Bhumimalayalam(Malayalam Movie by T.V.Chandran)

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Venu K.M

T.V. Chandran is among the few Malayalam film makers who would never stop asking questions about the predicament of women in Kerala; pursuing many a dark alley of the past as well as the contemporary life where silent sufferings by women are accepted as naturally as life itself, Chandran undoubtedly raises disqueting posers in Bhumimalayalam too.
Actually the story line moves back and forth between the present and the past. Stories of six women in varying situations of extremely challenging moments of their lives are presented here.
An elderly mother and school teacher who witnesses the macabre scene of her son in his prime youth being killed by the hordes, representatives of hate politics never returns to the normal state of senses. Another young woman, the slain man's sister working in a far away place is no more able to work with dignity as her ostentatious employer tries to coerce her to yield to his sexual whims. Another young girl who is also employed in the factory meets the premature crash of her hopes pinned on a young man who had been awaited on his next leave from the military service to marry her. she loses her lover for ever, following an accident in which he gets killed along with his few colleagues. Here, marriage would obviously seem to liberate her from the status of a factory worker with meagure earning to that of a decent middle class housewife!
The fourth woman is an ambitious media woman in her youth. Though married to a man working far away in a gulf country, as individuals, both of them are expected to go by the patriarchal code of conduct of the Muslim household, in which her father in law would no longer accept her moving around with the camera as a media person. The husband is ultimately pressurised by the woman's in-laws to bid talaq on account her insistence to continue the job.
And we meet the fifth woman, who is an eminent sportsperson. Towards the beginning of the film , we see her practising jumps, dreaming for more and more heights of achievement . Alas, she eventually gets married to a business man; unbearable drabness creeps into her life. It becomes just like unending chores of cooking and cleaning, not just for the members of the family but also for the evening parties where her husband receives friends for drinking.
In the meanwhile, thanks to the efforts of her former school teacher and few sportslovers she gets an oportunity for undergoing fully sponsored and high level coaching in the branch of sports related to her field of excellence (long jump). After such a proposal being rebuffed by her husband, she ultimately breakes the marriage and escapes to her dream field of accomplishment!

As a film maker, Chandran has always been sort of the unique person with outspoken commitment toward a kind of 'dream left' . His idea of left is rooted firmly in the struggles of the working classes and landless peasants of Kerala, of course, belonging to a previous era.
Over the passage of time , living links to this tradition are nearly lacking thanks to the changed perceptions of politics and social life by the Left parties themselves. Nevertheless, Chandran doesn't want to cynically abandon his leitmotif of a dream left in the manner many of the Leftists as well as his counterparts in Malayalam cinema would do.
This can be seen as both as a strength and the weakness of T.V.Chandran's cinema. On the one side, it has the advantage of enlivening and maintaining the dreams of a society free from exploitation; on the other, it overlooks certain important structures of oppression and dominance. For example, representation of the relationship between a factory owner and his female labourer as sexually exploiting is too stereotypical; the very circumstances and settings in which the attempted rape figures in the film betrays lack of imagination and innovativeness and tendency to be influenced by cliches.
The scene in which husband of the sportswoman shouts at the gentlemen coming with proposals to offer her best training also is in bad taste. Even without shouting to the visitors saying that he would not allow his wife's legs to be publicly displayed , any 'decent' , softspoken and 'cultured' husband would have done the same thing! For the diehard defending of this kind of moral concerns, please don't blame the poor(drinking) businessman! Let's ask the male 'Leftists' instead, howmany of them would willingly send their wives for such a training that would help improve a housewife's/mother's excellence in sports!
This is where Chandran consciously or otherwise refuses to look beyond the structures of commercial production relations (where, undoubtedly are sexist biases operating) evenwhile he raises important issues of freedom of women. The normative assumptions about the standard family is kept intact and without being questioned here; as a result he seems to be desperately bound to place all the blame to the capitalist, or to a drinking and party-loving businessman.
This failure of acknowledging these factors (of oppressing of women) working from within is probably has become cause for his tendency in seeking fantastic escapes. The sportswoman's escape in this film is more a fantasy than a real one. The journalist woman who faces separation through talak, is also not backed by any identifiable social forces of change.

Arundhati Interviewed by the BBC Urdu

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Venu K.M

Please find the link to Arundhanti's interview with BBC in Urdu
http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/multimedia/2009/04/090428_arundhati_wusat_uk.shtml

Macabre Memories Still Haunt : Narendra Modi & The Politics of Hatred (Gujarat 2002)

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Venu K.M

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, May 2, 2009 at 9:46 AM
Subject: [humanrights-movement:1493] Narendra "Killer" Modi: Some Glimmer of Hope!
To: humanrights-movement@googlegroups.com, chairnhrc@nic.in, covdnhrc@nic.in, NHRC <ionhrc@nic.in>, sukla.sen@gmail.com, insaaniyatlist@yahoogroups.com

, hope@topica.com, csdmumbai@yahoogroups.com

[The brazenness of this vile person is really astounding. So is the pusillanimity of the "system"! He goes about organising murder, loot, rape and arson of people of the state of which he is the Chief Minister - the people to whom he is supposed to provide the protection of the law and the state. He further tells the victimised that they are fortunate that the awareness(!), that triggered and drove the carnage, has not yet adequately spread to the villages! Not only does he deprive the relief camps housing the hundreds of thousands of hunted and terror-stricken, put up through incredibly courageous private efforts, of any state help as much as he can and keep these under most appalling conditions; he also calls these as a baby manufacturing factories! He of course openly went about blocking all attempts at booking and punishing the foot soldiers of the carnage as much as he could. When the state was found directly complicit in murdering one Sohrabuddin Shaikh and his wife, presumably after rape, and also Tulsi Prajapati – a friend of Shaikh; and a senior police officer, a close confidante of his, had to be put behind the bars at the intervention of the Supreme Court, he openly challenged the "system", in a widely televised public meeting, to hang him if it can! Now, in full page newspaper advertisements, he calls the directive of the Supreme Court to the Special Investigation Team (SIT), formed at its instance under the impact of long drawn out brave struggles of the victims and human rights activists, to investigate his role in the gory bloodbath that he had presided over, a "conspiracy", and nothing less!] I/III. http://www.hindu.com/2009/05/02/stories/2009050255171000.htm Contempt petition against Modi J. Venkatesan Hearing next week, says Chief Justice Court had asked SIT to probe complaint against Modi on post-Godhra riots Modi alleged the order was passed in conspiracy with Minister Kapil Sibal New Delhi: A contempt of court petition has been filed in the Supreme Court against Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged remarks that the April 27 order asking the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to look into a complaint against Mr. Modi and others was passed in a mala fide manner in conspiracy with the Congress. On Friday, Prashant Bhushan, amicus curiae in the petition filed by Jakia Nasim Ahesan, wife of the former Congress MP, Ehsan Jafri [who was killed during the Gujarat riots of 2002], made a ‘mention’ before a three-Judge Bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Justices P. Sathasivam and J.M. Panchal for early listing of the contempt petition. The CJI told Mr. Bhushan that the matter would be listed next week. On April 27, a Bench of Justices Arijit Pasayat and A.K. Ganguly had asked SIT to probe a complaint dated June 8, 2006 against Mr. Modi that he and his Cabinet colleagues orchestrated the post-Godhra communal riots in 2002 in connivance with police officials and senior bureaucrats, and submit its report in three months. In the present contempt petition, Mr. Bhushan said Mr. Modi, while reacting to the Supreme Court order, had alleged that it was passed in conspiracy with Union Minister Kapil Sibal in the Congress-led government. He said it was clear that Mr. Modi had made very serious allegations against the Supreme Court which “are totally scandalous and unfounded and what is worse is that they have been made in order to derive political advantage in the elections.” He said this technique of Mr. Modi making contemptuous statement and allegations was not new. In December 2007, the Supreme Court was forced to issue contempt notice to Mr. Modi for having made a public speech obliquely approving the extra judicial killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and seeking votes on that basis. This was done when the petition seeking action against police officers who were involved in the extra judicial killing of Sohrabuddin was pending before this court. The petition said: “In these circumstances, it is imperative in the interest of justice that Mr. Modi be brought to book and held accountable for his grossly contemptuous action. If this is not done, he will be further encouraged to make any kind of wild allegations and statement against this court for his political ends.” As amicus curiae appointed by the court “it is my duty to bring this matter to the notice of the court for appropriate directions,” Mr. Bhushan said. He sought a direction to initiate contempt of court proceedings against Mr. Modi for his alleged remarks. II. http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=101442997138&h=ixsLX&u=WJL9j&ref=nf Nemesis catches up with Modi By Kuldip Nayar Friday, 01 May, 2009 | 02:58 AM PST | THERE is a saying that justice may be delayed but is not out of reach. The wheel of fortune has turned slowly to expose Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, the state where some 4,000 Muslims were killed seven years ago. It has been an open secret that he and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members were involved in the pogrom, with the connivance of the state machinery, including the police. Modi would say in defence: where is the proof? He would also say that what happened in Gujarat was in retaliation to the burning of pilgrims in a train at Godhra, near Ahmedabad. There are too many versions of this to solely hold the Muslims responsible. The dust was somewhat cleared by the Supreme Court of India when it appointed the Special Investigating Team (SIT) to probe the matter last year. The complaint against Modi was that he and his cabinet colleagues orchestrated the post-Godhra communal riots in 2002 in connivance with police officials and senior bureaucrats. The complaint filed by advocate Sanjay Parikh on behalf of Jakia Nasim Ahesan Hussain Jafri, the widow of an ex-Congress MP who was killed by a mob allegedly at the instigation of Modi, the 'architect of a criminal conspiracy to subvert constitutional governance and the rule of law'. SIT, a sort of tribunal, is presided over by a retired CBI director, R.K. Raghavan, who is widely respected. His probe, it is conceded, will be fair, just and independent. The BJP is uncomfortable. The Congress is overjoyed for apparent reasons. And the people feel jubilant that the perpetrators of Gujarat may be brought to book. The state, much less Modi, expected such a turn of events in the investigation. A human rights activist, Teesta Setalvad, who has doggedly pursued the culprits in the Gujarat killings, had submitted a petition on behalf of Ms Jafri. The petition was filed as an FIR with the police in Ahmedabad to contend that the killings were pre-planned and that the authorities did little to protect the victims. The police refused to register the FIR. She went to the court which took little notice of the lapse in legality. The matter came to the Supreme Court where the lawyer appearing on behalf of the state of Gujarat said that all the information, whether registered or not, could be sent to the SIT. It was bravado. But it has served the purpose of justice. The whole matter, including unregistered FIRs, is before the Raghavan tribunal. Modi is now in the dock. He would have to disprove his involvement before the SIT. Many skeletons are bound to come out of the closet. Since then many retired police officials have admitted the involvement of the government. The immediate reaction of Modi has been that of silence. The BJP’s former foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha, in a TV interview, did not react to the Supreme Court’s order but praised Modi for his developmental work in the state. One cannot expect anything else. The party’s youthful brigade is at a loss to make comments because it has been vying with one another in its projection of Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate after L.K. Advani. They are all well-read, sensible persons. But their blind faith in Modi makes one wonder. How can they or, for that matter, any sensible person think of putting Modi in any responsible position when there are charges of his involvement in the killing and the looting of Muslims in Gujarat? Whatever the BJP thinking, India is a pluralistic country, however, wanting in many ways. The party does not appreciate the secular temperament of the people. But when the upper-middle class or the corporate leaders — there was a meeting of top industrialists in Ahmedabad to back Modi — throw to the wind the basic values of pluralism on which India’s democratic structure stands, they prefer pelf to principle. Sitting in their air-conditioned offices, they do not know how the mind of the nation ticks. Modi may be an efficient administrator but he has also the blood of at least 4,000 Muslims on his hands. To the unthinking corporate leaders, I can say only one thing: forgive them Lord for they know not what they are doing. I was a Rajya Sabha member when the Gujarat carnage took place in 2002. It was devastating news. Nobody could find any reason to explain Modi’s role. The BJP criticised him in private, but dared not say anything in public lest the party should take disciplinary action. Before Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Ahmedabad for the first time after the carnage, I told him that he should have dismissed Modi straightaway. After not having done so, I said, Vajpayee should take Modi to task before the public whenever he visited the refugee camps and felt relieved when he did so. He lost his temper in many places and admonished Modi. But the youthful brigade of the BJP which travelled with him from Ahmedabad to Goa brainwashed him so much that Vajpayee attacked Islam at the meeting he addressed. He hardly talked about the pitiable conditions in the camps he had seen or the tales of murder and rape he had heard. His entire speech was to run down Islam. It seemed that the party had taken over the prime minister, whatever his feelings or impressions. Till today, the BJP has not apologised for the killings in Gujarat. The Congress has behaved better. It has not only apologised for the killing of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in broad daylight in 1984, but has also denied party tickets in the Lok Sabha elections to both Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, reportedly involved in the riots which took place at that time. The party has given rehabilitation grants to the uprooted and to the victims of 1984. The Modi government has not given even a single rupee to any Muslim for rehabilitation. Whether the probe against Modi will affect polling in the current election is the question being asked increasingly. There is no doubt that the Supreme Court’s order will dent the BJP’s standing. However, it is difficult to assess the loss in terms of votes. Yet the damage to the party’s image will be immense. Other political parties have gone to town to attack the party. The tragedy is that neither Modi nor the BJP is willing to make amends. They should realise that Gujarat, like the demolition of the Babri mosque, is a millstone around their neck. They have to carry it for years to come. The writer is a leading journalist based in Delhi. III. http://www.tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Ws090509Ram_Puniyani.asp Gujarat Carnage-Role of Narendra Modi Ram Puniyani In the worst ever communal carnage of this century, the post Godhra Gujarat violence, over 2000 innocents lost their lives. Most of the survivors not only lost their livelihood and shelter but also have been degraded to the status of second class citizens. Most of the perpetrators of violence, have not only gone scot-free; many of them had an upward political mobility. The efforts of the victims and human rights activists had yielded very few results and majority of the victims are grieving and living with the scars of their losses. In the whole process, the direction of Apex court to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the role of Modi, his cabinet colleagues and other top functionaries of state and those involved in violence, has come as a sigh of hope. The court gave the direction (April 27, 2002) in response to appeal by Jakia Ahsan Jafri, the widow of slain Congress MP, Ahsan Jafri. One complements the courage and doggedness of Jakia Jafri for all her efforts. This comes in the backdrop of the arrest of Maya Kodnani, Modi’s cabinet colleague who instigated and led the carnage in Naroda Patia. Just to recall, Ahsan Jafri ex Congress MP had made frantic calls to all those concerned but the police help was not forthcoming to save him from the mob assembled by the VHP-Bajrang Dal and others, the lead players in Gujarat carnage. So far the official inquiry committees have not pointed its finger on the role of Modi, while the Human Rights Commission report (2002) pointed out that state machinery failed to protect the innocent people. Most of the citizen’s inquiry committees by human rights activists have pointed out about the role of state administration and Modi in particular in the violence. In the major such report of ‘Citizens tribunal’ headed by retired Justice Krishna Ayer and Justice P.B.Sawant, (Crime against Humanity), a Minister in Modi’s Government Haren Pandya gave description of the meeting which Modi had called on the evening of Godhra train accident. As per Pandya Modi instructed all the top state officials to let the Hindu anger not be curtailed in the aftermath of Godhra. Modi popularized the thesis that Godhra train was burnt in a pre planned manner by the international terrorism, in collusion with the ISI and local Muslims. Infamously, he announced that every action has an opposite reaction, meaning that now Hindus will take revenge and state should sit back and let the opposite reaction take its course. Same Harem Pandya was murdered later and his father stated that his murder had taken place on the instance of Modi. While the carnage was on, the Central government, NDA led by BJP, kept watching and barring some stray noises by PM Vajpayee and Home Minister Advani, the carnage went on spilling the rivers of blood. Despite Modi’s claim that he controlled the violence in 72 hours, it took months for the din to settle. Modi’s acts of omission were more than obvious. Now as matters stand our legal system has lots of loopholes and most of the guilty are not punished. On the contrary, in the case of Gujarat, Modi ‘succeeded’ in splitting the Gujarat society along religious lines, and he took advantage of the communal divide by riding back to power and strengthened his vice like grip on the administration and state as a whole. And now, In Gujarat the matters are not seen as guilty versus innocents, they are seen as Hindu versus Muslim. While on one hand Modi is being projected as the future Prime minister of India, not only by many captains of industry but also by the party sustaining on the fodder of communal divide, the BJP. While most of the people with plural values and concern for national integration are welcoming the direction of Apex court, the others doing electoral calculations point out that this investigation will enhance the standing of Modi. BJP spokesman also pointed out that this direction of Apex court will be helpful to the BJP in electoral arena. The nation is standing on a tragic point where the communal polarization brought in by communal violence and anti-minority propaganda has resulted in the loss of sensitivity of a section of society towards the miseries and travails of large part of our own country, our own nation. In response to court directive, Modi asserted that he is ready to go to jail. This assertion is the outcome of his knowledge that in the polarzed state he will benefit despite his ciminal acts. The observation so far has been that Modi has shown no remorse for what happened in Gujarat, forget apologizing for the same. The path to power for the practitioners of divisive politics is through the rivers of blood, and they know it. So should we press for justice or fall in the trap of electoral arithmetic? The point is if we loose our basic human morality, if we compromise on the issue of rule of law, what is the worth of values of Constitution? Tragedy is not that the nation is knowing the guilt of the ilk of Modi and is watching helplessly, the tragedy is that our justice delivery system has been eroded from bottom upwards, where justice is sacrificed at the drop of a hat. The communal mind set cultivated by divisive politics, the large section of state machinery being guided by considerations other than the values of constitution is a matter of deep concern. It is because of this total communalization of state apparatus that the Supreme Court had to reprimand Modi, time and over again. It is because of this that the major cases were shifted out from Gujarat. It is the same place where Zahira Sheikh changed her versions times and over again, lured by the lucre offered to her by BJP workers. Modi bloating his chest while sitting over the corpses of thousands, is a symptom of deeper rot which has set in the society. By now first the cases are not investigated properly due to communal considerations, then when the reports nail the culprits, many of them are not touched for political considerations. Rather than having remorse and anguish on what happened to say that this Apex court direction will benefit BJP, is the most immoral and base statement which only heartless inhuman characters can make. Peace Is Doable

Women and Islam by Fatema Mernissi- A Brief Review

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Venu K.M


“ Fatema Mernissi has done an epoch making and scholarly exploration of the Suras (original Quranic verses) and the Hadits (accounts by the Companions of the Prophet about how the Messenger of God responded to challenging moments in the lives of first generation of believers,methodically cross checked and compiled by religious scholars who lived in the first two centuries of Islam) along with the interpretations since then. The major findings of the author are the following:
1. The Prophet undoubtedly wanted no separation between the public and private realms of life.
2. His vision of a monotheistic universal faith is absolutely egalitarian and that is a world in which women could shoulder equal roles with that of men in political, social and economic realms with a view to creating a new world that would assure peace and happiness to all humans.
3. While Islam would not sanction the practice of slavery among the believers, continuation of that institution for several centuries was possible in the actual Islamic regimes thanks to the denial of option (to the new religion )to the prisoners of wars, who were mostly women from the pre Islamic kingdoms. However,their children were considered free persons. These women were treated as slaves and they were traded off or exchanged as booty.
4.The descend of Hijab,the physical as well as the symbolic separation of private and public spaces happened as a response to the grave crisis in the Medina period,which corresponded to the later phase in the life of the Prophet. Years between Hejra 3-8 (AD 625- 628) were critical periods of crisis characterized by severe losses and uncertainty both on the side of military expeditions and on the socio-economic life of people.
5. Even while the Prophet together with his wives and many of the articulate women in the Medinese city continued adherence to the principle of equality( between men and women) , they encountered lot of social abuses on account of this.
6. The prominent of the male Companions led by his son in law Umer continuously pressed on the Prophet to impose restrictions for women. They persisted on the view that solution to the above crisis of credibility and above all the insecurity, was in the separation of the Muslim space into two- public space was to be preserved as exclusive domain of men, and the private space as the secluded space for women- both these spaces to be separated by a Hijab-
7. The Hijab ultimately descended from the Heaven as revealed to the Prophet during the night of a wedding dinner in connection with his first night with Zainab in the year Hejra 5 (AD 627). The immediate provocation of the incident, according to a Hadith, was boorish behaviour of three men who continued to linger there chatting, sitting in the room without leaving the place even after the dinner; Prophet was eagerly waiting to be left alone in the company of Zainab, his new bride sitting in the same room. ”

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Venu K.M


Naomi Klein speaks on Israeli Apartheid Week from NOW Magazine on Vimeo.

"The Taliban are Here" - By Samad Khurram

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Venu K.M

The Taliban are Here

Monday, April 20, 2009
By Samad Khurram

Back in 2002, I was returning from Friday prayers when I saw an unusual gathering of singing and quasi-dancing mullahs. Unusual because I had always assumed mullahs to be against all types of kufr (art). The amused crowd were listening to chants of “Taliban aa-gae! Taliban aa-gae!” I smirked: As if! Pakistan is a nuclear country with the seventh-largest army. We’re safe.

The mullahs’ songs have been answered – the Taliban indeed are coming. And with them the cowards are bringing a lifestyle that destroys everything Pakistan.

Oh, no! Wait! This guy is on the paycheque of those who are trying to break Pakistan. The Taliban are our heroes, it is America which is in the wrong. Yes, this is the typical self-defence mechanism coming to full force. Having nothing to lose, and having been already declared a CIA agent earlier in life, I suppose I’ll continue. Continuing with a genuine fear that these words are falling on either deaf or hostile ears, it may well be that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan is over in a year if all this chaos continues.

Perhaps, if Jinnah knew that the country he founded was going to become an arena for public flogging, where the laughs of sadist barbarians will mingle with the screams of women and children, he would not have decided on creating it. Had he known that there would be more suicide bombs in his country than any other place in the world, where militants and bigots would go around threatening women to “dress properly,” where schoolchildren would have to undergo security checks as if they were in a war zone, he would be extremely upset.

All our talk shows discuss the merits and demerits of the 17th Amendment, or bash America and India. Yes, American drones and Indian statements are a threat to our sovereignty. Yes, the balance of power is important, but it is the Taliban who have killed more people than India or the US drones combined, and have made us feel more unsafe than anyone else in the past thirty years. What other definition of sovereignty is there than provision of protection to people and maintenance of the writ of the state? Why can’t we have some programmes that discuss the atrocities of the Taliban, acts of terror that they do and how they have destroyed Pakistan?

No, it’s not the “Hindu Zionists” working on a CIA/Mossad-sponsored conspiracy to break Pakistan. And for the sake of argument, even if they are foreign-funded, does that not mean we should double our efforts to counter them? Remember when India briefly occupied some land in 1965 and how the whole country rallied to defend this invasion? My grandfather had stories of people going with sticks to support the army. I am afraid I will not have any such stories of patriotic resistance to tell anyone when another enemy has taken control of, say, a fourth of the NWFP and roughly one-twentieth of Pakistan.

But remember the great Pakistani Fauj which, under the Ameer-ul-Momineen, Zia-ul-Haq, crushed the Russians? This is only a plan to make America taste the same fate! Yes, thank you Zaid Hamid. For a nation which already lives in denial, your conspiracy theories are all we need to turn us completely schizophrenic.

For the love of God, can anyone explain to me why the great army whose laurels we sing from the day we are born has still not been able to jam radio stations pouring terror in Swat? How is it that these Taliban leaders can appear before journalists in broad daylight and roam freely without any trouble even when they claim responsibility for a suicide bombing?

Perhaps the real question I should ask is, why do I even care? When I took time off from Harvard to be part of the lawyers’ movement I had seen a ray of hope. There were concerned citizens and lawyers who stood for what was right, no matter what the consequences. We fought for a principle and won, with the hope that things will slowly improve. Today the very judges we had faith in released the Lal Masjid cleric whose crimes everyone knows about. If the judiciary was going to release people whose crimes were recorded on TV, perhaps it does explain why the Taliban are growing popular.

Having said that, rays of hope like Afzal Khan Lala, who has refused to move from Swat while he is alive, appear every now and then. However, he stands alone in facing the storm. Other than Ayaz Amir, not a single Pakistani leader has spoken out against the Taliban. Will the real leader who can get rid of these monsters stand up, please? Imran Khan? Qazi? Nawaz Sharif? This silence is criminal!

What’s worse is that these leaders of ours have unanimously approved a state within a state run, which is not accountable to anyone, absolved the Taliban of all crimes and provided them a safe haven to kill more Pakistanis. The so-called Nizam-e-Adl Regulation was endorsed by the National Assembly without any proper debate.

The sad story, friends, is that the Taliban are here, and unless we stand up against them in every possible way, Pakistan will be lost for good. And it will not be lost because of Zardari’s real or perceived corruption or anything else like that, but because of the silence of the lambs – we ALL will be responsible if Pakistan fails.

The writer is a student at Harvard University and turned down an award from the US ambassador as a mark of protest against killings of Pakistanis by US drone attacks. Email: skhurram@fas.harvard.edu

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=173372

Standing Up to the Madness - by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

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Excerpt

Excerpt from Chapter 6 of Standing Up to the Madness

Voices in Conflict
Jimmy Presson was freaking out. The 16-year-old junior from Wilton High School in Connecticut was pacing in a corner, going over his lines for the school play. He had a powerful monologue to deliver, and he wanted to get it right. He was playing the part of an Iraq War veteran, Navy Hospital Corpsman Charlie Anderson. The vet was describing his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Finally, the house lights dimmed. Jimmy stepped forward, his feet spread in a defiant stance, his demeanor a bit bewildered, like the seaman whose life he was channeling:

My symptoms didn’t show up right away. Then everything just caught up to me and hit me all at once. . . . You get home, you relax, and then it just comes rushing up. I have nightmares. I can’t sleep.

There was a dramatic pause, and Jimmy exhaled. As he looked out, he didn’t see the faces of friends and families in the Wilton High School auditorium, the venue for other school plays in which he had acted. Instead, he was peering from the stage of the Culture Project, a theater in SoHo. The audience was New York City theater buffs.

When Jimmy Presson signed up for Theater Arts II taught by teacher Bonnie Dickinson in the spring of 2007, he and the other students couldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams that they would end up performing in a New York City theater. Professional actors only hope of getting a break like this. Jimmy and the rest of the cast were just high school students who had spent the spring preparing to perform for their friends and families. Suddenly, their student play, Voices in Conflict, was banned from Wilton High School.

Was there graphic sex? Homosexuality? Violence?

No—but the theater arts students had done plays that dealt with all those hot-button issues in previous years without incident or objection from the school administration. Voices in Conflict dealt with a topic that was much too hot to discuss in this suburban Connecticut school.

The subject was war.

When Wilton High School tried to silence the student actors in the spring of 2007, the students of Wilton and their teacher mounted a national stage. Their courageous stand shed light on the pervasive silencing of critical voices, especially when those voices are veterans telling the story of living and dying in a war they have been sent to fight in our name.

We find Bonnie Dickinson sitting at an outside table at a café on a warm summer afternoon in the picturesque village of Wilton. This suburban community of eighteen thousand lies less than an hour from New York City, but its sense of cloistered affluence makes it seem a world away. A group of students and parents have joined us to talk about the experience of being banned, shunned, and then hailed and celebrated. It has been two months since their last curtain call, but the outrage and exhilaration of their experience comes bubbling back with each retelling.

Dickinson has been the drama teacher at Wilton High School since 1993. A 53-year-old mother of two, she is dressed in jeans and a stylish blue blouse, her face framed by a mane of blond hair. Her students casually alternate between “Bonnie” and “Mrs. Dickinson” when addressing her. She is hip enough to connect with them, but also commands their respect.

Dickinson graduated from New York University in 1976 and struggled to survive as an actress doing off-off-Broadway shows; she later cofounded an experimental multiracial Shakespeare company in Los Angeles. A popular teacher, her classes at Wilton High School, which is home to 1,250 students, typically have waiting lists. She is well known in the school and community as the director of the fall play and the drama club. Dickinson is not involved in Wilton High School’s extravagant spring musicals—West Side Story and Grease were some of the recent productions—which are performed in a $10 million state-of-the-art theater. She prefers the “intimate, shabby Little Theater” for her dramatic performances.

Dickinson’s real passion is educational theater, which she offers to students in several theater arts classes. She often uses drama to tackle difficult and sensitive issues within the school community. Several years ago, when Wilton High School was the scene of gay bashing incidents and some lockers had been defaced with racial epithets, Dickinson and her students chose to perform The Laramie Project. The play, about the murder of
Matthew Shepard, a young gay man in Wyoming, was “a big success. Only one parent out of a thousand said we don’t want our kid to do it,” she recalls. The administration had been concerned about the subject matter, but agreed to allow the play to be performed for juniors and seniors.

In the fall of 2006, Dickinson was looking for a new way to engage her students. As she often did, the drama teacher stopped by the school library to see what new books looked interesting. The English Department chairwoman, Sandy Soson, was also prowling the stacks looking for material. By chance, the two teachers stumbled upon the same book, In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive, by Yvonne Latty. The book is a collection of first-person accounts from soldiers about their experiences fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Teachers are always looking for voices of kids their age,” Dickinson tells us. “I saw the book as a collection of great monologues. There’s nothing like a first-person anecdote to connect with the audience. This was a natural piece of theater.” Dickinson planned to offer the soldiers’ monologues to her theater arts students and see whether it captured their interest.

A personal play about war was especially timely. Wilton High School had been shaken that fall by the news that Nicholas Madaras, a 2005 Wilton graduate who had joined the army, had been killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb. It gave further impetus to Dickinson’s interest in offering the students a play that dealt with the war. When she approached principal Timothy Canty in November 2006 with In Conflict, she recalls that he said that the idea of a play based on the book “sounds great.”

“You might even honor Nick in it,” Canty told her. Dickinson agreed. It was a routine approval.

When Theater Arts II met in January 2007, Dickinson was contacted by a parent, Barbara Alessi, who had a son serving in the military in Iraq and whose daughter was initially signed up for Dickinson’s class. Alessi complained to both Dickinson and Canty that the play was “anti-war.” It hadn’t occurred to Dickinson that the soldiers’ real-life experience
of combat could be construed as pro- or anti-war.

On March 9, Canty called Dickinson. “I don’t wanna hear from this parent anymore,” Dickinson recalls Canty telling her. “Shut this play down now.” (Canty, along with the members of the Wilton school board and Superintendent Gary Richards, declined our requests for comment.)

Dickinson pleaded for more time to change the script to make it more “balanced.” She spent a frantic weekend working with teacher Sandy Soson to add more explicitly pro-war voices to counter any perception of bias. But when she presented the revised script to Canty, he was unconvinced.

The administration’s rationale for shutting down the play began shifting. Dickinson says Canty told her, “I’m very concerned about the sister of the soldier who died. She should not have this going on in school.” Then he complained that a revised script was too violent. Later, he claimed that the script was plagiarized, since it drew heavily on other books and a documentary film, The Ground Truth, allegedly without attribution.

“We tried to make sense of it, but there was no making sense,” Dickinson tells us, waving her hand in exasperation.

Canty informed Dickinson that the play could not go on. It was a few weeks before the performance. Dickinson insisted that he explain to the students in person why he was taking this action. On March 13, 2007, Canty met the students in the school theater, where they had been working on the play for two months.

“You can’t do this play,” he told them flatly. He said it was too controversial, too complicated. And just to be sure they understood, Dickinson recounts that he added, “You can’t do this anywhere. You can work on it. But you can never perform it.”

Students protested. Senior Erin Clancy, her voice trembling, said, “I’m 18—old enough to fight in the war, and old enough to vote for leaders who send people to war. So why
can’t I perform in a play about it?”

One student began swearing at the principal. Dickinson admonished the student and insisted that Canty be treated with respect.

Canty said his decision was final. He had made up his mind and would not debate the matter any further. “This ship has sailed,” he told them. Jimmy Presson was disgusted. Canty may have mollified one student and parent, but “he was hanging us out to dry.”

We all become casualties of war. Who we are when we leave is not who we are when and if we’re lucky to physically return. Because psychologically, you, you, you’re completely changed by it.
—Corp. Sean Huze, from The Ground Truth, read by senior Seth Kopronski, Voices in Conflict

Backlash
Students debated how to respond. One suggested letters to the editor. Another wanted to picket. Then an irate parent of one of the theater arts students contacted a reporter at the New York Times. On March 24, 2007, the Times ran a story describing how Wilton High School was shutting down a play about the Iraq War.

“Our school is all about censorship,” Jimmy Presson was quoted in the article as saying. “People don’t talk about the things that matter.”

Principal Tim Canty countered, “It would be easy to look at this case on first glance and decide this is a question of censorship or academic freedom. In some minds, I can see how they would react this way. But quite frankly, it’s a false argument,” he told the Times.

The response was swift and stunning. Invitations began to arrive for the students to perform in major theaters in New York City, including the prestigious Public Theater. Theater professionals of the Dramatists Guild of America, among whom were playwrights Edward Albee and Stephen Sondheim, sent letters of protest to Superintendent Gary Richards. The National Coalition Against Censorship called for the
show to go on. Music Theatre International, an agency that licenses many high school productions, awarded the students its first ever “Courage in Theatre” award.

Voices in Conflict was in the spotlight after all.

Then the recriminations began. “Theater fag,” “traitor” were just some of the names posted on a Facebook Web page about the students. The sixteen members of the cast found themselves shoved in the school hallways and shunned in the cafeteria. “It was horrible,” says Presson of the aftermath. Through it all, the students stayed focused on their goal: bringing their play to the widest possible audience.

Meanwhile, the Wilton High School administration was digging in against the students. Superintendent Gary Richards issued a letter that stated: “The student performers directly acting the part of the soldiers . . . turns powerful material into a dramatic format that borders on being sensational and inappropriate. We would like to work with the students to complete a script that fully addresses our concerns.”

Richards continued, “We believe that this play can be upsetting to our student, parent, and community audience. . . . .As a school, we have a responsibility to ensure that the Iraq war, the lives lost, and the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families are presented in the appropriate context with appropriate support and guidance. . . . In its present form, the play does not meet those standards.”

The students responded the way they knew best: They promptly added Richards’s letter to the script. The cold, condescending bureaucratese would be in stark relief opposite the play’s passionate eyewitness testimonials.

Jimmy Presson, dressed in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes, tells us that the battle was often isolating. “It felt like we were being kind of separated, like Wilton High School feels this way, and those students feel that way. That hurt a lot. . . . I don’t hate my high school. I’m not trying to bring down the administration.

“We’re not attacking anyone here,” he says, his voice rising in anger. “The play wasn’t meant to make people feel bad, or make people feel war was bad. It wasn’t Democrats versus Republicans. None of this was a factor when we did the play.”

Bonnie Dickinson became the subject of attacks. Barbara Alessi wrote an op-ed piece for the Wilton Bulletin declaring, “Though the play was to be an indictment of the troops, Ms. Dickinson was misrepresenting intent from the very beginning. . . . This was never about the ideal of freedom of speech. It was about the manipulative use and abuse of that principle by a vindictive teacher who used the hot button issue to attract the attention of the New York Times.”

Alessi concluded with a veiled threat: “Does Ms. Dickinson believe that the media firestorm would inoculate her from all negative repercussions once the uproar died down and her actions were exposed? If she does, I believe she is wrong.” Alessi then filed a lengthy administrative complaint against Dickinson in late April.

Meanwhile, the national media shone a light on political censorship in Wilton. The students appeared on CNN and ABC’s Good Morning America, and were featured in articles from the Los Angeles Times to the Christian Science Monitor. In response, the administration hedged, but didn’t relent. In April, Principal Canty announced that it might be possible to have the play performed in school in the fall—after half the cast graduated.

Dickinson and the student actors had already shifted their energies into preparing for performances at the Public Theater, the Culture Project, and the Vineyard Theater in New York, and at the Fairfield Theater in Connecticut. In early June, an assistant superintendent again asked to see the script, which now included the superintendent’s letter. “This is the version you want to do for school?” the administrator asked
Dickinson.

“Now it is,” Dickinson shot back.

Dickinson was emboldened, but nervous. “I was really scared for my job,” she tells us as we have coffee with her and the students in Wilton. Cars honk nearby en route to a Wilton High School football game. A cancer survivor and mother, Dickinson could not afford to be fired. Noted First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus volunteered to defend her and assured her that she would not lose her job.

The school’s clumsy attempt to salvage its image ended up ensuring that Wilton’s name became synonymous with censorship. “Had the school not done any of this stuff,” said Garbus of the play, “it would have just gone through uneventfully.”

The experiences I have had in the last two years have brought me down, but hopefully I’ll get stronger. I just got to get there.
—Army Reserves Sgt. Lisa Haynes, from In Conflict, by
Yvonne Latty, read by senior Erin Clancy, Voices in Conflict

Censorship Society
“Striving for Excellence” declares the slogan over the front door of Wilton High School. Indeed, Wilton is one of Connecticut’s top public schools. But when it comes to discussing the war in Iraq, the school’s motto would more accurately be “Striving for Silence.”

When Wilton High School administrators banned Voices in Conflict, they shut down the only place in school where the Iraq War was being vigorously discussed. Jimmy Presson, who was named after an uncle who was killed in the Vietnam War, tells us that his U.S. history class had a weekly assignment to bring in a current event news item, with one caveat: “We are not allowed to talk about the war while discussing current events.”
Other students said they could discuss the war in a Middle Eastern Studies class, but it was not being taught that spring. So it fell to Theater Arts II to be the only class in school where students were discussing the war in any depth.

Actually, there is one other place where students talk about war. “We also get to speak about it with the military recruiters who are always at school,” says Presson wryly.

Wilton High School has a history of muzzling free speech. Students were upset in 2007 because the administration required that yearbook quotations come from wellknown
sources, out of fear they might contain coded messages. When the school’s Gay Straight Alliance hung posters a few years ago, the administration ordered that all
student posters be approved in advance, due to public safety concerns. Wilton administrators attempted to ban bandanas, insisting they could be associated with gangs. Officials were forced to back down when hundreds of bandana-wearing students
showed up at school.

Wilton High School is not alone in attempting to banish controversy from the mouths of its babes. In whitewashing dissent, it has taken a page from the script followed by President George W. Bush.

At the start of the Iraq War, Bush issued an executive order banning photos of soldiers’ caskets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, neatly decoupling the disastrous war from its body count. Following Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration’s decisive intervention was to ban images of dead bodies floating down the boulevards of New Orleans. And President Bush’s advance team has banished protesters from appearing anyplace where cameras might capture them. It is all part of an elaborate effort to create a Potemkin presidency, where reality is defined and managed by those in power.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg explained the rationale best: “Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”

In this environment of manipulated imagery and suppression of free speech, it is no surprise that censorship in schools is on the rise:

• At John Jay High School in Cross River, New York (about fifteen miles from Wilton), three high school girls were suspended in March 2007 for reading an excerpt of Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues, during an open mic night at school. Their crime: uttering the word “vagina” after being warned not to. Parents decried the “blatant attempt at censorship,” and the suspension was overturned.

• In March 2006, high school geography teacher Jay Bennish was suspended from Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, following a class in which he criticized
President Bush. Bennish’s talk was recorded by a student, who gave it to local radio stations. In response to Bennish’s suspension, more than one hundred students walked out of class. Bennish was reinstated several days later.

• Deborah A. Mayer, a teacher at an Indiana elementary school, lost her job after discussing the Iraq War. The class was reading about the impending war in the newsmagazine Time for Kids in January 2003 when the students in her grade 3–6 multiage class asked if she had ever protested. Mayer replied that she had honked when passing a demonstration where someone held a sign saying “Honk for Peace.” After a parent complained, the principal barred Ms. Mayer from discussing “peace” in her classroom and canceled the school’s traditional “peace month.” The school announced a few months later that Mayer would not be rehired.

For Wilton parent Hermon Telyan, whose daughter Taylor acted in Voices in Conflict, being censored struck a familiar and chilling chord. Telyan, an Armenian who fled persecution in Turkey, is emotional as he tells us about his experience. “I lived fascism and repression. It is very familiar to me. I can smell fascism in a crowd.

“The first rule of fascism is censorship in the arts,” he explains. Wilton administrators articulated it “in such a nice way I have to applaud. We have here a first-class fascist mentality. It came from Washington to Wilton.”

While the debate over the banned play filled the pages of local newspapers—one parent said it was the most heavily covered local story he’d seen in his twenty-two years in Wilton—“the administration, the faculty, and the students became eerily silent on the matter,” recalls Glen Clancy, whose daughter Erin was in the play. “The silence of the populace involved is one of the things I find most disturbing in
the dynamics of censorship.”

Ira Levin, author of The Stepford Wives, the best-selling novel and movie that depicts a town in which people are blindly conformist, wrote a letter to the New York Times immediately after the story about the play banning. Levin, who died in November 2007, drew the connection between fact and fiction:

“Wilton, Conn., where I lived in the 1960s, was the inspiration for Stepford, the fictional town I later wrote about in The Stepford Wives. I’m not surprised, therefore, to learn that Wilton High School has a Stepford principal, one who would keep his halls and classrooms squeaky-clean of any “inflammatory” material that might hurt some Wilton families. It’s heartening, though, to know that not all the Wilton High students have been Stepfordized. The ones who created and rehearsed the banished play Voices in Conflict
are obviously thoughtful young people with minds of their own. I salute them.”
Another letter to the Times helpfully suggested a play that would be perfectly suited to Wilton High School and its administration: a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984.

I’ve spent hours taking in the world through a rifle scope, watching life unfold. Women hanging laundry on a rooftop. Men haggling over a hindquarter of lamb in the market. Children walking to school. I’ve watched this and hoped that someday I would see that my presence had made their lives better, a redemption of sorts. But I also peered through the scope waiting for some- one to do something wrong, so I could shoot him. When you pick up a weapon with the intent of killing, you step onto a very strange and serious playing field. . . . You’re all part of the terrible magic show, both powerful and helpless. I miss Iraq. I miss the war.
—Brian Mockenhaupt, U.S. Army infantryman, read by junior Nick Lanza, Voices in Conflict
* * *
We choose to hear the voices of those who serve.

The lone, determined voice echoes throughout the hall of the Culture Project as the second New York City performance of Voices in Conflict opens. The theater is abuzz with excitement, as the students jostle one another backstage to get in position to take center stage.

Jimmy Presson, acting the part of Navy Seaman Charlie Anderson, steps forward.
We take fire, we return fire. The military taught us how to pull the trigger but never once did they tell us what to do next.

I heard it takes eleven or twelve years to adapt to being home. But right now, I don’t even feel like I have a home. It’s like I went away to war and someone secretly replaced my country. No one really understands me.

The doctors say I have post-traumatic stress disorder. Disorder? I call it post-traumatic stress order. I’m worried about the guys who go through what we did and be normal.

Then it’s Devon Fontaine’s turn. The thin, dark-haired high school student takes on the persona of Marine Sgt. Robert Sarra. He tells a harrowing story of what happened one day when a woman in a burka approached him.

I pulled up my rifle, took two shots at her. I know I probably missed the first shot. The second shot, I’m pretty sure I hit her. And as soon as that second shot went off, the guys on the other vehicle opened up and they cut her down. She fell to the dirt, and as she fell, she had a, a white flag in her hand.

At that moment there, I lost it. I threw my weapon down on the deck of the vehicle and I was crying and I was like “Oh my god, what are we doing here? What’s happening?”

I had a gunnery sergeant who had been in the first war. He said it happens. There’s nothing you can do to bring her back. It happens. We got to keep going.

Devon tells us back in Wilton, “Thinking about that woman coming toward my vehicle and shooting her once, twice—yeah it is very violent. But that’s what war is.

“Every time I did that monologue, I saw that woman, I shot her. . . . It affected me every time—in a good way. It put me in the shoes of this soldier. I really felt like I was there.”

Courtney Stack, a junior and the choreographer for the play, hadn’t thought much about Iraq before the play. “You have these numbers thrown at you about how many died today, yesterday—after being exposed to that, you sort of become numb to it. . . . Seeing other kids assuming the roles of these different people, it changes it from just a number to realizing these are people who are not that different from who we are. That makes such an astonishing impression.” Courtney reflected on the impact that each soldier’s death has had on their families and communities. “I think of how it would feel if a couple hundred students didn’t show up for school one day. That’s the real effect of this war.”

At the end of the play, students step forward, one by one, to introduce themselves—in the words of others.

And so we serve those who serve by telling their stories.
Who are we?
Rebels without a cause.
Fucking Goths.
Femme-Nazi teacher.
Stupid.
Worthless.
Theater fags.
Liberal pig parents.
Disrespectful.
Immature.
Unpatriotic.
Unabashedly biased.

Then one by one, the actors challenge those who tried to silence them:

Why is talking about the war “sensational and inappropriate”?

Since when has war not been graphic and violent?
If they consider the words of the soldiers biased, why do they allow an army recruiter into the school cafeteria?
Why has the school been silent on these issues?
Why did it take a New York Times article to start discussion?

As the curtain falls on the last monologue, the audience rises in a long standing ovation. Some people have tears in their eyes. Culture Project artistic director Allan Buchman speaks. “I couldn’t be more proud of having this work on our stage. It should travel around the country. Why it is not shown [in Wilton] is beyond my comprehension. What we saw tonight,” he said, “is the reason to have a theater.”

Actor Stanley Tucci, who starred in The Devil Wears Prada, had visited Wilton to interview the students after the play was banned. He says, “I suddenly felt there was some hope that theater was not just indulgent but can actually do some good, and some damage, in a good way.” He then addressed the students and their teacher. “You’ve made the people of Connecticut very proud.”

Devon talks to us after the performance about what he gained. “I learned that you’ve gotta fight for what you believe in.”

Natalie Kropf, an ebullient senior, says, “I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much from anything I’ve done. Some soldiers came two nights ago. They came backstage and said, ‘You guys nailed it two hundred percent.’ I just felt so proud.”

The parents agree. Moira Rizzo, whose daughter Allie was in the play, tells us, “I would say it was the most meaningful,inspiring thing that has happened to us as her parents yet. I wouldn’t trade this personal growth experience for my kid for anything in the world. It’s a shame because this was an opportunity for everyone to look fantastic. Bonnie and the kids came out shining, and the school system came out looking like a bunch of fools.”

Glen Clancy, father of actress Erin, observed that in defying their banning order, the students learned more than they’d ever imagined. “They learned that those in authority to whom they have given unquestioned respect can suddenly turn devious and duplicitous when it’s time to cover their own butts. They learned bravery by watching their now beloved teacher endure job-threatening actions from the school and stand tall in their defense because what they were doing was the right thing to do. They were presented with Music Theatre International’s ‘Courage in Theatre’ award, but every one of them will tell you the real courage was displayed by Bonnie Dickinson. Now, that is a role model.”

Dickinson’s ordeal continued even after the performances finished. In August 2007, the school administration released the results of the investigation that it did in response to Barbara Alessi’s complaint. The school found that almost all of the charges leveled by Alessi were unsubstantiated. But the school insisted that Dickinson did not cite her sources properly. In fact, the students identified the source for each of their monologues during the performances, but Wilton officials would not have known: Not a single Wilton administrator attended any of the nine performances that were staged in New York City and Connecticut theaters in June and July 2007.

In November 2007, Dickinson and her former Theater Arts II students traveled to New York City again. This time they came to receive an award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, which recognized them for “their courage in writing and performing Voices in Conflict.”

Bonnie Dickinson continues to feel harassed by school officials, but vindicated by her students. We ask her why she fought. She is in a hurry—she has to conduct a rehearsal for the fall play, a hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night—but she pauses to answer.

“For the kids. I could not let them down. . . . I realized this is where my whole life was going. . . . I love these kids. I love doing theater. And that’s it. I could care less what the administration says about me.”

She pauses a moment and just shakes her head as she ponders all that has happened. “This censorship was so blatant. Fifty-five minutes from New York City, in 2007,” she sputters in exasperation. “Didn’t they ever learn anything? Here we are fighting for democracy in Iraq—that’s the irony of it all.”

For one of their last performances at the Public Theater in New York, the parents and students decided to buy a plane ticket for Charlie Anderson to fly in. He was the navy seaman with PTSD whose words were brought to life by Jimmy Presson. As the show ended, Anderson walked up to Jimmy and embraced him in a giant bear hug. He then pinned his medic badge on Jimmy.

“The navy’s core values are honor, courage, and commitment,” Anderson told the student actors, “and I can say beyond any doubt that you all exemplified all of them.”

STUDENT: Who are we?
CAST: Just some kids from Connecticut.
We are not the future of America. We are America. One love.

From the book Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times By Amy Goodman and David Goodman Published by Hyperion April 2008;$23.95US; 978-1-4013-2288-5 Copyright © 2008 Amy Goodman and David Goodman