Teaching the personal meaning of 9/11: Welles Crowther, the man with the red bandana

September 10, 2012

On Facebook, Duncanville Superteacher Medgar Roberts said:

I am using this in my classroom to teach the personal impact of 9/11 on real people. If you have fifteen minutes to spare it is worth the time. You might want to have a bandanna nearby, though. It is a bit of a tearjerker.

Don’t believe him.  Get at least two bandanas.

ESPN produced the film about Welles Crowther.

Ten years later: remembering the man who led people to safety after terrorists struck the World Trade Center on September 11th — a former Boston College lacrosse player whose trademark was a red bandanna.

If you use this film, please tell us about it.


Encore haunting by Santayana’s Ghost: FDR warns about Republican hypocrisy and sarcasm, from 1936

September 10, 2012

A haunting by Santayana‘s Ghost, on Social Security, unemployment insurance, job training, job creation and budget deficits:

[Editor’s note, 2016: Rats! that almost-perfect speech excerpt has disappeared from YouTube. Here’s a shorter excerpt.]

Our friend SBH pointed us to the text of the speech.  FDR addressed the New York State Democratic Convention, in Syracuse, on September 29, 1936  (Can you imagine — does any state have such thing still —  state party conventions so late in the year, today?).  He found it at UC-Santa Barbara‘s American Presidency Project website.  Here’s the text of the excerpt above, plus a little:

In New York and in Washington, Government which has rendered more than lip service to our Constitutional Democracy has done a work for the protection and preservation of our institutions that could not have been accomplished by repression and force.

Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them — we will do more of them, we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories. No one will forget that they had their golden opportunity—twelve long years of it.

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done.

Read more at the American Presidency Project: Franklin D. Roosevelt: Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15142&st=Roosevelt&st1#ixzz1T2VHx1tx

More:

Social Security Poster: old man

Social Security Poster: old man (Photo from the Social Security Board, via Wikipedia)

This is mostly an encore post.