And 3,000 guns have been taken off the streets. Mayor Adams seemed to be rooting for Paul Vallas who lost the Chicago election for mayor this week. And the mayor on television indicated that the mayors communicate with each other to make the streets safer. And they do communicate with each other, sometimes attending the U.S. Mayors’ Conference.
Just before the election, I watched two parts of a You Tube of Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa. There is no reason to even think of Sliwa at this time. This was when I learned that 80 percent of the people in Rikers’ had no diploma (even a GED) and that 66 percent had dyslexia. Dyslexia is apparently the mayoral administration’s making its own education piece, Bloomberg had school closings and charter schools. DeBlasio had universal pre-k. DeBlasio abandoned GED after he got elected. Bloomberg never had GED, but he did add the number of GED diplomas into his annual graduation rates. Both could have had GED, or it seems all three could have had GED.
But let’s learn more as I thought about this this morning. There have been 2,000 recidivists that are jacking up New York’s crime statistics. It would appear that around 80 percent of them have no diploma and 2/3s have dyslexia or maybe even more of them for each group. There was a transition as Chancellor Banks took over the Department of Education and we know that the problem was not just going to go away because Mayor Adams talked about it. Think about the man who says he could end this, and he could end that (wars and other problems) just by making a telephone call (to Putin and others on his list).
You and I know that the jails are always full of people. All kinds of crimes are taking place every day and new people are enrolling in Rikers and other jails. The streets are full of people with mental health problems, addictions, and people ready to commit crimes. What about their dyslexia and their lacking even a high school diploma?
I happened to speak to a man who became famous who went into a world before the year 2000 that was typical, drugs and crime. He had dyslexia, a great teacher long before there were charter schools everywhere, a desire to earn a GED which he earned, and he felt proud to earn. The man told me how he had to learn whole words because he could not produce the sounds in the words. For us that would be like learning Chinese, Hebrew, and most languages without even learning the sounds. We see Rosh Hashanah once a year, but how many people can read that correctly? And if the men and women in Rikers and other jails and detention centers are not accelerating toward reading and if adults on the streets of New York City are not learning at a fast pace, what is going on? Is this policy a cat and mouse policy that plays into the hands of the police and the pipeline to prison? It is imperative that people know how to read words including mayor, city council election, prison, and more of course. And the entire city has to help now!
So how many of those 2,000 recidivists have received instruction in reading in Rikers and other jails and when did they receive the help? And how many of the people who have been caught with guns in the city under Mayor Adams have learned that they have dyslexia, and something could be done about it? In other words, where is the help?
This article is basically about what we could define as Do the Right Thing instead of just any old thing. Even two decades ago, I revealed publicly that the first question that should have been asked to immigrants seeking English as a second language this. Do you have a diploma from your country? Upon hearing a no, that person should have directed immediately the ESL department to GED class and probably or possibly en español because Spanish was the stronger language. Instead, we got much institutionalization of messaging that it was better to take the test in English which caused long delays for people earning the diploma. I even heard that at a Somos El Futuro Conference on Long Island by a Latina working for one of the most important health companies. Do the Right Thing Mister Mayor and City Council. Do the Right Thing! There should not be long delays for adults to overcome their dyslexia.
The city council of New York is divided between factions including progressives, “common sense” members, and others. In thinking about all those factions, shouldn’t the blame be shared? Just as we look at the people whose need is so great, we should look at the individual members and find out just what they have stated and what they have done. Waking up the entire city matters (woke). Be woke! The mayors of New York have not really given their constituents the very best formula to fight crime, workforce development, parenting, and more. Govern well or gobiernen bien is something I cared about along time ago and the city got incremental improvements instead of greatness. And what has Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago done about dyslexia? Mayor Adams said that her loss in Chicago was a warning sign for the nation, but more information is needed than just an increase in crime and the public seeing crime as the number one issue in a race.
Brandon Johnson was just elected mayor of Chicago and I have had this thought this morning. Can you imagine Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis as mayor of Chicago or even New York City. Think about the handling of COVID-19 and this. No mask mandate at all in schools or on public transportation. And the additional deaths in a city where we watched Elmhurt being overwhelmed, a neighborhood that I lived next to before 1993. The city would have been overwhelmed. True Donald Trump signed on to get US the vaccines, but even he did not wake up strong enough until it was apparent that more people were dying in red states than in blue states. DeSantis never really woke up to anything except talking about the freedom to put your neighbor and neighborhood in harm’s way.
I just did some research of early March 2020 before COVID-19 was declared a national emergency by the CDC. I read about the template which was only those infected needed to wear masks and what those people should do. I noticed a meeting of concerned citizens, educated and religious people where they were sitting around a table and there was no social distancing (March 4, 2020). Any one or all of them could have become infected by just one of the attendees. I did no such thing at that time or any time since. That meeting could have been a virtual meeting instead of a meeting in person. But based on what we know about Trump-DeSantis, could we not conclude that there would have been many more deaths in what were previously “blue cities?” And guess what? No crime would have been committed from their call for freedom.
The thing that has been on my mind most for days is reading about Greece during the Holocaust and World War II. And I am learning new things to share. Before becoming known in the world of GED, I was a social studies teacher on the Lower East Side (LES) and some of my students called me Dannen Yogurt. We know that yogurt is mostly Greek, and the beginning of that company was revealed to me in the book which I will not share right here or right now. I took the train ride in 1983 mentioned at the beginning of the book from Belgrade to Salonika which became Thessalonica under the Greeks. Salonika had been a majority city of Jews who were mostly Sephardic and whose spoke Ladino. “Es konfortable, i non se ve el pantalon” is one of the sentences that I read to share.