Two links that I’d pass along:
students and others provide watch over victims of 9/11 in NYC Free registration at NYTimes required.
At beliefnet.com, click on the “Being Peace” icon near the top. Gave me a few moments of thoughtfulness. Nice way to start the day or give yourself a quiet break.
I found this very nice after some bad excitement at work yesterday. In training I had learned that most theft in stores is done by professional thieves. That idea was pretty incredible to me. Yesterday we got to experience it first hand, and in fact, I actually got to speak to both members of the team of thieves during the couple of minutes they were in the store. Totally breath-taking in the speed of the operation and frightening to me in how it affected my thoughts and feelings toward people in the store for the rest of the day. Along the same lines, I read in Dear Abby today something that pushed all my buttons:
DEAR ABBY: I am a grandmother who volunteers in a third-grade class. Last week, a child I was reading to turned to me and said, “Grandma, have you ever been so hungry that you couldn’t play at recess?” It broke my heart that an 8-year-old girl could get her brother and herself off to school, but not have food for breakfast. Of course, our elementary school has a free breakfast program. The irony is that some parents would rather send their children to school hungry than sign them up. Unfortunately, many children complain of hunger during the school day. My teachers and I have started a classroom pantry so we can provide a nutritious snack to any student who, because of hunger, struggles to read, solve an arithmetic problem or play actively on the school grounds.
Now – the schools have breakfast and lunch programs which provide free or low-cost meals to students who need them. And yet it’s up to the parents to sign up the kids who need and would benefit from such a program? That seems to be so against the purpose of the program. If the school finds that a child is going hungry, don’t we have an obligation to provide the child with meals? We have ok’d the expense of such programs. Our goal is to give kids the meals they need in order to prosper and learn. I think we can find a way to do it without embarrassing parents or compromising anyone’s beliefs, don’t you?
It all boils down to: Do the right thing.
