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Letters
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And God created teachers…
February 4, 2002
Hello Substance,
I wanted to share this piece as widely as possible. Its author is unknown.
It’s appropriate today.
Tim Galloway
Chicago, Illinois
A RELIGIOUS STORY: GOD CREATED THE FIRST TEACHER
 On the 6th day, God
created men and women. On the 7th day, he rested.
Not so much to recuperate,
but rather to prepare himself for the work he was going to do on the next
day. For it was on that day-the 8th day-that God created the FIRST TEACHER.
This TEACHER, though
taken from among men and women, had several significant modifications.
In general, God made the TEACHER more durable than other men and women.
The TEACHER was made
to arise at a very early hour and to go to bed no earlier than 11:30 p.m.
— with no rest in between. The TEACHER had to be able to withstand
being locked up in an airtight classroom for six hours with thirty-five
“monsters” on a rainy Monday. And the TEACHER had to be fit
to correct 103 term papers over Easter vacation.
Yes, God made the TEACHER
tough...but gentle too. The TEACHER was equipped with soft hands to wipe
away the tears of the neglected and lonely student...of those of the sixteen
year old girl who was not asked to the prom.
And into the TEACHER
God poured a generous amount of patience. Patience when a student asks
to repeat the directions the TEACHER has just repeated for someone else.
Patience when the kids forget their lunch money for the fourth day in
a row.
Patience when one-third
of the class fails the test. Patience when the text books haven’t
arrived yet, and the semester starts tomorrow.
And God gave the TEACHER
a heart slightly bigger than the average human heart. For the TEACHER’S
heart had to be big enough to love the kid who screams, “I hate this
class — it’s boring!” and to love the kid who runs out
of the classroom at the end of the period without so much as a “Good-bye,”
let alone a “Thank you.”
And lastly, God gave
the TEACHER an abundant supply of HOPE. For God knew that the TEACHER
would always be hoping. Hoping that the kids would someday learn how to
spell... hoping not to have lunchroom duty... hoping that Friday would
come... hoping for a free day.... hoping for deliverance.
When God finished creating
the TEACHER, he stepped back and admired the work of his hands.
And God saw that the
TEACHER was good. Very Good! And God smiled, for when he looked at the
TEACHER, he saw into the future. He knew that the future is in the hands
of the TEACHERS.
And because God loves
Teachers so much, on the 9th day God created “Snow Days.”
Return to Top
Gates can’t suppress ideas
February 26, 2002
Dear Substance,
Now that Chicago is
one of the targets of the Bill Gates billions (you are supposed to do
“Small Schools” because Gates is funding the project, aren’t
you?), I think your readers will enjoy this. It’s not unrelated to
press freedom.
John Spritzler and
his fellow doctors and researchers have just won a small but terrific
victory at the national AIDS conference now in progress in Seattle. As
you know, Gates has been getting a lot of positive public relations thanks
to his wife’s work against AIDS.
Bill Gates was the
invited keynote speaker at this conference, the largest of its kind in
the U.S., involving 3,500 physicians and biostatisticians. John Spritzler’s
a professional biostatistician, working on AIDS research. Three weeks
ago John sent an email to a couple dozen doctors and AIDS researchers
objecting to the presence of Bill Gates as keynoter at the conference.
John included with his post a brief article he had written about Gates
(copied below) and invited these doctors to circulate it and to join him
in getting it around to the conference.
John arrived in Seattle
on Sunday, February 24, armed with 2,000 copies of his article and proceeded
to begin passing them out in the lobby of the convention center. After
he had passed out about 400, security guards grabbed John, took away his
conference credentials (a serious professional matter, since John was
supposed to be presenting a paper on AIDS research on February 25), and
expelled him from the conference.
Not to be deterred,
John set up a table in the food court of the convention center (where
no credentials were needed) and struck up conversations with everyone
he could, explaining what had happened. People were outraged. By 1:00,
John said, there was a large group of doctors who had found chairs and
were sitting around his table, discussing the situation, and there were
some 25 physicians who had signed on to an effort to get John reinstated
to the conference. They went off singly and in groups to try to locate
the conference director and give her a piece of their minds.
Finally a large group
of physicians confronted her and she backed down. At 4:00, the person
in charge of credentials came up to John’s table and gave him his
badge back. Meanwhile John had passed out another 100 plus copies of his
article and got many names of doctors who want to continue working together.
John had many great conversations in the course of the day. At the end,
one doctor told John, “This is the most exciting thing I’ve
been involved in since Berkeley in the 1960s.”
John’s courage
and persistence, as well as the physicians’ understanding that the
attack on John was, as several of them said, “fascistic,” really
won the day. Congratulations, John.
Dave Stratman,
Editor, New Democracy
Return to Top
Why is Bill Gates giving away billions?
A New Democracy article for the 9th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic
Infections, February 2002
By John Spritzler
Bill Gates, the richest
man on earth and our conference’s keynote speaker, is now the poster
child of capitalism. Newsweek put Bill and his wife Melinda on its cover
with the headline: “They’ve Given Away $24 Billion. Here’s
Why.” Inside we’re told they want to “bridge the most fundamental
gap separating the poor countries of the world from the rich ones: the
gap in human health.”
Is this really true?
Or is Bill Gates trying to ensure that the capitalist system, which makes
his enormous wealth and power possible, maintains enough moral legitimacy
in the eyes of people around the world to survive?
The morality of capitalism
— self-interest, inequality and Competition — rules in corporate-controlled
institutions, but not in the hearts of ordinary people including most
scientists like ourselves. Most people are not trying to monopolize an
industry and become a billionaire.
Despite all of the
pressure from capitalism to put self-interest first, most people try,
sometimes with greater and sometimes with less success, to create relations
with their family, friends, neighbors and co-workers based on equality,
trust and commitment to each other. Apologists for capitalist inequality,
who say it’s the profit motive that creates wealth and scientific
progress, are wrong. Jonas Salk didn’t do it to get rich, nor do
the creators of free Linux software, or the millions of ordinary people
who create all the wealth and positive human relations in society. People
resist capitalist values implicitly. Were this not so, society would indeed
be a jungle of selfishness and distrust, which is clearly not the case.
“It’s a very
dangerous situation…”
The world’s elite
know their grip on power is fragile. Earlier this month Gates told his
fellow elite at the World Economic Forum, “People who feel the world
is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous
for us all.” Last year our celebrity keynote speaker, Harvard professor
of international trade Jeffrey Sachs, warned us about “a circumstance
where millions of people are dying before our eyes from conditions that
could be treat-able with new products and pharmaceuticals that could save
their lives, and they know it. It’s a very dangerous situation that
we’re in from all aspects — ethical, public health, economic
and political... We have recognition among our national intelligence council,
Central Intelligence Agency...that this pandemic fundamentally threatens
U.S. interests...The pharmaceutical companies themselves I think are beginning
to understand the risks... They are the target of a growing amount of
activism...”
Those who worry about
capitalism’s survival are alarmed at growing numbers of people around
the world realizing that capitalism — like communism — offers
nothing but a grim and bleak future to most people; that it is a system
by which elites pit working people against each other in dog-eat-dog competition
to control them; that it attacks ordinary people’s efforts to make
a more equal and democratic world where people help — not compete
against — each other; and that it celebrates the inequality that
Bill Gates embodies. They are afraid of people rising up against this
inhumane system.
Like Bill Gates, Sachs
called for more money to be spent on AIDS for Africans. But hiscareer
makes it clear that his concern is protecting capitalism. Sachs achieved
fame when he served as the chief economic advisor to Russia’s President
Boris Yeltsin from 1991 to 1994, where he advocated “shock therapy”
to create market capitalism in Russia by making the mines and factories
the personal property of former high ranking communists and other businessmen,
while employees went unpaid and starvation conditions emerged for the
first time since World War II.
An article in Harvard
Magazine, 1996, reported that, “Russians are dying at an unprecedented
rate. Between 1990 and 1994 the country’s death rate in-creased by
40 percent, from 11.2 to 15.7 deaths per 1,000 people. Male life expectancy
fell from 63.8 years to 57.7 years, and female life expectancy from 74.3
to 71.3 years.” Sachs is so callously pro-capitalist that he could
write in the January 13, 1990 The Economist, while “advising”
the Polish government, “Western observers should not over-dramatize
lay-offs and bankruptcies. Poland, like the rest of Eastern Europe, now
has too little unemployment, not too much.”
Bill Gates’ high
profile philanthropy follows the precedent set by the first robber baron,
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Rockefeller owned the Colorado Fuel and Iron
Company (C.F.&I.) which produced 75% of Colorado’s coal by 1892,
in notoriously unsafe mines that killed 1,708 miners between 1884-1912,
twice the national average.
In 1913 the miners
went on strike. The owners evicted them from their housing and forced
them into “tent cities,” the largest of which was in the town
of Ludlow with 1,200 miners and their families. Rockefeller brought in
the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to break the strike with a campaign
of harassment against the strikers which included murders, beatings, and
an armored car that sprayed the miners with machine-gun fire, all designed
to goad the strikers into violent action, which would provide a pretext
for the Colorado Governor to call out the National Guard. On April 20,
1914, in Ludlow, the state militia opened fire on the miners and their
families. Fifty-three people including thirteen women and children were
killed in the massacre.
The events in “bloody
Ludlow” aroused widespread public sympathy for the strikers and provoked
outrage at the Rockefeller family. In response to inflamed public opinion,
the Rockefellers hired the father of modern public relations, Ivy Lee,
to change the public perception of their family. Lee had Rockefeller make
heavily publicized trips to the Colorado mine site, saw to it that Rockefeller’s
philanthropy was prominently showcased and that newsreel footage showed
him in appealing settings such as handing out Christmas presents.
In the early years
of the twentieth century Rockefeller had a reputation as a callous villain.
Wisconsin progressive Robert LaFollette, for example, had called him “the
greatest criminal of the age.” By the time of his death in 1937 the
tycoon’s transformation from villain to civic benefactor in the public
view was virtually complete.
Unlike Rockefeller,
Bill Gates has succeeded in distancing himself personally from the violence
that capitalism relies on to preserve elite power. He is not personally
reviled (except when our PCs crash.) But the system of inequality and
privilege that he relies on is increasingly reviled around the world,
and that is why he, like Rockefeller before him, is engaging in high profile
philanthropy. The philanthropy is meant to neutralize the critics of corporate
power and weaken people’s efforts to fight against it. This is why
Gates does not give money to organizations that challenge the root cause
of poverty and inequality: corporate power.
How we respond to Bill
Gates, whether we treat him and the capitalist system he defends, as a
positive or a negative force in the world, is far more important than
how much money he may or may not give to charity.
Return to Top
George Cummins — Tribute to a Teacher
Substance is postponing our special section in tribute to Substance copy
editor and
Chicago teacher George Cummins until our May issue. If you have thoughts,
photographs, poems, and memories you wish to share in honor of our extraordinary
friend, please get them to Substance by April 20, 2002. As part of our
preparation for this event, we share the photograph below. Can you find
our friend in this 1954 family photo from Ireland?
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