as saying that young personnel were usually not confident enough to take over managerial posts, while subordinates doubted their capabilities.

Critical thinking skills are vital for effective problem-solving and decision-making, since they allow individuals to react in a balanced way to difficult situations by weighing the evidence and responding in a measured and beneficial manner. In addition to intellectual skills, other traits found in good critical thinkers include empathy, humility, and autonomy.

The devil reads Pravda

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” Saul Bellow’s words have a timeless application to the act of governance, be it spin-doctoring in a democracy or propagandizing by the “Ministry of Truth” in an Orwellian-style totalitarian state.

Such practices are something I witnessed daily when I began working as a freelance writer and subeditor for one of Vietnam’s state-owned newspapers in November 2007. The paper, Thanh Nien, is a national English-language version of the Vietnamese edition, published by the elaborately titled Forum of the Vietnamese Youth Federation. Indeed, some of the subtle manipulations of “the truth” fall into my hands as subeditor and “reporter.”

Thanh Nien is one of the freer media outlets in terms of its editorial policy. “Freer” basically means that it is allowed to run corruption stories: the chief of police who took bribes, the minister receiving bulging manila envelopes in order to fast-track a construction project, land reclamation scandals, and so on. It’s a long and growing list. Such stories give the illusion that the endemic, deep-rooted corruption is being tackled.

The paper’s name translates as “Youth,” as does its main print rival, Tuoi Tre. Youth is an important concept in this still insidiously communist country. Youth means the future propagation of the old Marxist ideals. Indeed, Vietnam can only have been one of a handful of countries to celebrate Marx’s 190th birthday.

At work, I sit down to edit stories of war heroes, decoding “Pham Xuan An: American leaders continued to blame each other for intelligence leaks covertly orchestrated by the stealth Vietnamese mole.” Such stories are plucked straight from the Vietnamese edition and mean nothing to the foreign readership of the paper. But orders come from higher up to leave page four free for the 14th episode of such inspirational espionage. My stories are summarily bumped with a shrug from the page editor, and I already know why.

The April 30 holiday, these days tellingly relabeled as “Reunification” Day, is approaching. The State is reminding the population which side won, while the army reasserts its presence in the city. These bored young recruits, many on national service, choose easy targets, such as old ladies hawking fruit on the streets or impromptu street noodle stalls. Such illegal vending is tolerated for 10 months of the year, either through some kind of kickback or sheer wiliness on the vendor’s part. But now a point must be made to the population at large. Now is the time for a sharp reminder from the puppeteer still pulling the strings. So the propaganda posters go up, noting that triumphant date with the classic symbol of a white dove flying above the “Reunification Palace.” And the tools of someone’s livelihood are seized — tables and chairs, pots and pans, bunches of bananas.

Earlier this year, an old regional sticking point, the Spratly Islands archipelago in the South China Sea, reared its head in the news. Territorial ownership is asserted by half a dozen countries in the area, including China, Taiwan, and the Philippines, although Vietnam has the strongest claim to these islands. Interest is piqued by the rich fishing stocks and reserves of oil and gas the archipelago possesses. In March, China began making noises about its rights to claim the islands — a country that, in 1988, was involved in a naval battle with Vietnam off one of the reefs.

At the time I was teaching Business English to university students, and one young man, Trinh, decided to do a class talk on the Spratly crisis. He brought in maps, Wikipedia references, and newspaper cuttings to show why the islands were rightfully Vietnam’s. The class applauded his jingoistic stance, a carbon copy of the nationalistic propaganda that the papers were full of at the time. 

Bypassing the information superhighway

Fast Internet connections are widely available today and cheap in all urban centers. The only sites blocked are those to Geocities, where the Vietnamese overseas community has its pro-democracy sites. Such activists are now inevitably labeled “militants” and “terrorists” in the Vietnamese press.

But, thanks in part to the lack of English skills at higher levels, most sites like the BBC and Google are not blocked by a China-esque firewall. One would hope that this might mean some of the ideas about freedom of the press and democracy might make it though. 

And yet this is a country that since 1975 has actively encouraged suspicion. It’s the ultimate neighborhood watch scheme. Everyone spies on each other and reports suspicious activity to the police. It is an inversion of Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted phrase: the price of un freedom is eternal vigilance.

All this may sound like a lot of 1950s McCarthy-era paranoia, as I myself thought when I first arrived, until I began to be followed to and from the newspaper. Each day, the same motorbike taxi driver (known locally as xe oms) began to appear either outside my house or outside the newspaper whenever I was there. It was sinister, unnerving. Par for the course, an Australian colleague said.

A life less ordinary

So, at times I find myself terrified and tested — when the heat is drawing out beads of sweat by the hundreds, and the bike horns, car horns and, worst of all, bus horns, are bursting my eardrums, scattering my patience and shredding my nerves. At those times I despair for what Vietnam has already become, and what it will be like 10 years hence.

At times I find myself enlightened and elated — a trip to a local temple alive with Buddhist chants, chance encounters on the street, how the city’s pollution turns the sun into a ball of red fury as it sets on another wearying day.

And, after four years, I would say that the key to unlocking the city is this: Despite all the accoutrements of capitalism that have accompanied its phenomenal economic growth in recent years — SUVs, mobile phones, laptops, Wi-Fi hotspots — Vietnam is still is starkly, unpleasantly totalitarian.

The roots of propaganda are sown young and sown deep. Some of the most highly educated and well-traveled Vietnamese people I have met here, including lawyers, doctors, and business people, have all reverted back to a potent, disturbing nationalism when any issue that portrays Vietnam in a negative light has been raised. 

Vietnam, number one. Ho Chi Minh, number one.

That’s the country’s myth and mantra. And it’s what the youth are sticking to, at least for now.

In The Fray Contributor

My wife and I were driving home from a long Labor Day weekend spent in northern Minnesota. Traffic was light, considering there were more than 50,000 visitors in the Twin Cities for the Republican National Convention (RNC). At the other end of the Mississippi River, 1,200 miles to the south, Hurricane Gustav was slamming into New Orleans, the first hurricane to do so since Katrina in 2005. The country held its collective breath, waiting to see what damage the storm would bring, but in the streets of St. Paul, pepper spray hung in the air, riot police crushed protesters into the asphalt, and the National Guard stood watch.

We listened to reports of the chaos on the radio, hunched forward in our seats as our car zipped toward our apartment in St. Paul. By the time we collapsed into our beds that evening, exhausted from the long weekend, nearly 300 protesters were in jail. What began as a call for peace and a demonstration against the Republican Party ended in smashed windows, tear gas, and mass arrests. And this was only the first day.

Between Monday, Sept. 1 and Thursday, Sept. 4, the St. Paul Police Department and other cooperating agencies arrested 818 protesters. The vast majority of the protesters were nonviolent, but the police used pepper spray, tasers, rubber bullets, tear gas, and other “less lethal” crowd control measures. They conducted mass arrests, cordoning off streets and arresting everyone, including street medics, innocent bystanders, and journalists. Downtown St. Paul looked like a police state, filled with police officers in riot gear, an alphabet soup jumble of federal agents with three-letter acronyms, and National Guard soldiers.

Rick Kelley, of Coldsnap Legal Collective, a group of concerned citizens dedicated to providing support to activists involved in the legal system, was taken aback at the intensity of the police response. "I didn’t expect the preemptive raids, I didn’t expect the felonies, I didn’t expect the invocation of terrorism charges against people who are as far from terrorists as anyone I’ve ever met," Kelley said. "The kind of police response that we experienced was, I think, unprecedented in a lot of ways, and it shocked me."

Irene Greene, a practicing therapist and a coordinator with North Star Health Collective, felt the same way.

"It was a much wilder scene than any of us anticipated, but we were prepared for the worst, so folks were prepared for what they had to deal with: people getting beat by batons and beat up in jail, and tasers,” said Greene.

North Star Health Collective (NSHC) is a group of health care workers, students and community activists who are dedicated to access to health care for all, regardless of ability to pay. During the RNC, volunteers associated with NSHC organized, manned, and operated a first aid and wellness center in downtown St. Paul. The center housed a first aid station, a base of operations for the street medics who tended to injuries of both protesters and police, an outdoor decontamination center for people who’d been sprayed with chemical irritants, and a wellness center to help people cope with the mental trauma of protest-related violence.

First aid centers are common at large-scale protest events like the RNC, but the attention to the mental health needs of protesters was something new.

"One of the things that was especially unique about our center was that there hasn’t, to our knowledge, been a wellness and first aid center that has combined crisis counseling with the first aid/medic component," said Greene.

During the events surrounding the RNC, 58 street medics came from around the country and assisted more than 1,100 individuals with injuries as minor as blisters and sunburn and as severe as taser wounds and projectile injuries. There were 375 people decontaminated at the washing station outside the first aid and wellness center, 65 people treated at the first aid center, and another 85 counseled at the wellness center. There were 21 street medics who were arrested once, and four who were arrested twice, despite clear markings.

The volunteers and activists of Coldsnap Legal Collective (CLC) were also standing by to provide assistance to the protest groups. "Long days, little sleep, and a barrage of phone calls from people out on the street," said Becky, who asked that her last name be withheld, from CLC.  Coldsnap encouraged protesters to write their legal hotline number on their arms or legs, so if they were arrested, the police couldn’t take it away. They fielded calls from protesters in the thick of the action, people who’d been arrested and were making their one phone call, and people who’d been released from jail. CLC served as a liaison between those in jail and their friends and family. They also maintained a vigil outside the Ramsey County Jail, so that arrestees would have warm food, clean clothes, and a hug when they were released.

The police were as prepared for the protests as the activists were. Infiltrators placed inside the protest groups kept the police informed on the protest actions planned during the week. On Friday, Aug. 29, the police launched a series of preemptory raids targeting activist groups and independent journalists when they entered the Convergence Space, a gathering place for anti-RNC activists. The next morning, there were three more raids in Minneapolis and another in St. Paul. The St. Paul raid targeted the base of operations of I-Witness Video, a NY-based group of photojournalists whose mission is to film and document police abuse. Video taken by I-Witness helped invalidate many of the charges filed in arrests surrounding the 2004 RNC in New York. Also targeted in the raids were the "RNC 8," prominent members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, an ironically named activist group. These eight people have been charged under the Patriot Act, and they face terrorism riot charges.

"Monday and Thursday were really big decontamination days," said Greene.  On Monday, about 10,000 marchers from several different groups came to protest the war. The majority of protesters walked, chanted, and waved signs, but a few broke windows and blocked traffic. The police clamped down hard on the violence, arresting nearly 300, including journalists and street medics. They used tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other "less than lethal" crowd-control measures, and eventually arrested almost 300 people, including passers-by caught up in the violence, and Amy Goodman, Nicole Salazar, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous from Democracy Now!

The protests and police violence culminated on Thursday in a drama played out over several hours on several highway overpasses near the state capital. A rally held at 4 p.m. fired up a crowd of about 2,000 for a march at 5 p.m., when the group’s legal permit to assemble expired. When the protesters headed for the Xcel Energy Center and the Republican delegates who were beginning to arrive, mounted police cut them off, blocking their path on the John Ireland bridge. As protesters moved east, to the Marion and Cedar Street bridges, the police moved as well, closing all downtown overpasses over the interstate and blocking the protesters’ path with snowplows, mounted police, and cops in riot gear, brandishing batons.

The standoff ended in the inevitable way. As the sun set and darkness settled in, the police issued the final order to disperse. Shortly thereafter, they moved in with tear gas, pepper spray, concussion grenades, and full riot gear.  The police drove the group onto the Marion Street bridge and arrested everyone, including journalists and street medics.

"When I was out there on Thursday night, one of the first instances that happened is basically that this line of mounted police formed in front of some of my friends and I, and I stood there for several minutes, my friend and I stood there with our arms around each other and stood in front of them and just stood there,” said Becky. “All I wanted to do was have them look me in the eyes. And they wouldn’t do it. I actually said at one point, ‘Look me in the eyes, please look me in the eyes right now, and the woman looked down and gave this uncomfortable laugh […and said], ‘I can’t, I’m watching the crowd,’ and I thought, no, it’s because in the next minute if you’re ordered to beat the crap out of me, looking me in the eyes and recognizing me as a human being might prevent you from doing that. Making that human connection with me right now might prevent you from doing your job."

Becky, Greene and Kelley all agree that the purpose of the police actions seemed to be to demoralize protesters, to isolate them from their fellow activists and to discourage further protests, Instead of tearing activists apart, the harsh actions of the police had the opposite effect.

"I truly do not believe that anyone involved in the protester side of the convention is going to come out of that and say, ‘Well, clearly they’re right. Clearly I should no longer be anti-authoritarian,” said Becky. “Clearly, the government and the state and the police . . . know what’s up and I should probably listen to them from now on. You guys win.’ That’s not what we’re going to see, that’s not what we’re seeing. If nothing else, people are more politicized."

The response a lot of people have, in the example of Amy Goodman’s arrest, is, "She should have stopped when the cops told her to." When asked about Thursday’s events, many people respond, "Oh, well, their permit expired at 5 p.m. They shouldn’t have been there." Both of these arguments boil down to "You should do what you’re told." And that’s true, at least if you want to stay out of jail. I knew at 5:30, when the standoff on the bridges over I-94 was just beginning, that there were going to be arrests and tear gas and everything else. Every person on that bridge, be they protester, police, journalist or observer, must have known it too. After the events earlier in the week, how could they not?

The problem comes in when what you’re being told to do is unjust. Then you have two choices: go home and allow the injustice to continue or refuse to do what you’re told, make your voice heard, and suffer the consequences. When the state is unjust, you can’t wait for the state to give you permission to object to their actions. During the civil rights movement, marchers were refused permits and faced fire hoses and police dogs. They marched anyway, because they knew what they stood for was honorable and just. This is why people stayed in the streets of St. Paul, knowing what was about to happen to them and standing defiant. They had something to say and were determined to be heard.

In situations like these, I try to think about things from the opposing view. What was going through the minds of the police involved? I assume, from the cops I’ve met and known, that most of the police involved were good people doing the best they could in a tough but necessary job.

“I don’t think you can police always for the best in the crowd. You have to police for the worst in the crowd,” said Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher in an interview with Amy Goodman. It wasn’t an easy situation, either. Downtown St. Paul was filled with celebrities from around the country. The national spotlight was fixed on our city. We wanted to make a good impression.

Also assumed: the police are a tool of the state. They are the monopoly on violence that any government must maintain, without which it cannot exist. I buy into government’s basic assumption: violence is inevitable. We are all humans. We are violent creatures. Someone will always be in charge. But I also buy into the basic assumption of anarchy: I am my own best boss. If we all treat each other like adults, we don’t need the enormous infrastructure of government and we can all get along. It’s an optimistic viewpoint, and I buy it. At least until someone gets shot.

So what happened? Why did the police turn on the citizens of the Twin Cities and our guests with such brutal force? Why did they spend so much time infiltrating activist groups? Why did they use pepper spray, tear gas, and concussion grenades against nonviolent protesters? Did it have anything to do with the $10 million lawsuit insurance policy the city of St. Paul negotiated with the Republican National Convention?

"If you’re going into something knowing that you’re not going to be held accountable in your community… and you’re not going to have to deal with that public pressure, I think it lifts a little bit of that weight off your shoulders and gives you a little be more free reign,” said Becky.

The agreement, made between the RNC and the city of St. Paul, is unprecedented, and covered "up to $10 million in damages and unlimited legal costs for law enforcement officials accused of brutality, violating civil rights and other misconduct," according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in an article published Sept. 3, 2008. An agreement like this creates a situation where the police don’t have to worry about the legality of their actions, because they know there won’t be any heat from taxpayers. Instead, maintaining "order" becomes the prime directive, and constitutional rights are violated in the interest of temporary security.

It’s easy, though, to get bogged down in the negativity that surrounded the RNC. Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin may have mocked community organizers in their speeches to the Republican delegates, but on the streets of St. Paul, friendships were being forged in the crucible of a shared crisis. Communities were organized. "I feel like I met people that I will be friends with for life," said Greene. "To go through something like that, it’s definitely a uniting experience."

Giuliani, Palin and others may sneer at people who care enough to go out into their community, reach out and try to make their community a better place, but it hasn’t stopped those who were brought together by events surrounding the RNC. One of the shared goals of the many activist groups that protested at the RNC in 2008 was to build solidarity and bring together like-minded people. In that sense, the protests were a success.

Epilogue
Becky, Coldsnap Legal Collective:
"One of the most beautiful things I saw out of this week was how close we became as a community. The number of hugs that I got, the length of time of those hugs. We held each other longer, we cried together. People that I didn’t know that well before the event, I could meet them on the street and be like, ‘I remember talking to you when you were in jail, I’m really glad you’re out. Can I give you a hug? How are you doing? Thank you for being out on the street,’ and they would respond with ‘Thank you for being in the office.’ That kind of mutual support and mutual aid and caring was really great.

"The state uses this divide and conquer technique. We saw that on a smaller scale in the convention, even in just little things, like isolating individuals, putting them in solitary, or dropping them off in the middle of nowhere after they got out of jail,  It’s trying to isolate people, trying to make people feel like they’re alone, feel like they don’t have any people to support them. Those isolation tactics can be very useful if we don’t recognize that together, we’re really strong and we have each other’s backs. If we allow members of our community, whether radical or not, to be isolated and to be picked off, it makes the larger group smaller. They just keep picking us off one by one.

"We have amazing community resources in our city right now. We have a legal collective where none existed before. We have a radical healthcare collective. We have a community bike space. We have a group that formed around confronting and dealing with sexual assault in society… there are things to be optimistic about."

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

Only the man who was in charge of the single lamp at the North Pole, and his colleague who was responsible for the single lamp at the South Pole, only these two would live free from toil and care: they would be busy only twice a year. —Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

The stars have been our companions for the past few months. Dancing in between them, the ribbons of the southern aurora offer light when the moon is gone. Watch them fade and the black grows so deep as to lose hands in front of faces, to discover wind drifts in the snow or a wall by blunt impact. The last remnants of the sun set in March, and the long dark has carried the sixty of us through the bitter winter of the South Pole.

All of Antarctica offers uniqueness in character of the land, the sky, and the sea. It’s a world as yet untamed, where it is still risky to do something as simple as stepping outside, or understand something so patterned as the rise and fall of the sun. Men of written history have found God and lost sanity here, have faced frostbite and harsh wind, fierce loneliness, silence and death. But in confronting this world, many of them also found tremendous beauty and great humility.

The last hundred years have tamed this continent somewhat, to a level that finds its safety concerns part of corporate databases, the warmer seasons attract thousands of visitors, and human impact grows every year. Yet in the midst of the growing hustle, a set of people gather, intent on experiencing that which only Antarctica can offer — the long night of winter.

From mid to late February through to mid October, Antarctica grows weary of visitors. Winds driving in from the polar plateau bring storms, gales, and extreme temperature drops. Travel not only within the continent but to and from it brings great risks. Temperatures descend into territory that render vehicles unusable, ice locks in summer harbors for tens if not hundreds of miles, planes cannot land in the cold and dark Antarctic winter, and survival without protection is measured in minutes. In response, the various stations close down, become isolated, and build upon an internal community to make it through the winter. When the last flight leaves, very few will see a new face for eight months. An entire existence becomes dependent on the equipment and people immediately around. In the event of any disaster, rescue, if possible at all, will be severely delayed.

Just over 900 people from a multitude of countries find this appealing each year. We’re split between 36 different stations, spread out over 4.5 million square miles. To some extent, every station experiences the Antarctic night. It is only at the very bottom of the Earth, eight hundred miles from our closest neighbor, that the South Pole bears witness to a single day spread out over an entire year. One sunrise and one long day; one sunset and one long, dark night.

The pursuit of science and the International Antarctic Treaty (one of the premier examples of international cooperation, preservation, and exploration) drive this continent’s development. Everything that is done here can relate back to furthering the knowledge of humankind.

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is an international hub, hosted by the United States Antarctic program. From a peak population of 300 in the summer months, who fly in and out from the coast, the isolated winter reduces that population to 60 or fewer.

We form a modern tribal community with the necessary skills between us to keep the station warm, powered, and gathering data until the return of the sun and the summer.

Scientists and technicians (known as “beakers”) manage an array of scientific acronyms designed to peel back the fog of the unknown. There are massive telescopes that look into the darkest sky on Earth, detector arrays that are buried kilometers deep in the ice below, gathering evidence of subatomic particles; digital eyes that seek out the streaming auroras; weather stations; atmospheric ozone devices; and sampling systems that gather the some of purest air on earth. The data pooled helps us to see and understand the very beginnings of the universe, to explore the relationship between the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field, and to provide a baseline for atmospheric comparison the world around.

To ensure the integrity of the data, a slew of men and women are responsible for maintaining everything from something as mundane as a clogged drain to the severity of a generator failure. Their skills keep us powered, warm, and alive. Chefs work miracles with frozen food (much of it years old) and supplement meals from the harvest in our greenhouse. A small IT department maintains the computer and server systems on station and keeps the limited, but vital, satellite and radio links to outside world, live. Carpenters, electricians, welders, and plumbers continue needed construction through the winter months and aid the maintenance crew when needed. The power plant technicians guarantee lights, heat, and water. A materials department tracks inventory long since buried in drifts, much a mile or more distant from the warmth of station. Engineers and planners communicate the changes made and needed with management who are off-continent. Our heavy equipment operator strives to support construction, material movement, and fueling the distant buildings.  As the cold damages the vehicles, the shop endeavors to keep them running. Our two-person medical department is prepared to tackle any contingency and all of us are involved in emergency response teams (fire, trauma, and logistics) in some form.

We do this all in the cold, in the dark, with a necessary willingness to step outside our basic responsibilities and aid the friend next to us. Often, we do this at temperatures that we can stand but that our equipment cannot. Working outside at -95 ºF with a windchill thirty or forty degrees colder is not uncommon. Doing it with clothing that freezes, goggles that fog over in minutes, numb fingers and numbing minds, dying batteries for limited light (to protect the light-sensitive science experiments), and exhausted lungs from the ten-thousand foot altitude? This is our normal.

Your breath at these temperatures crackles when it moves past your lips, a brief respite from the searing cold of the winter air diving deep into your lungs. Though only your eyes may be visible to the cold, the lightest touch of the wind bites hard, freezing eyelids to low hanging hats and mingling with the quick forming ice on your hood and facemask. Fire comes to mind, a white-mix of intensity, when skin has been exposed to cold for too long — a sign that you have seconds to cover it or frostbite will set in.

Ostensibly, we tackle these challenges and risks to keep hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and data in good order for the U.S. Antarctic Program — for individuals in offices ten thousand miles distant and an ideal based around scientific exploration. Realistically, we do this for each other.

In the dark, isolated and distant from any neighbors, the sixty of us have a jumpstart on familiarity. We immediately share a context and a challenging environment that few other places can offer. We depend on each other in the most literal sense for eight straight months. Friendships and disagreements, loves and arguments abound — the panoply of human emotion and action is all here, often magnified, often gossiped about. Our situation, however, also has an obvious undercurrent of dependency. All of us are necessary for the survival of the other. Anyone short-shifting their work forces others to carry their burden and then has to eat meals with them at the end of the day. “Family” may be too strong a word but say “community” and that notion becomes far more tangible. 

In his book Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut talks of a sadness of the modern connected world. He speaks to how a talent is suddenly compared to the whole of humankind. How an ability to sing, which may have once entertained a small village must now compete with the talent that can move an entire planet. Though we are children of the first world and modern globalization, here we can explore what Vonnegut laments.

We make our own entertainment, our own plans and pursuits. We compare ourselves and compete with each other, come to know our abilities in a group where “better than” has less weight than “different than.” Over the season the last delivery of magazines grows old, movies are watched one too many times, and the ever-present voice of consumer culture fades. Somewhere in the setting of the sun even those not previously exposed to the value of individual talent find their eyes opening toward it.

How entertaining others manifests itself differs — it could simply be consistent human conversation and company in the bar every night. It could be stepping up to sing in a band having never before performed or learning to play an instrument and sharing those painful first steps. At this point, over half the station is involved in music in some fashion.

The escapes that society uses to avoid the awkwardness of human contact are still here but the press of people (sixty may be few but our space is limited) makes real and true interaction hard to avoid. By virtue of our shared context and isolation we can quickly move past being new and strange to each other and reap the rewards of a relationship. We can institutionalize ourselves, grow used to constant company and eating nearly every meal with friends and familiar faces. There’s a saying that the first time you come to Antarctica you do so for the adventure. The second trip is for the money. Every time after that you return because you can’t seem to fit in anywhere else any more.

What they say, though, is just that. All of us come here for our own reasons, all of us with our own goals and aspirations, with our own hopes. How those measure up to the people we meet and the effects of the cold, the dark, the altitude, and the night sky vary.

“Polies” (as we’re known in the Antarctic communities) often set up for a winter with specific ideas of changing their life, be it through exercise, education, self-reflection, or something else entirely. An individual might come down hoping to write a book, read a great many more, learn a language (or three), to leave problems stateside, learn an instrument, find a lover, cook, build something, make art, get into better shape — the combinations and specifics are multitudinous, including the many not spoken out loud.

We come expecting to be able to complete these goals in full, picturing months of time set aside from the distractions of the real world back home, easily saying that we can put something off one more day — we’ve plenty left. We don’t realize, unfortunately, that distractions are common to society regardless of size or place. We don’t see or understand always that change occurs over time — that if one lacked the discipline to write a book in his or her life before, he or she will likely not gain it here. We don’t expect or count on the environment to the degree that it affects us.

Buried under 9,000 feet of ice sits the land at the center of the Antarctic continent — we rest on top of it. In combination with our physical altitude, variations in barometric pressure and weather patterns cause the physiological altitude to rise to 11,500 feet in the winter. When that hits, no one on station sleeps well, if at all. Walking the halls the next morning, you can easily believe you have awoken to zombies taking over the station. The cold, of course, does its own number on our metabolism. For those working outside daily, the exhaustion may be welcome, but it can and will drive ambition into the ground. Inspiration can be difficult to find when the environment doesn’t change and when one cannot seek out new things or leave. However, the altitude, the cold, the static nature of this place — none compare to the dark.

There is great excitement when the sun first sets in March — the winter is still new, nothing is yet too worn or staid. Your fellow winter-overs are still mysterious, your friendships still new. The setting sun, though below the horizon, takes weeks of horizontal circling to fade. As a group we wait for signs of the coming dark — of the steps between nautical twilight and astronomical twilight, of the first stars, of the first of the southern auroras. The magic is still easy to see and find — the horizon, stretched and perfect, humbles with its stark beauty. The first shadows from the moon bring smiles (soon frozen). The aurora dance with an intensity and frequency that is to become familiar — they are present so long as the sky is clear and moon is set. 

As the dark grows we cover the station windows and shut off exterior lights to shield sensitive science projects. Though we can’t see the horizon, there is cocoon-like comfort in the sheltered station, in the settling night sky. For the majority of us from the northern hemisphere, the constellations are new and unfamiliar. We learn to navigate in the black by watching the direction of the Southern Cross and we watch for the first of the iridium flares — reflections from the satellites that keep us in touch with the outside world.

Two or three months in and the night still feels positive and powerful. Two or three months in, however, and the reality of a vacant sun and isolation begin to take their toll, rendering personal feelings irrelevant. According to research compiled by Lawrence Palinkas, “Among the physiological responses to these environmental conditions are a complete absence of Stage IV sleep as well as sizable reductions in the amount of Stage III and REM sleep, a disruption of circadian rhythms, dyspnea, arterial hypoxia, headaches, hypocapnia, erythrocytosis, mild alkalosis, suppression of the immune system, and disruption of thyroid function.” The effects of the dark on your mind and on your physiology grow more apparent daily. Manifestations of memory-loss, sleeplessness, and mood swings all creep into normal interactions. Palinkas offers the scientific terminology to use. For us, we simply say that you are getting “toasty.”

We are all affected in some degree or another and all of us move down the slope together. Isolated as we are, we don’t have an easy comparison to see how we have been affected. Veterans tend to laugh it off as the names of our friends begin to slip from easy recall. Attempting to come up with simple words becomes a chore — referring to something as common as a boat becomes, “that thing that, you know, floats on water and hauls stuff.” We stare off into the distance, often in the middle of a conversation and count how many times we’ve tried to tell the same stories to the same friend. Small disagreements balloon into massive arguments beyond any logical perspective and basic troubleshooting of problems requires extreme concentration. None of us have an accurate understanding of how much or how severely we’ve been affected — we won’t, until the sun has crawled back above the horizon and the station opens again.

For six months now, we’ve been on pause. Our cares and concerns from the outside world have been muted, rendered distant, physically and emotionally. Our day-to-day routine consists of simple plans, of familiar people and few responsibilities that exceed what has become habit. Expectation followed us here in the form of our plans, our hopes, and our goals. The expectations built up over the beginning of the season, and played out calmly or not at all. The future happened to other people, was worried over by those long away from here. We’ve been able to simply exist, continuing along at a pace unaccustomed to change. Though we have our challenges — to us our world is simple and comfortable. It is simply here.

And then the sun started to rise.

We first noticed it in early August. Clouded horizons had masked the beginning few days of twilight that we were supposed to be able to see. There were rumored whispers that someone had seen something — an edge of color on the horizon from the corner of their eye — but nothing solid. Then, in the middle of a weekend concert, excited yells led to ill-clothed runs to the observation deck. Cheering, smiling, laughing, joyous piles of people ran out at seventy below, hopping barefoot for moments, breath clouding faces and wide, thrilled eyes. In the distance stood the barest glow of orange.

Suddenly we find ourselves thrust into the undetermined future. The sun cracked the horizon on September 22 and the evidence of its rising grows daily. Even in an overcast sky we can now see drifts, other people, and all of the station at once.

No longer able to avoid it, we are pushed into planning vacations and the next job, into finances and the pragmatic aspects of the future. We are pushed into wondering about friends and family soon to be seen again, into wondering how we will react to them, to the outside world. We are forced to wonder how they will react to us.

Our expectations for the season are now measured in progress versus the time left. Our goals, our projects, and our ambitions are laid bare to the truth of what we have accomplished. We have no choice but to weigh our own minds toward failed pursuits. Do we struggle with self-doubt or do we treat them as casualties of the dark and move on? We begin to count our victories and contrast our memories against the grip of nostalgia. The great unknown has moved from a vague fog of dream and wonder to storm clouds brewing on the horizon.

The last couple of months of the winter season are described as among the most difficult and trying, because the drama and conflict are knocked up a few notches. The rising sun drives a fierce desire to move on and experience the next step of life. It is easy to assume that this is due to the effects of the long dark. The suspicion is growing that it is instead to do with our rebirth into the world at large.

To waver too long on self-reflection and the unknown of the future is to become lost. Now is to relearn decision-making, to plan again after a year-long break and to face our actions from the past year. The waves are rising, the wind is building, and the time to pick a direction and run strong is nigh.

The other night, when the sun first cracked the horizon, the storms that had been obscuring its rise cleared for several hours. A group of us gathered around the galley windows to watch. Not yet fully crossing the cover of land to sky, atmospheric refraction left the top of the sun rippling. Pieces of it seemed to break off and hover above it, shimmering into blue, then green, and disappearing. In all the rest of the world one might be lucky, on the clearest of days with the flattest of horizons, to see the flash of green for only a second. Here, we watched it dance for hours.

This is our sunrise — our one sunrise that brings with it more than any other before. This is our demarcation point, a decided moment that cannot fade like an ordinary dawn back home. It is our marker for the change that we find has already happened and the untold affects that this experience will bring for years to come.

[ Click here to view the accompanying visual essay ]

Nathan Bahls

Like most other Harlem eateries, Manna’s Eighth Avenue location presents little to look at: it’s a standard two-floor affair, with the food on the first level and seating upstairs. The restaurant occupies the southernmost end of a low-rise building between 125th and 126th Streets: a red-brick edifice running almost the entire length of the block’s western edge and comprising several other establishments, all local businesses.

Just inside the entrance hangs an ornate crystal chandelier, a furnishing somewhat at odds with Manna’s predominantly utilitarian aesthetic. Once entering, patrons immediately pick up their Styrofoam clamshell carton and browse the steaming trays on the pair of glass-sheltered buffets.

Representing a broad cross section of the traditional Afro-American palate, the cuisine here includes Collard Greens Seasoned w/ Turkey Meat, Creamy Rich Baked Macaroni & Cheese, Corn & Okra ‘n’ Tomato Sauce, Manna’s Specialty B.B.Que Spare Ribs, Lima Beans Seasoned w/Ham Hocks, Honey B.B.Que Chicken Wings, Manna’s Homemade Peach Cobbler w/Homemade Crust, Southern Style Fried Chicken, Sweet Plantains, Crab Cakes, and Jamaican Style Rice & Beans, among other entrees.

Having made their selections, customers carry their food to the long stainless steel checkout counter, where Assistant Manager Philip Bulgar weighs and rings up their meal at the rate of $5.49 a pound, typically exchanging a few casual remarks in the process. Then they head upstairs, passing the two awards displayed proudly on the wall above the landing: the twin distinctions of “Best Soul Food Buffet” according to the New York Press’s Best of Manhattan 2004, and The Village Voice’s “Voted Superior Soul Food” from the paper’s Best of NYC 2001.

The dining area above extends into the second floor of the four-story building next door (a forlorn-looking structure with the metal skeleton of an awning wrapped around its southeast corner and gates closed over its storefronts like aluminum eyelids). Its large plate glass windows overlook the bustling activity of Harlem’s central commercial corridor: shoppers and street vendors, locals and tourists, all walking, talking, pushing, shouting, and pressing on toward their respective destinations, and then the interminable flow of traffic along the street itself. In the early months of the year, the decor here consists mostly of an abundance of indoor plant life — including a few lingering holiday poinsettias — as well as renderings of civil rights leaders and framed photographs of owner Betty Park flanking notable personalities, many of them hanging at an angle. Aside from the most recently vacated tables, the place is exceptionally clean and well maintained.

The customers fit no one description: Manna’s serves a multicultural clientele, spanning races, classes, and occupations, from middle-aged white businessmen to Latino teenagers, to African American families and Asian American solicitors.

Fighting change

Last summer, Betty Park and the other leaseholders learned that Kimco Realty had purchased their building and intended to demolish it. The deal was brokered by Harlem native Eugene Giscombe, of the real estate company Giscombe-Henderson, and a board member of Harlem’s Business Improvement District, a taxpayer-supported organization designed to bring jobs into the neighborhood. When asked about the development, Giscombe declined to comment.

Several businesses left the premises immediately, including Bobby’s Happy House next door, among the first African American–owned businesses in Harlem. But Manna’s and its remaining neighbors (the House of Seafood, Victor Body Lawson Architects, the Million Nail Salon, and Rotiplus Caribbean Cuisine) coalesced into the Save Harlem Association. Together they hired Adam Leitman Bailey, a prominent Manhattan real estate attorney, hoping to obtain an injunction against Kimco and prevent their eviction.

“My opinion is that Kimco does not respect how long we have been here,” says Park. “We want to take them to court.”

Park, a New Jersey resident and emigrant from Korea, opened Manna’s on the heels of the 1984 riots, which were directed against Korean merchants operating in the area. Although a self-described “new kid on the block” at the time, Park says she recognized that in order for a Korean American–owned business to gain acceptance in Harlem, it had to both appeal to and hire people from the community. One African American employee born in the South — who left Manna’s in the early ’90s — showed her how to make the “soul food” for which Park’s restaurant became known. In need of more space, Manna’s moved to its current Eighth Avenue address from its original spot around the corner. Two more Manna’s opened in Harlem: one in 1990 and the other six years later, both on the south side of 125th Street, to the east of Lenox Avenue and at the corner of Madison respectively.

According to Bailey, Kimco’s representatives claimed in an early settlement meeting that they planned to build a four-story community center on the location. However, on November 15, 2007, Kimco ran an ad in The New York Amsterdam News for a much larger retail center called “Harlem Plaza” to be built on the site. He also states that his clients were collectively offered $100,000 to leave by January — an offer Kimco has since retracted.

“They are liars and they keep on lying,” says Bailey, a brash-voiced and energetic gentleman.

Fred Winters, a spokesman for Kimco, asserts that the real estate company has intended from the outset to construct a large retail building on the site with office space available on its upper levels, some of which would be allocated for community use. He calls the $100,000 figure “grossly understated,” insisting that Kimco’s actual offer was far greater. It was withdrawn, he says, because the business owners brought suit against Kimco. Winters promises that the Harlem Plaza will bring innumerable economic advantages to the area, providing employment both in its construction and in the new businesses it will attract to the neighborhood.

“The [existing] building is old, and Kimco wants to build a building that is new and modern,” Winters says.

Bailey argues that Kimco’s project will have a devastating effect on the neighborhood’s character, saying further that the development will take years to complete, reducing the 125th Street and Eighth Avenue hub to a “parking lot.” His legal case rests on the fact that the Save Harlem Association’s members signed their leases with the building’s previous owner with the understanding that they would not be evicted and the building demolished, granting them legal protection from Kimco’s plans for the spot. In addition, the lease included a provision waiving the right to judicial review, which Bailey believes should render it void under New York State law.

Bailey’s law firm has drafted a piece of legislation that would declare all of 125th Street — also called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard — a historic district, preventing any further development along the thoroughfare. Bailey views his work in the area as an extension of the civil rights activism based out of Harlem in the 1960s, and of the prototypical American enthusiasm for “underdogs.”

Winters, who lives only five blocks from the Plaza’s prospective address, considers the possibility of damage to Harlem’s authenticity “a very complex debate” that he prefers not to comment on.

Harlem locals say…

The accelerated gentrification of Harlem over the past decade has left many natives feeling pinched between rising rents and changes to the neighborhood’s appearance and demographics that have come with the upswing in apartment building construction. Added to that in the past year have been Columbia University’s city-approved plan to convert a 17-acre tract of Harlem’s Manhattanville area into campus buildings — while demolishing most of the existing structures, including 132 apartments — as well the rezoning of 125th street to permit further high-rise and residential development.

Assistant Manager Philip Bulgar, who has worked at Manna’s now-imperiled address since 1996, recalls first hearing about Kimco’s purchase last March. He is clearly angry, and is voluble in expressing his indignation.

“This store has been here since 1991,” Bulgar says, referring to the restaurant’s current location. “It has been one of the cornerstones of the community for a long time. We service the community and we give jobs to people in the community.”

He points to Manna’s diverse staff, a group of 20 individuals drawn entirely from the neighborhood, and that includes among its number immigrants from Africa and Mexico. Bulgar believes that new retail developments, like Harlem Plaza, will neither hire nor cater to locals. Moreover, he sees it as part of the wide-scale gentrification of the area, which he calls “ugly” and “immoral.”

“I was here in the ’90s, when Harlem was bad,” says Bulgar, recalling the neighborhood’s past problems with drugs, gangs, and petty crime. “You couldn’t give away a building in Harlem in those days. But today, Harlem is safer and cleaner than ever before.” He points out that last year, Harlem’s 28th Precinct won an award for its safety, but asks “at what cost?”

Nonetheless, Bulgar admits he prefers Harlem’s present situation to its previous one. And while he concedes that upscale development will make the neighborhood “look nicer,” he argues that “it will be artificial, very artificial.”

“A lot of businesses are going to be gone and a lot of people will lose their jobs,” Bulgar asserts. “These small businesses reflect people’s dreams and lives. And I guarantee that people will miss this.

“This is not some corporate store,” he continues, characterizing Manna’s approach to business as “people-oriented and hands-on.” Bulgar mentions a nearby Disney Store that went out of business “without anybody noticing.”

Operating the register, Bulgar — a Harlem native who lives just blocks away from his place of employment and whose daughter attends nearby City College of New York — appears comfortable and familiar with nearly all of Manna’s customers, addressing most of them like old friends. One patron invites Bulgar to his new Washington Heights apartment, which he selected for its high ceilings and its location in a vintage building. The two men spend a few moments discussing the superior merits of pre-World War II architecture.

Other customers have their own comments about the changes in their neighborhood.

“Columbia’s taking over,” one woman complains, referring the university’s increasing incursions into West Harlem. “I’m ashamed that I work for them.”

“It’s not your fault,” Bulgar assures her. “You’re not the one who makes the policy.”

“You know that in 25 years, Harlem’s going to be mostly white,” another customer, a light-skinned African American man, declares. “Seventy-five percent white and just 25 percent black.”

Noting the current rate of gentrification to the neighborhood, Bulgar estimates the interval will be closer to five years.

“Look at this,” Bulgar exclaims, gesturing out the window toward a new Soho North building on 123rd Street. “None of this was here a year ago — these condos and everything. It’s happening faster than people even realize.” He laments what he sees as obliviousness and indifference on the part of many Harlemites.

“Most of the people here are unaware of what’s going on, unaware or apathetic. They think, you know, ‘what can you do?’”

Condominiums like the one noted by Bulgar are sprouting up all over south Harlem — or as it has come to be known in real estate circles, SoHa. And with the new zoning laws, the trend is only going to continue. Proponents of the rezoning include the owners of the Apollo Theater and Congressman Charles Rangel, himself a frequent Manna’s customer. They assert that the construction of new buildings and the importation of chain stores will further rejuvenate the neighborhood.

Manager David Taylor has a different idea of why Harlem politicians are supporting City Hall’s plans.

“We live in a community where our leaders can be bought,” Taylor says. “Our leaders don’t work for us.”   

“What they’re saying is that the Harlem of old has no future,” Bulgar remarks. “A lot of these properties, the condominiums, they are going to cost half a million dollars. Now, the median income in Harlem is $27,000 a year. Who’s going to live here?”

Postlude

In the unisex bathroom on the upper level, a number of visitors to the Eighth Avenue Manna’s have written their thoughts on the wall.

“Harlem is state of mind and spirit. If you work hard enough and with the right spirit you can get Harlem back.”

“HARLEM IS OUR Promised LAND. Think about it!!”

“Black people in Harlem could have owned Harlem but they gave it away!! Now think About that!!”

Written in reply: “No one owns the earth.”

And as commentary on its predecessor: “he who has might has Right.”

And a final quip, punctuated with a smiley face: “Lease :)”

On June 11, 2008, Kimco Realty settled with the Save Harlem Association for an undisclosed sum. According to the agreement, the tenants must vacate the building by September 30 of this year. Most have left already. Manna’s continues to operate out of the 125th and Eighth Avenue location, and will relocate one block northward — to 126th and Eighth Avenue — sometime this winter.

Will Bredderman

On the roof of Gregory & Paul’s hotdog and beer stand is a statue of a paunchy man giving the thumbs-up. He’s holding a hamburger so faded one suspects it was fresh off the grill 30 years ago. The man is covered in graffiti, and so is the old-fashioned rocket ship with which he shares the roof. Back in the day, it would not have looked out of place in a Flash Gordon serial; today its blue and red paint has faded, and its white spots are splattered with yellow rust.

The sign on the top of the beer stand says “Astroland Park,” a reminder of a time when Coney Island was somebody’s idea of the future. Though the area has currently lost its former space-age shimmer to time’s onward march, it still inspires futuristic thinking — and not just the thinking that has it slated for massive commercial renovation in the coming months.

Day-trippers and beach-lovers have been visiting Coney Island for centuries, and in 1864, the West End Terminal, the area’s first train station, opened. But at the beginning of the 20th century, as Brooklyn grew in popularity, the New York City authorities and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company had the West End Terminal demolished and rebuilt with the most innovative, flexible transportation technology available, including a then unheard-of eight tracks and four platforms.

The new station, named the Stillwell Avenue Terminal, opened on May 29, 1919. Shortly afterward, Surf Avenue’s bustling boardwalks and amusement parks, like Steeplechase Park and Luna Park, made Coney Island one of the most popular vacation spots in all of New York; at the height of its popularity, the area had more than a million visitors a day.

Over time, Stillwell has grown into the largest above-ground terminal in New York City and one of the largest in the world. And since its 2005 renovation and reopening, it has become the first and biggest solar-powered terminal in the world, says Gregory Kiss of Kiss + Cathcart, Architects, the architectural firm that helped plan the reconstruction.

Kiss, a skinny man with a calm, professor-like demeanor, walks along the bridge that links all four platforms, pointing with pride to the panels above him. Kiss and his company worked with the New York Transit Authority to design and build the 80,000-square foot terminal shed that covers the platforms like a stadium dome.

In many ways, the Stillwell Terminal feels like the first attraction that subway users see upon arriving at Coney Island. The platforms are constructed with faded periwinkle- and white-colored steel, and are markedly free of the grime and graffiti coded into the DNA of the New York subway experience. Yet the disembarking teenagers and nuclear families rarely pause to look upward at the roof’s phalanx of panels, as such gawking is for tourists, and there are beaches, myriad forms of deep-fried batter, and the Cyclone to attend to.

If they did look up, they would see a ceiling composed of 2,730 five-by-five panels, which are two layered sheets of industrial glass that have sandwiched between them two squares and two rectangles of semitransparent photovoltaic glass. The intersecting lines between these sheets form crosses of light when looked at from below. 

Photovoltaic glass is a type of solar cell that captures the energy of the sun and converts it into direct current electricity. Kiss estimates that there is more than 50,000 square feet of it in the shed. “In most ways, they really are the best source of energy, period, because they are solid state with no moving parts, no emissions of any kind, and they produce the most energy when you need it the most — typically, in the middle of the day,” Kiss says. “This is the biggest project in the world that uses this kind of technology, integrated into a building structure.”

The shed’s solar panels represent the successful union of architectural design and fuel efficiency. They are also very, very shiny. The silvery glow of solar cells make the terminal feel like something more akin to Disney World’s Epcot and Tomorrowland amusement parks than the nostalgic charms of Coney Island. When viewed up close, a vantage point made possible by the nearby Wonder Wheel Ferris ride, the ceiling resembles a mirrored disco ball that has been unraveled and fashioned into an airplane hanger. Taken in as a whole from 150 feet in the air, the terminal and the rest of Coney Island’s attractions seem symbiotically out of time: Astroland Park and the rest of Coney’s attractions a living postcard from half a century gone by, and the terminal shed an image that arrived a few years ahead of everyone else’s schedule.

Construction time again

Last year, the New York state government announced the “15X15” plan to reduce electric energy usage in New York by 15 percent by the year 2015. The plan seeks to address the rising cost of energy by reducing the state’s reliance on fossil fuel–burning power plants. The “15” initiative calls for an increased investment in clean power options and greater energy efficiency, two areas Kiss understands well.

Kiss, 49, was born in Toronto but grew up in New Jersey around Princeton. He received his bachelor’s from Yale and his Master of Architecture from Columbia University. In addition to authoring technical manuals for the Department of Energy, his lectures on advances in solar technology and how they can be used with architectural design have taken him across the globe, and his projects have been developed everywhere from Panama to Native American reservations.

He moved to New York to study architecture in 1981, and in 1983 his newborn firm had its first commission: to design a solar panel manufacturing factory. Ever since, he’s had an interest in integrating solar technology and efficient energy practices into architectural design.    

His firm has constructed a number of environmentally forward-thinking projects in the city, including the sun-fueled, self-sustaining Solar One community education center by the East River. The center, which resembles a suburban home outfitted with a downward-facing, panel-lined roof, teaches energy conservation techniques to New York students and residents, and also hosts dance and film events.

In 1998, Kiss and his company were hired by the New York Transit Authority to help revitalize the dilapidated Coney Island Terminal. Though the area was synonymous with the Roaring ’20s, after World War II it struggled to remain relevant. The area faced competition from Jones Beach, as well as the rising popularity of then-burgeoning entertainment options like television and air-conditioned movie theaters. In 1946, the popular Luna Park closed after being ravaged by fire, and Steeplechase Park closed in 1964 following a series of accidents and the rise of crime in the area. By the 1970s, the area had become so deeply synonymous with drug- and gang-related crime, much of it linked to notorious low-income housing projects like Surfside Garden, that commercial developers were wary about investing in the area. By the 1990s, the once mighty Coney Island shrank to just four blocks of roller coasters and shows, with The New York Times reporting more than 50 unoccupied lots in the area.

Kiss remembers visiting Coney Island when he first moved to New York in the early ’80s. Back then there were hypodermic needles in the sea and fear in the air. And it only got worse as years of saltwater-infused air, as well as citywide neglect, accelerated the rust and decay of the platform’s metal.

Physically, the terminal was close to collapsing. “It was pretty scary. The steel columns down below these tracks and in many other places were corroded away to almost nothing, so there was some degree of danger there. It had to be replaced,” Kiss says. “This was an expensive project, not the sort of thing you do lightly, but as a matter of safety, it had to be done.”

Kiss + Cathcart was hired to create a new ceiling. The terminal once had individual roofs over each platform, but the Transit Authority wanted a giant roof that covered all of them. It had to be aesthetically pleasing, it had to be durable, and it had to be low-maintenance and easily fixable. Also, it would be nice if the structure could multitask.

“They thought, ‘well, this station has been here for almost a hundred years, and it will hopefully be here for another century or more.’ They have very long planning periods,” Kiss says, “and they figure that it might as well be generating electricity as it’s sheltering the station.”

Kiss and his team worked with the Transit Authority to integrate the energy-saving photovoltaic glass into the structure, and designed it with a state-of-the-art, silver and glass retro-futuristic look that would blend in well when subway passengers viewed the terminal on the same horizon as Coney Island institutions like the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. The firm took care to use recycled steel and aluminum, and Kiss even designed the roof to have wires that delivered a mild shock to keep birds from nesting on it.

Although they came to Kiss wanting a forward-thinking structure, the Transit Authority still had to be convinced that the project could actually work. “[We had to] show them why this makes sense and why this is not a finicky, scary, fragile technology, and why it is very reliable, and how it can be done in a way that if something does go wrong, it can be fixed.

“One of the most satisfying things to me was really the process of dealing with this very large organization that, for very good reasons, tends to be very conservative, and working through the process of educating them and understanding their needs,” he says. “It affected the design a lot; we did a lot of work and made a lot of changes to make this a very user-friendly, maintainable facility and so on.”

Power, houses

The total rebuilding of the terminal cost $250 million, some of which is returned in the form of energy savings.

The sunlight collected by the photovoltaic glass is fed into a conversion device that creates alternative current electrical energy, which is then fed into the grid for the entire station, including the main office, police stations, and underground lights. None of the collected energy is used to fuel the actual subway trains, as Kiss says that utility companies are very strict about how much power can leave an installation, and the Transit Authority prefers to sidestep the issue by keeping the energy within the local grid. “The power that is generated is used within the system,” he says.

“Another way to look at it — this project is unusual and it’s hard to get your head around it — this station produces enough electricity to provide all of the electricity for about 33 average single-family houses in this part of the country,” he says. “Total, per year. It’s a significant amount of energy.”
                       
Green days

Because of the difficulty of efficiently transporting electricity into the city from outside the city, 80 percent of the energy for New York City is generated by fossil fuel–burning power plants within city limits. These power plants contribute to unwanted citywide pollution, so Kiss thinks it’s only a matter of time before every city-owned structure that has sunlight falling on it will be outfitted with solar cells.

“The sun is giving off about probably 850 watts per square meter of energy, and it’s basically going to waste right now,” he says. “All it’s doing is heating up the sidewalk.
 
“In fact, it’s worse than that, because in most cases city buildings with a black roof, the sun is heating up the roof, heating up the building, and we are cranking up the air conditioner to counteract that. So we’re wasting all that energy, and there is an enormous capacity to harvest and use this energy in a very positive way in the city.”

There are several ways of getting power from the sun: Solar thermal power stations use sunlight and mirrors to heat up a liquid that drives an electric generator. But photovoltaic cells are the most popular form. Though solar panels have existed since the 1800s, the first solar cell was patented in 1946 by semiconductor researcher Russell Ohl. The company for which Ohl worked, Bell Laboratories, discovered that certain forms of silicon were markedly sensitive to light. The company was the first to create a device to harness energy from the sun; it had an efficiency of around 6 percent. Driven both by America’s space exploration efforts and the gas crisis of the 1970s, the technology continued to slowly grow in efficiency, popularity, and affordability, but has yet to achieve widespread household acceptance.

Even today, many think that solar panel technology, especially photovoltaic glass, is too exotic, too expensive, and not ready for mass use. Kiss wants to prove that cutting-edge technology and innovative design can fit into a reasonable budget.

“There is this sense among a lot of people, even environmentalists, that ‘yeah, solar is great, it’s expensive, but we shouldn’t even worry about the cost, we should do it anyway,’” he says. “I find that kind of an unfortunate attitude. By doing things like [Stillwell], you can make the technology much more economical than it would otherwise be. It is a struggle, but that’s not a reason not to do it.

“You don’t see more of this because of a lot of different reasons, none of which is a very serious issue in and of itself,” he says. “Technically, obviously it can be done. It can be made quite economical. There are regulatory issues, building code [issues], but those things can all be overcome.”

Whether out of concern for the environment or the bottom line, there is no doubt that the construction industry is showing an increased awareness of environmentally responsible building principles. In 2006, the Chicago-based Mintel International Group Ltd. estimated the green marketplace to be worth more than $200 billion. Chief executive officers (CEOs) are paying attention. According to a recent study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 61 percent of executives who responded said it was important that their companies take steps to reduce their environmental impact.

One organization helping companies do that is the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit environmental organization that works with businesses to promote energy efficiency. Spokesperson Ashley Katz says that 39 percent of total energy consumption and 39 percent of harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions come from buildings in metropolitan areas. The council helps companies reduce their energy use by showing them how to rely on windows instead of indoor lighting and how to install energy-saving air-conditioning units, among other techniques.
 
“I attribute it to a lot more awareness of climate change and global warming, whether it be Al Gore’s documentary [An Inconvenient Truth] or people learning more about the issue,” Katz says, “but I think right now this is a big time to be green, and people are really seeing that they need to step up to the plate in order to make a difference and turn back the clock on global warming.”

Show and prove

Kiss’ design has already saved the Coney Island Terminal both financially and in terms of CO2 emissions. And while architectural design that integrates photovoltaic technology could potentially help reduce electricity costs and harmful emissions across the country, Dr. Edward Kern of Irradiance, Inc. cautions that solar panel–integrated design is far from a quick fix for all of America’s power and pollution issues.

Kern has been working on the development and deployment of photovoltaic systems for close to three decades. A past president of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England, Kern and his company help to create commercial photovoltaic installations, and designed and executed many aspects of the Stillwell Terminal design.

Kern points to “incredible year-over-year growth” of 40 percent for companies that make solar cells as proof of the technology’s increasing acceptance. But he warns that it is best to take the development with measured enthusiasm, as the technology can reduce carbon emissions, but will not be able to completely replace the current means of producing electricity.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction. The more solar you do, the better,” he says. “But it’s not something that’s going to end coal tomorrow and save the world.”   

Kern points to the technology’s limitations, one of which is the finite amount of energy that panels can provide relative to an area’s electricity needs.

“If you look at the electricity consumed per square mile and the amount of sunlight falling on that square mile, for New York, that ratio … is a very large number compared to rural areas,” says Kern, adding that even if it were theoretically possible to put solar panels on every square mile of the city, “solar alone for New York isn’t going to do it. You’re going to have to bring in energy from the surrounding land.”

In addition to concerns about how much energy can be generated, Kern also believes that the other main obstacle to solar technology catching on in American cities is its cost-effectiveness. While solar cells cost about $4 a watt, coal, which he says is still the most commonly used fossil fuel, only costs “about $1 or $2” a watt. A power source’s dollars-per-watt ratio is determined by dividing the cost of the source by its rated energy output. For example, Kiss says that a panel that produces 200 watts and sells for $600 has a ratio of $3 a watt.

When solar panels first became commercialized in the 1950s, the cost was usually thousands of dollars for one watt, says Kiss. These days, prices are holding steady at $4 a watt, as booming demand for solar panels in Europe and Asia is keeping prices high at the moment, he says. But he’s encouraged by reports from solar technology developers First Solar, which is currently developing a thin-film photovoltaic cell that he says will be “approaching $1 a watt fairly soon.”

At that point, it’s unclear whether people will take to the change and how much energy solar panels will truly be able to provide, as even experts in the field cannot agree on just what can be reasonably expected of photovoltaic technology.

But it is clear that as proud as Kiss is of the energy saved by the terminal he designed, he thinks the greatest achievement he made at Coney Island was showing that large-scale,  environmentally friendly, solar-powered buildings can not only be achieved, but can be practical and economically feasible.

“The general awareness of people that ‘yes, solar is great but it belongs in space,’ or ‘it’s going to be another generation,’ it’s just a lot of stuff like that adds up to a big obstacle,” Kiss says. “But there’s no inherent reason there shouldn’t be a lot more of this. And there will be — it’s just a question of time.”

Michael Tedder