City of Reno Mayoral Debate

While browsing the RGJ website this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to come across an advertisement for an open and public debate between candidates for City of Reno Mayor. Lucky for me, it started right after I got out of stats class and t was on campus.

Over to the Jot I went. There are 18 people running for Mayor. Almost all of them were present tonight, they were missing one person. It was not well attended, but I also don't think it was well advertised.
We are avid PBS/KNPB viewers and I didn't see a single ad or mention on tv this past week. Channels 8,4,&2 and the RGJ were present, but KNPB was sponsoring this first debate.

It was fascinating and enjoyable! Entertaining at times, and sobering at others.  There was an entrepreneur from New Zealand and a man who had suffered brain damage and had a severe disability, making it difficult for him to talk. There were three women. Everyone was White. All 17 candidates. Much like the audience! Aside from me and two Black males who arrived halfway through, the audience was a homogenous group of concerned citizens and voters.

I wonder who picked the questions. And the format. Moderated by Anjeannette Damon and Brent Boynton, each candidate began with a one minute introduction, answered yes or no with a raised hand for the first lightening round of questions, had 30 seconds to answer some questions, another lightening round, then one minute each to close.

Highlights for me included when no one raised their hand during a lightening round question in support of giving $1 million to the Reno Aces Ballpark next year and when everyone raised their hand in support of Burning Man. Their answers for most of the questions centered around bringing small business to Reno and lowering debt. A brave few ventured into tax revenue, gold, and stopping the subsidization of local billionaires. Not once was education mentioned as a priority. everyone continued to circle back to the fire department, police department, parks and rec, and limited government.

Once again, education was not mentioned once.

These are our soon to be elected officials and the turnout from our student body was abysmal! As was the turnout from our community. But, I surely did not know about it till this morning, by happenstance. How many more people might have attended had they known about it?

The moderators had a question about what to do with our homeless population. Several of the candidates alluded to the population as a problem that hindered economic recovery because tourists don't like homeless people. Several others called the homeless citizens who have rights and deserve our help. Very few people had an actual plan on what to do. Some candidates see the homeless as fellow community members who need services and help back on their feet while others view the homeless as a problem to be dealt with and rid of.

Less than half of the candidates would vote to support legalization of gay marriage.

Did I mention that education did not come up once?

Here is the kicker. Ten of tonight's candidates will move on to a televised debate on May 29th at 8pm. How are these people being selected you ask? Three criteria:
How many followers they have on social media.
How much they have in campaign contributions.
How many people vote for them at tonight's debate.

That's it. Not their previous work or reputation. Not their background. Not what their current platform is or their vision for Reno.

Just good ole' popularity and money.

These are the people who will make decisions for us, whether they have our input or not. You can view tonight's debate online: http://www.knpb.org/programming/knpb_local_productions/mayoral_forum

You can also vote for your top 5 people online and submit that to contribute to the final 10 who will debate on TV. There is a link somewhere on the RGJ website.

And you can vote on June 10. This is our community just as much as theirs! How will they know our needs and who we are, if we don't participate in the process?

There is way too much in the news this week. The crazies have come out in full force. It is a domino effect I think. Bundy started it, Sterling was pushed in, the KKK are always on the fringes waiting for their media moment. Poor Chicago. Almost a given to be in the news for the insane amount of ignorance going on in the South Side and the elite wild of suburbia.

This week I read the following story and was moved to the point of immobility. After reading, I sat at my computer for probably 15 minutes. Thinking. Processing.

This story was deep.

So deep, I am not going to paraphrase it for you. You should grab yourself a cup of tea and a pastry and take 15 minutes to read this story. It’s below.

If I were a professor in this situation, I don’t know what choice I would make. To educate or not educate a man, who as a young boy had been indoctrinated into the darkest part of terrorism under Bin Laden rule. A 15-year old boy who killed mercilessly was captured by American military before being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Was he old enough to know better? Would any child-soldier?

If this professor was educating inmates at an American prison, I don’t believe she would have been targeted the way she was. If she was working to educate prisoners in her own country (Canada), I don’t believe she would have been judged so deeply. She would have been hailed as a hero, given accolades, encouraged to teach others and share her methods.

Because she was trying to educate a terrorist who had spilled American blood, I think she was unfairly persecuted. It is incredible that she was supported by most of her faculty peers, students and president.  It is shameful that the community continues to scorn her without knowing the full story.

Who are we supposed to educate? Who is worthy of redemption? Are we rehabilitating or punishing? And what do we do with our own inmates, guilty of heinous crimes and evil doings?  How do you measure someone’s ability to repent? And who is capable of doing so?

The comment that sticks with me most was from the prisoner/student:

"Children’s heart are like sponges that will abserb what is around it, like wet cement soft until it’s sculptured in a certain way," he wrote, "a child soul is a sacred dough that must be shaped in a holy way, for there is no good fruit in a bad earth or tree." - See more at: http://0-chronicle.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/article/The-Professorthe-Prisoner/146183/#sthash.DKkuRlEg.dpuf

Many of the comments on the article suggest the professor was manipulated and duped. She might have been. If she was, she can look back and know that she tried to make a difference and do the right thing. Her conscious is clear and her heart is clean. What scares me about the vehemence of the manipulation accusation is that it makes me believe there are people who would choose to do nothing for fear of being manipulated. They would toss their humanity aside, opting for swift judgment instead of compassion. 

I say to my soon-to-be-five-year-old “Time, place, and manner” when she is doing something she ought not to be in that moment. There is a time, place, and manner for compassion and punishment, anger and peace. I think this professor chose a time to be compassionate and educate versus condemn. I don’t know if I would do the same. The lines are blurred for me, between what is wrong and what is right. I do believe we should have options for some prisoners in the American penal system to be educated and become contributing members to society. A low level, non-violent offender is very different from a terrorist, but I can’t say with certainty what’s in a person’s heart or mind. Can you? 

Was she right to pull resources, forming a liberal-based education and a bevy of classes for this one prisoner? I don’t know if there is an answer to that. I do think if educators put half the time and resources into programs the way she did for this one person, our education system would be incredible. 

*And when I say liberal-based, I am not referring to a political definition. I am referring to the origins of a liberal arts education, the reason colleges were created. There is an awesome definition and breakdown of terms here: https://www.aacu.org/leap/what_is_liberal_education.cfm 

The Professor and the Prisoner

A scholar’s beliefs took her from Canada to Guantanamo and, she says, closer to the spirit of a liberal education.

Jason Franson

Arlette Zinck, an associate professor of English at King’s U. College, in Alberta, heard a pessimistic talk about Omar Khadr’s detention in 2008. “We don’t do hopeless,” she remembers thinking 
at the time.

By Ian Wilhelm

Edmonton, Alberta

One afternoon in September 2008, students at King’s University College here filled every available seat in a lecture hall, occupied the aisles, and fanned out against the wall. A guest speaker had them spellbound with the story of Omar A. Khadr.
The speaker, a human-rights lawyer from Scotland named Dennis Edney, told the students at this small Christian college how the Toronto-born Mr. Khadr had been captured at the age of 15 in Afghanistan by the U.S. military and was being held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Years of living in Edmonton hadn’t scrubbed away the lawyer’s Scottish brogue, nor had he adopted Canadians’ preference for polite talk. The young man stood no chance of receiving justice, he said bluntly. It was hopeless.
From near the front of the hall, that cold assessment hit Arlette Zinck in the gut. "We don’t do hopeless," thought Ms. Zinck, an associate professor of English.
A short time later, although she was not scheduled to speak, she felt moved to stand up before the entire college. Ms. Zinck, slim with straight, auburn hair that frames her face, wasn’t exactly sure what she would say. It turned out to be a simple message.
"You’ve heard a passionate advocate. You’ve heard one story. You never leave it at one story. Go out and learn everything you can," Ms. Zinck 51, recalls telling the students. "If at the end of that you’re still wanting to do something, then know that we’re not going to leave that with you; we’re going to walk beside you."
It was a pledge. Perhaps similar to one professors make every day when they see passion in their students’ eyes. But the commitment Ms. Zinck made that afternoon would eventually give her an unlikely new student: Omar Khadr himself. It would take her far from Canada and, some would argue, far from the proper role of an academic.
Child soldier. Murderer. Torture victim. Terrorist.
Omar Ahmed Khadr has been called many things since his capture by U.S. Special Operations forces on July 27, 2002.
After a firefight and an airstrike on a compound seven miles from Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, Mr. Khadr was found in the dirt and rubble, seriously wounded. During the skirmish, Army Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, a Delta Force medic, had been killed by a grenade, purportedly thrown by Mr. Khadr.
A few months after his capture, the U.S. military moved him to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. During Mr. Khadr’s time in custody, his military defense lawyers said he had been beaten by interrogators and made to endure other abuses—accusations that a judge rejected.
Allegations of his mistreatment provoked outrage, but the key controversy in the Khadr case was his age; at 15 he was one of the youngest captives held at the prison in Guantánamo.
Although military prosecutors call Mr. Khadr a hardened terrorist, Mr. Edney, who works pro bono for Mr. Khadr’s family, says the detainee was but a boy sent into battle by a father who had indoctrinated him in radical Islam.
During Mr. Khadr’s youth, his family moved back and forth between Canada and Pakistan, where his father ran various charitable projects for Afghan refugees. The Khadrs eventually settled in Afghanistan, where the father formed ties with Osama bin Laden. In the summer following the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. military response in Afghanistan, Omar Khadr joined a group of militants who wanted him to work as an interpreter. The U.S. military said he received "basic training" at that time, learning how to use grenades, rifles, and other weapons. Not long after leaving his family, he found himself in the deadly firefight in Khost.
In Canada, Mr. Khadr’s case sharply divided the country. Many considered his imprisonment a necessary part of America’s war on terrorism. Critics of the Canadian government said it should have done more to repatriate him and to speak out against the United States’ detainment of terrorism suspects in Guantánamo.
The government’s silence, wrote Michelle Shephard, a Canadian reporter, in her 2008 book, Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr, meant "a Canadian teenager has been interrogated, abused, and jailed in conditions worse than those afforded convicted rapists and murderers. Canada has lost the moral high ground we once enjoyed."
In the weeks following Mr. Edney’s visit to King’s University College, Arlette Zinck noticed an energy building on the campus of 600 students.
A senior stopped her in the hall one day, breathlessly telling her he had been reading documents about the Khadr case.
Another day, she discovered students in the atrium ironing an image of Mr. Khadr’s young face onto white T-shirts for a silent protest of his treatment.
Then a handful of students sought out Ms. Zinck and made an appeal: "We want to send him a letter."
A commitment to social activism runs strong through the private Christian college, but Ms. Zinck was surprised by how passionate the students were. She liked the idea of a letter, remembering Matthew 25:36, which urges the faithful to "visit" the imprisoned.
After an attempt to send postcards to Mr. Khadr via the U.S. Judge Advocate General’s Corps failed, Mr. Edney offered to help. On his next trip to Guantánamo, he would take letters directly to Mr. Khadr.
Ms. Zinck’s first letter was short. She introduced herself and her family. She invited Mr. Khadr to come and visit one day, and included pictures of her two children—her daughter Arielle on a horse and her son Colin playing ice hockey.
The goal was simply to let Mr. Khadr know that people back in his home country were concerned about his welfare.
She handed the letters to Mr. Edney. And she waited.
Before Mr. Edney’s talk on campus, Ms. Zinck had read only the occasional newspaper article about the Khadr case. Her passions are not political but literary.
In the classroom she has a maternal quality as she gently prods her students to think deeply about a text. She speaks with a thoughtful, quiet confidence, has a self-deprecating sense of humor, and as her colleagues at King’s note, is fiercely determined when she sets her mind to a task.
Her scholarship centers on the writing of John Bunyan, the 17th-century preacher who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. It tells of a lost soul who must overcome suffering and trials to make his way to the "Celestial City."
Ms. Zinck dislikes drawing connections between her scholarly focus and her interest in helping Omar Khadr. But Bunyan is widely believed to have started writing Pilgrim’s Progress while in prison. Ms. Zinck would seem to draw on that fact one day to give Mr. Khadr hope. "Some of the world’s most important stories have been written by men in prison," she would tell him.
His handwriting was shaky; words were misspelled, and the grammar at times incorrect.
But the short letter, dated October 23, 2008, spoke volumes.
Dear Arlette:
I got you letter and picture and was very serprised by them. So thank you very much for them i’m in your debt and what you showed me is more than what i expected and that you are true friend and as they say: The true friend is not in the time of ease but in the time of hard ship. So again thank you and i’m honored to visit you when i come back.
Stay will with best wishes
Your truly
Omar A Khadr
From that initial exchange, a correspondence blossomed. As Mr. Edney prepared for his trips south, which he took several times a year, Ms. Zinck would hand him a packet of letters, including hers. When he returned, it was often with a letter from his client.
Mr. Khadr’s responses were usually short, expressing deep thanks for the attention from the outside world. And while his formal education had stopped at eighth grade, his words revealed an articulate, even poetic, young man.
"Your letters are like candles very bright in my hardship and darkness," he wrote to Ms. Zinck on January 22, 2009. "We hold on the hope in our hearts and the love from others to us, and that keeps us going till we all reach our happiness."
That summer, Mr. Khadr wrote that her words were worth more than gold because words "keep you going in such hardship."
In a letter dated that fall, Ms. Zinck responded. "Omar, don’t feel discouraged about the time you are spending in Guantanamo right now. Live it fully. Be kind to those around you. Know there are many of us here at home who are thinking about you. Right now you have time to read slowly and think deeply. Believe it or not this is a blessing if you will see it as such."
"Be a good student of the lessons that life is presenting to you right at this moment," she wrote near the end of the letter. "They are precious, uniquely yours and irreplaceable."
Respectful of Mr. Khadr’s Muslim beliefs, Ms. Zinck, a practicing Episcopalian, never tried to teach him about Christianity, let alone convert him. But she did not refrain from expressing her own faith. "Whenever you are lonesome, remember you have many friends who keep you in their prayers," she wrote. "Each morning at 9 o’clock, I include you in mine."
More frequently, she expressed her faith in the power of education.
"I know you are likely busy and preoccupied these days, but I hope you have had time to do some reading," she wrote on February 5, 2010. "Reading provides an education that no school can provide."
In that same letter, encouraged by Mr. Edney, she asked Mr. Khadr to write a one-page book report.
Mr. Khadr responded, telling her what books he was reading: Great Expectations, the Twilight series, Three Cups of Tea, a John Grisham novel, and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. He chose to write about that last one, the nonfiction account of a Sierra Leone teenager’s experience fighting in his country’s civil war and his rehabilitation from the horrors he witnessed and committed.
His report was a methodical summary of the book, each of his points numbered, one through seven. But his conclusion hinted at the demons in his life:
"Children’s heart are like sponges that will abserb what is around it, like wet cement soft until it’s sculptured in a certain way," he wrote, "a child soul is a sacred dough that must be shaped in a holy way, for there is no good fruit in a bad earth or tree."
In a letter he included with the essay, for the first time, he signed off as "Your … future student."
Really, though, Ms. Zinck had already become his teacher.
During the exchange of letters, Mr. Khadr wrote nothing about the legal roller coaster he was on. After several years of uncertainty over how to prosecute detainees, in 2007 the U.S. government charged Mr. Khadr with murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism, and spying.
Military-court proceedings were finally coming to a close by the fall of 2010, eight years after his imprisonment, and a military jury would decide his fate. At Mr. Edney’s suggestion, the Army lawyer who served as Mr. Khadr’s counsel asked Ms. Zinck to testify at his trial, to tell the jurors about his educational potential. She agreed.
For Ms. Zinck, the relationship had been its own roller coaster. She had not expected to develop the bond she had with Mr. Khadr, and as word spread about her work with him and her plans to testify, the news media put an uncomfortable spotlight on King’s University College.
In August, in a filing to the military commission, Mr. Khadr’s defense team said Ms. Zinck would testify that the college was willing to admit Mr. Khadr "immediately." Ms. Zinck, who learned of the filing from a reporter with The Globe and Mail, denied that the promise had been made. Other erroneous reports said King’s had offered Mr. Khadr a scholarship or a tuition waiver.
J. Harry Fernhout, the university’s president at the time, began to hear a steady drumbeat of questions that grew louder as Ms. Zinck’s court date neared. The university said it took no official position on the Khadr case and emphasized that Ms. Zinck was doing Christian charity on a purely volunteer basis, not as an official project of King’s.
Most but not all faculty members and students were supportive of her. Some donors complained. In phone calls, emails, and the occasional home visit, Mr. Fernhout tried to explain the situation to them. A few balked and eventually stopped supporting the institution. (He declined to say how much the controversy cost King’s in financial support.)
Ms. Zinck even received a pair of anonymous letters containing threats. She declines to discuss the details, but the letters were worrisome enough that Mr. Fernhout turned them over to the police.
He says the Khadr case was the most divisive issue he ever had to deal with as a university president. Yet he supported Ms. Zinck. It was only after a long talk with the president that she agreed to appear at Mr. Khadr’s trial.
Their discussion had been reassuring. But on October 26, 2010, as Ms. Zinck traveled from Edmonton to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, and from there on a charter plane to Guantánamo, she still had her doubts.
She had never met Mr. Khadr in person. Her plan was to tell the jury about the young man she had found in the five letters he sent her over two years: the thoughtful student, the eloquent soul. And just maybe, prod the jurors to question the narrative they had heard about him.
It was as if Mr. Khadr was a character in a novel, she thought, and the jury a class of students meant to interpret his actions and motivations. "And I’m a lit scholar," she thought. "I teach people how to ask intelligent questions about a figure that you meet in a text."
Yet the doubts lingered. What was an English professor from Canada doing in a trial like this? What chance did she have of changing a single juror’s mind?
As she said later, "I knew I was going to go down to be comic relief in a very dark bit of political theater."
Two days after arriving in Cuba and only hours before she was to testify, Ms. Zinck was taken to an old, squat, two-story airport building with a traffic-control tower jutting from its top. It was here, in an area known as Camp Justice, where the military commissions were held. Inside the building, a member of Mr. Khadr’s defense team handed her a stack of papers; it didn’t take her long to figure out what it was: the confession of prisoner 0766, Omar Ahmed Khadr.
As part of a deal signed before her arrival, Mr. Khadr had pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him, making him the youngest war criminal in modern history. At the end of the documents was Mr. Khadr’s signature, in the same uneven writing as he signed his letters to her.
Ms. Zinck says she didn’t feel disappointment or outrage at Mr. Khadr. She says she wasn’t even surprised. To her, it was just the latest sign that the system had failed him.
She still wanted to testify. The jury was unaware of all aspects of the deal and would in part determine his sentence. And though it might have little impact on the outcome, she wanted to show Mr. Khadr that the outside world had not abandoned him.
At about a quarter to three, in a canary-yellow jacket, she took the stand. She was scared but "on," reminded of the moments before she defended her Ph.D. dissertation. About 50 people, mostly military personnel, occupied the windowless room. And there, a few feet away, sat her student. Mr. Khadr wore a dark suit, and a trim beard covered his face. At 24 years old, he was no longer the slight boy who had been captured in Afghanistan.
They exchanged a short nod of hello and a smile.
Ms. Zinck settled into the witness chair. Hours earlier Tabitha Speer, widow of the Army medic whom Mr. Khadr had now admitted killing, sat in the same chair, talking about the life of her late husband. At one point, she had spoken directly to Mr. Khadr, saying he had stolen a father from her two children.
Now, the jury heard a different story.
Prompted by questions from Lt. Col. Jon S. Jackson, Mr. Khadr’s Army defense lawyer, Ms. Zinck told the court about her background, how her relationship with Mr. Khadr developed, and the person she had grown to know.
"What’s your analysis of Omar’s writing of what you’ve seen?" asked Lt. Col. Jackson.
Ms. Zinck emphasized his good character, calling him courteous, with a generous spirit: "He is remarkably outward focused," she said. "He will always ask what’s happening to the people that he’s writing to."
"And, of course, I mean I see an intelligent young man," she added. "A man who’s thoughtful and has a good vocabulary and capacity to express himself." If he ever wanted to apply to King’s, she said she would write his recommendation.
The prosecution lawyer, a captain whose name has been redacted from the court transcript, seized on that statement.
Would admissions officers "consider the whole Omar, which would be the fact that he admitted that he murdered someone?" he asked.
Yes, said Ms. Zinck.
"They’ll consider the fact that he admitted that he attempted to murder as many Americans as he possibly could?"
Yes, she repeated.
"That he wanted to murder for money?"
Yes.
He hammered on the fact that Ms. Zinck was not speaking on behalf of King’s or everyone at King’s. Again and again, he made the point that the prisoner might not get accepted if he applied.
"If I’m a betting woman," she answered at one point, "odds are good."
The prosecutor brought up foul language and crass names Mr. Khadr had called guards and military officers, asking: Is that thoughtful? Is that courteous?
No, Ms. Zinck said. But she had two teenagers at home and heard that language under much less "difficult circumstances."
When the prosecutor had finished, Lt. Col. Jackson asked whether, if Omar Khadr applied to King’s as a convicted war criminal, it would be taken into account that he was 15 at the time of the crimes. Yes, replied Ms. Zinck, it would. And then she gave voice to what many had long argued was the crux of the case:
"We treat our children differently before the law, because we understand that human beings are mutable and that it is our responsibility to protect them, and particularly our responsibility to give them opportunity to reform, right, to start again."
Three days later, the jury sentenced Mr. Khadr to 40 years in prison. Ms. Zinck’s words had apparently fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps her testimony meant something to Mr. Khadr; it’s hard to know. Mr. Edney declined to make him available for an interview.
But also sitting in the courtroom during her testimony was Katherine Porterfield, a child psychologist who works with child soldiers and victims of torture. In her mind, the professor’s contribution was immeasurable.
"To me," Ms. Porterfield says, "the greatest truth that was spoken at that entire hearing came out of Arlette Zinck’s mouth."
As part of his plea deal, Mr. Khadr’s sentence was reduced to eight years. And after one more year in Guantánamo, Canada would consider allowing him to be repatriated to serve the remainder of his time.
Exhausted and mentally drained, Ms. Zinck cried on the plane ride home, but she felt hopeful that Mr. Khadr’s life was entering a new phase.
Lt. Col. Jackson had made her an offer: While Mr. Khadr remains in Guantánamo, can you develop a correspondence course for him?
Ms. Zinck relished the idea—and made it a team effort.
She brought together a multidisciplinary group of about 15 professors from in and outside of King’s: a mathematician, a biologist, a historian, a geographer, a religion scholar, and others.
They designed a curriculum based on books by Canadian authors set in different parts of the country or exploring different cultures there, providing Mr. Khadr with a virtual tour of a home he barely knew. He read Who Has Seen the Wind, a novel about life on the Canadian prairie, and Obasan, a story told through the eyes of a child about the internment of the Japanese in Canada during World War II.
They wove in lessons about math, history, and geography with the reading. For example, when he read a book that featured the Canadian Rockies, a physicist at King’s designed a math lesson to teach Mr. Khadr how to measure the height of a mountain using triangulation.
The lessons were intended to help sustain him during his final year in Guantánamo, but he remained in limbo. In November 2011, when he was first eligible to return to Canada, government leaders gave mixed messages as to whether he would be moved.
As the months dragged on, his military lawyers sought to bolster the correspondence lessons. So, for the second time in her life, Ms. Zinck was asked to go to Guantánamo. In April and May 2012, she held what she called the "spring session"—two visits lasting a few days each.
At Guantánamo, Ms. Zinck insisted on wearing a business suit, hose, and heels despite the 90-degree heat—a wardrobe that sometimes drew quizzical looks on the base. She wanted to dress as she would for classes at King’s.
In a small room at the base’s Camp Echo, with Mr. Khadr at a small, plastic table, his ankles shackled to the floor, she taught practical lessons on essay writing and reading critically. But it was also a freewheeling affair, with Ms. Zinck recruiting others on the base to contribute brief seminars. A civilian lawyer taught Mr. Khadr about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With Ms. Porterfield, the psychologist, Mr. Khadr read journal articles and connected concepts in the psychology of trauma and resilience to his own life.
Ms. Porterfield says it felt a like graduate-level class.
For Ms. Zinck, the lessons for Mr. Khadr were a curriculum of "human flourishing," approaching a Platonic ideal of what education should be. Without the pressure to transmit job skills or meet academic requirements, she and her colleagues were free to teach to the whole person. And contrary to the criticisms that she had no business giving lessons to a suspected terrorist, Ms. Zinck believes she was acting in the true spirit of liberal education, with its power to change lives.
"That’s ultimately what liberal arts and science education is all about," she says. "It builds people."
Arlette Zinck takes a white binder from the bottom shelf of a bookcase in her low-lit office at King’s. She places it on a table and opens the cover.
Inside, preserved in plastic sleeves, are Mr. Khadr’s lesson plans and completed tests. The professor turns the pages as if reminiscing over a family photo album.
Someday she would like to give the assignments back to Mr. Khadr. Once he’s free. Perhaps to serve as a reminder of how far he has come.
In September 2012, 10 years after he was captured—and almost four years to the day from Mr. Edney’s talk at King’s University College—Mr. Khadr returned to Canada.
The departure from Guantánamo was a long-sought victory, but it was not an easy homecoming. For Ms. Zinck, the sad irony was that though Mr. Khadr was closer than ever—held at a maximum-security prison in Ontario—she was cut off from him. As a new prisoner, Mr. Khadr had been placed under evaluation, with restricted communications privileges.
He was also a target for other inmates. Given his high profile, Ms. Zinck feared he would be hurt, or worse.
The uncertainty took a toll, and the professor drew heavily on her Christian beliefs. "Without my own vibrant, personal faith, the pain of caring in a context where so, so, so many are ambivalent or opposed might be more than I can bear," she says.
Indeed, many were against Mr. Khadr’s return.
One of them was Ezra Levant, a Canadian newspaper columnist, who wrote about the case in his 2011 book, The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. In it, he lambasted Ms. Zinck as a key member of Mr. Khadr’s "fan club," saying she had "led the charge in turning her campus into a factory for Khadr groupies." 
He argued that sympathetic Canadians like Ms. Zinck had been duped by the savvy Mr. Khadr.
Others have questioned whether she overlooked the hurt caused to Tabitha Speer and her family. Ms. Zinck said she prays regularly for them.
"People are going to eventually meet this young man," she says, "and they’re going to come to their own decisions about who he is."
Ultimately, her work did not hinge on whether Mr. Khadr did or did not do what he was charged with. It was about restoring an individual to the larger community.
"For us, it’s never been about guilt or innocence; we’re not lawyers," she says of the team of educators she assembled. "It’s been about the simple understanding that punishment plays some role in justice, but if that’s all you’ve got, you haven’t got justice."
While the criticism has persisted, others have rallied to support her, with some saying her involvement in a very public issue is all too rare these days for academics.
David J. Goa, director of the University of Alberta’s Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life, has contributed lessons on Christianity, Islam, and secularism to Mr. Khadr. He says Ms. Zinck and King’s, with its liberal-arts focus and Christian orientation, had entered an area where most administrators and professors at larger, public universities would be reluctant to go.
To Mr. Goa, Ms. Zinck is fulfilling one of a professor’s fundamental roles. "One of the gifts of tenure," he says, "is precisely to give you liberty to speak in the public square about things that are important and to enhance the conversation about it."
"Integrity." Ms. Zinck says. "Who has it? What does it look like?"
It is 9:30 a.m. on a sunny winter day at King’s, and the professor is starting to rally her sleepy students into a conversation about A Man for All Seasons and the virtues—and drawbacks—of living a conscientious life.
She moves around the room, a small gold cross hanging from her neck, and tries to get the 22 students to use the text and the decision of its main character, Sir Thomas More, to reflect on their own lives. "What does living with integrity look like?" she asks them.
The discussion continues, but one topic Ms. Zinck won’t bring up in the classroom is Mr. Khadr. If a student asks about their relationship, she is happy to discuss it, but outside of class.
In general, few ask. While some students at King’s remain engaged in the Khadr case, those who were provoked by Mr. Edney’s remarks have all graduated.
Mr. Khadr’s case continues to receive attention from the news media, but since his release from Guantánamo, it is not the same hot-button issue it once was.
Today Mr. Khadr is imprisoned in a medium-security facility not far from Edmonton and fighting his conviction, saying he signed the plea deal because it was his only way out of Guantánamo.
Ms. Zinck was able to re-establish communication with him several months after his return and now speaks with him often. Members of the team of professors she organized visit Mr. Khadr regularly to tutor him, and other prisoners have expressed interest in joining the classes.
He is about halfway to the credits needed to receive his high-school diploma. He hopes to become a doctor. Enrollment at King’s someday remains a possibility.
Looking back on it all, Ms. Zinck says, she never intended to become so involved. "Look, I got up that morning in September 2008, and I went to work. I sat in the audience and I listened because that was my job, and I watched our students because that, too, was my job, and everything else has fallen out from this."
And for all that Mr. Khadr has received from Ms. Zinck—the letters, the lessons, the hope—she says the gifts have been returned in kind.  
"In getting to know this young man, I have been privileged to have observed embodied hope in a way that I have not been exposed to it before," she says. "I have learned how to cope with fear, my own and other people’s. I’ve learned the value of story and how engaging with narrative can open windows and doors in the most isolating prison cells."
Letters from Omar Khadr quoted in this article were made public at his trial. Arlette Zinck’s letters to Mr. Khadr first appeared in the Edmonton Journal.

- See more at: http://0-chronicle.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/article/The-Professorthe-Prisoner/146183/#sthash.M2x3Mc89.dpuf

Babies

There were so many different  ways to dissect this article. My mind is still processing. My head hurts! Before we get into it, I have to say this: As a parent, there is nothing I wouldn't do for my babies. I don't agree or disagree with the path these  parents took to get their families. I do understand and empathize. 

Let's get to it.

Adoption, surrogacy, and in-vitro are a few non-traditional methods of creating a family. I would argue that non-traditional births have become traditional in their own way, a part of the fabric of our culture for the current generation.  This article was eye-opening for me. This small sliver of reproduction and parenting was nowhere on my radar.

Chinese parents seeking American surrogates.

The article breaks it down into a few reasons why:
1. Access to an American passport for their child, a valuable ticket to American education and opportunity.
2. Skirting Chinese law restricting number of babies. If you have the babies outside of China, the single child law no longer applies to you!
3. Wanting American genes in hopes their children will have "American" features of blond hair, blue eyes, and tall height.

I cannot even get into the vile comments around illegal citizenship, distorted American values, and a sundry of other ridiculous hate. So I won't. Instead, let's focus on these top three reasons the article identified as values of the Chinese parents who participate in this market.

1. American passport, access, and education
This is why international experiences are crucial to informing and shaping our perceptions. I know I complain about the poor state of our education in this country. I read statistics and watch movies like "Waiting for Superman" and fret over what is to become of our children, why we don't pay our teachers better, and what my role is supposed to  be in it all. Advocate? Change agent? Critic? Supporter? Educator?

But these families are coming from all over the world because they want their children to have an American education. I am dumbfounded. Have they not read the data? Or been in the schools? What information are they getting that leads them to believe an American education is superior to other educations? And if that is so, how much worse is the education in their communities? 

I am guilty of the same behavior. I love me some Finland! I will talk about Finland all day. I actively seek Fulbright opportunities and jobs at the University of Finland. I am Facebook BFFs with the Finland Consulate. Everything I read tells me nothing but wonderful things.  Is the information I'm getting accurate? Or is the Finland Tourism Board decidedly good at their job? 

I understand we take our citizenship for granted. I couldn't cite rhyme and verse every reason an American passport is a benefit, but I understand it does guarantee access and privilege in a way that is unattainable for others countries. 

2. Chinese Law and Single Baby Households
Ellie Chang. My best friend since 5th grade. She went to USC and works for Nestle. Her parents are refugees from Cambodia. Anything I know about Chinese culture, I know from her, her brother, and her parents. Their dining room table was my home away from home. I tried all parts of a duck at her grandmother's hand one Chinese New Year. I love her family. We never asked questions about why her parents left Cambodia for America. I wonder if this law contributed in any way to their decision. 

There are a few exceptions to the law. Twins, multiple marriages, untimely death of a child, and a few others.  When I first learned about it in grade school, I was scared. It was scary to me to think that my government, the people I was supposed to trust, could make such an intimate decision for me. And now we see the impact of these decisions.

The population is aging and there is no one to replace them. Because of the emphasis on boys, there are not enough women to marry sons off to, assuming the son is straight that is. Women are taking advantage of the situation, waiting longer to get married, moving and marrying other non-Chinese,  and asking for huge dowries and lavish weddings. 

If I was in the same situation, what would I do? 

3. "Superior American Genes"
It seems we always want what we don't have. Short people want to be taller. People with long hair want short hair. Thin people want curves and voluptuous people want a thigh gap. Good gracious, can we please love and appreciate what we were given?  

The more pressing issue, is from this rational I draw two conclusions:
1. All Americans are blond, blue-eyed, and tall. When these families think America, they see Barbie.
2. These traits will ensure my children will be successful.

This is where my head started hurting. I cannot wrap my brain around the number of issues with this rationale. And if this is what these families think, then is this the image we put out there to the world? In 2014,  is American still in denial about who is American and what we look like and who is successful? My answer before reading this article was, "Yes". My answer after reading this article was, "Yes and how do we change that?"

The link and full text are below….There are some uber-cute pictures of kids and happy families  :-) 




http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/21/305514689/made-in-the-u-s-a-childless-chinese-turn-to-american-surrogates
Chinese couples who are unable to have children are turning to a surprising place for help these days: America. By hiring American surrogates, Chinese couples get around a ban on surrogacy in China, as well as the country's birth limits.

It also guarantees their children something many wealthy Chinese want these days: a U.S. passport.Tony Jiang and his wife, Cherry, live in Shanghai and couldn't have children naturally. First, they turned to underground hospitals in China for surrogacy.

It didn't go well.
Jiang says one of the surrogates ran away."It was almost Chinese New Year's break. She became so homesick so she flew back home," he says. "My wife was just two or three days away from embryo transfer. That was really ridiculous and disappointing."

So Jiang went online and found a fertility clinic in Orange County, Calif. Three years and $275,000 later, Tony and Cherry have a son and two girls, which would have been against the law had they all been born in China.

The couple now works for the clinic, connecting it with Chinese clients, the vast majority of whom suffer from infertility, Jiang says. Others clients have included gay men and heterosexual couples barred from having a second child in China.

Jiang's first clients were a couple — both Communist Party members — who were leaders at a government-owned firm."How could leaders violate this kind of regulation?" he says. "You could be easily laid off if somebody knows you already have two kids."The wife had nearly died giving birth to their first son. The couple did have a second child through surrogacy, who — because he was born overseas — did not violate Chinese law.

Still, they're very cautious about appearances.

"Only their closest friends, relatives, know they have two boys. All their colleagues, leaders, bosses don't know," Jiang says.

 Advantages Of American Surrogacy 
Chinese women routinely fly to the U.S. to give birth so their children can get an American passport and enjoy the benefits that come with it, including clean air and a U.S. education. Birth tourism is so common it provided the plot for a popular movie last year, Finding Mr. Right.

Amy Kaplan is the director of West Coast Surrogacy and West Coast Egg Donation, the fertility clinic that helped and now employs Tony Jiang. She says Chinese surrogacy took off in recent years through word of mouth. Her clinic saw their first Chinese client in 2009. Now, 47 percent of clients waiting for a surrogate are from mainland China, she says.

There are no hard numbers on Chinese surrogacies, but Kaplan figures in California alone there are perhaps several hundred right now.

She says her firm only works with clients who can show a medical need for surrogacy, and not those who just want a passport for their kid. But she says perfectly healthy couples have forged medical records to try to meet the requirements."The surrogates are putting their own health at risk for another person," she says. "And for immigration reasons, to me, that's .... not ethical."For a Shanghai businessman, who gave his English name as Mark, there are other reasons for seeking out a surrogate.

"I know my dream, to have a baby," he says. "For my status, to have a baby is not easy."

What he means by "status" is that he's gay, which is still considered fairly taboo in China. So he went to America to quietly start a family. Last year, he had a daughter, Yifan."When I hold her, look at her, my heart was expanding," he says. "She looks exactly like my mirror image."

Mark, who is 34, chose the U.S. because it gave Yifan a clear, legal identity, including an American passport, which she can use to attend school there in the future.

Like many Chinese his age, Mark is disappointed with China's education system."For Chinese school, you are not allowed to have a free talk. So you just sit there quietly, just passively receiving knowledge," he says. "But in the U.S., it's different. Be more innovative, creative and free spirit."When Yifan reaches high school, Mark plans to move to America and educate her there. 

East Meets West, Clashes Sometimes 

Chinese parents often have specific concerns and novel demands of their American surrogates. At first, Tony Jiang did: "I remember very clear how panicked I was in the first 12 weeks." When his surrogate, a woman in Northern California named Amanda Krywokulsky, was carrying his first daughter, Jiang worried about radiation. Krywokulsky remembers: "Once the pregnancy was confirmed, they had asked about me wearing a lead apron when I used the microwave, which I thought was kind of weird." Jiang says some couples apply the principles of traditional Chinese medicine to pregnancy and childbirth, which clash with American behavior.

"I saw my surrogate when delivering; she was chewing ice," he remembers. "So that's quite weird. Most of my clients don't understand or don't suggest their surrogates to drink icy water during pregnancy because they believe these cold things they drink or eat could arouse miscarriage."

Some of Jiang's clients even tried to have lifestyle provisions written into the surrogacy contracts: Don't eat seafood, don't drink ice water, limit activities in at least the first four weeks. "They say: I will pay your four months' salary if you can [stay on] bed rest four weeks," Jiang says. "People raise these kinds of ridiculous provisions, but finally they understand the situation, and they let it go."Jennifer Garcia, a surrogacy case coordinator with Extraordinary Conceptions in Carlsbad, Calif., says some Chinese clients don't just want American surrogates — they also want American eggs.

"They all say the same thing: tall, blond, blue-eyed and pretty," Garcia says.She says they see an egg from a tall woman as a way to genetically trade up for stature. "In Asian culture, they are a bit shorter; they just want really tall children and strong boys," Garcia says. "And they're thinking the Caucasian girl is stronger and taller, therefore they'll have stronger, taller children."

Garcia and other clinicians expect Chinese demand for American surrogates to continue to grow, even with the recent relaxation of China's population policy.There was a rush to conceive children earlier this year — the Year of the Horse — which, according to the Chinese zodiac, is especially auspicious for boys.
Frank Langfitt is NPR's Shanghai correspondent. You can follow him @franklangfitt./blogs/parallels/2014/04/21/305514689/made-in-the-u-s-a-childless-chinese-turn-to-american-surrogates

Not Everyone's Racist

I recently finished a 6-week fitness program through Kaia Fit. Three days of insanity/P90X/TRX/Yoga followed by one day of trail running. Every morning at 6am we were sweatin' it out to fun music. All kinds of music, but mainly something with a beat to wake us up and get us moving.

 In my class, I was the only African-American. There was one gal who could be of Asian decent. Everyone else was White. Including our instructors.  There came a day when the music was starting to mess with my mind. And I didn't know if any one else was bothered. Could be that folks were too busy trying to hold the plank position to notice that almost every song was not a clean edited version, but the original version that was dropping the N-word left and right.

I felt uncomfortable and couldn't focus. But no one else seemed bothered. I wondered what this room looked like when it was all White people listening to this music with this offensive word. Did they really not notice or care?

Week 4 I finally spoke up. I told the instructor after class how I felt and told her I'd be happy to bring in clean versions of the songs. Most of the music was music I had at home. I was pleasantly surprised by her reaction. She apologized and said she would take care of it. She let me know it wasn't even something she thought about, but would now take more care with music selection. She told me I didn't have to bring in music, it was her job to provide it and she would do it. And again, she apologized.

I don' t know what I was expecting. But I was not expecting her to take ownership of the issue and fix it. Maybe because of my experiences and where we live (Reno) I was thinking she wouldn't take me seriously, brush me off, or give a fake apology and change nothing. The last couple weeks of the session there were no more N-words.  Not everyone is racist :-)

Six Things I did not know about the Civil Rights Act

I really liked this article because it spoke to a few facts I was unaware of about the Civil Rights Act.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/10/politics/civil-rights-act-interesting-facts/

1.       More Republicans voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act than Democrats

2.       A fiscal conservative became an unsung hero in helping the Act pass

3.       Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. met for the first and only time during Senate debate on the act

4.       The act didn't help just black Americans

5.       A segregationist congressman's attempt to kill the bill backfired

6.       The 1964 law didn't do much to address discrimination at the ballot box

My favorite tidbit is #2. It refers to Representative William McCulloch, a Republican from Ohio. The article says McCulloch opposed funding education and was an advocate for gun rights and school prayer. He had very conservative views. However, his own ancestors opposed slavery before the Civil War according to the article and McCulloch believed in the Constitution’s protection of all people saying, “The Constitution doesn't say that whites alone shall have our most basic rights, but that we all shall have them.”

Then he was key in getting the Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act approved. These are actions I would not have thought would come from a person such as him.  The article also revealed that the district McCulloch represented is the same district currently being represented by House Speaker John Boehner!  I find it fascinating that we have two people with similar values from the same party with very different work ethics in government. McCulloch supported President Kennedy, working with him to uphold the constitution and sincerely caring about the American people. Boehner outright declared he would do everything in his power to thwart the success of President Obama and actively works against the administration for no real apparent reason other being obnoxious. 

I can’t help but wonder, what in their experiences and background would lead these two men with similar values, to act in such dissimilar ways when it comes to serving in public office?