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The kids on the bus call Jeremy Hernández a hero. He calls them his little brothers and sisters.

When the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River, people around the world watched the orange school bus that fell with the bridge. That bus was filled with 50 kids and eight young staff members from Waite House, along with the bus driver and her two children, all returning from a field trip to the Bunker Hills water park.

On the orange bus on Wednesday evening, kids kept asking Monica Segura, “Are we almost there? Monica, Monica, are we almost there yet?” She tried to distract them, leading them in a song about elephants. She remembers checking her watch at about 6 p.m., thinking that they were running late and parents would soon be calling Waite House to see where their children were.

When they got to the bridge, Monica remembers, kids got up out of their seats to look at it, pointing at the river. She told them to sit down—every counselor knows you have to keep the kids in their seats on the bus. Then she saw a semi truck swerving, and the bridge went down, “like in the Power Tower at Valley Fair when it just lets you go.”

“I grabbed the two kids I was with to keep them from hitting their heads,” Monica recalled. “All we saw was all this dust—no heads, nothing. We were quiet a minute until Jeremy got up and jumped over the seats and opened the door—that’s when we all reacted.”

The kids call 20-year-old Jeremy Hernández a hero. He was asleep when the bus got to the bridge, worn out after getting up early and then spending a long day in the water park with the kids from Waite House. One of the kids woke him up when they reached the bridge, and the next thing he heard was a big bang. “I thought we were in a car accident,” Jeremy said. “The bus crashed down … then it crashed again and it stopped. You could hear the kids moaning and crying and you couldn’t see them because of the dust.”

Jeremy reacted instantly, diving for the back door and then superintending a speedy evacuation of children, staff and bus driver. “I just remember grabbing and putting them down, grabbing and putting them down, handing kids to the guys who came to help.” Jeremy didn’t leave until everyone was off the bus, and then he checked around the bus to make sure that no one was lingering near it.

“They’re like my little brothers and little sisters,” Jeremy said at a press conference on Thursday. “I’ve been working here for five years. It’s like they are a part of me.”

Monica agrees. “Our youth program is like a big family. We are really close with the kids and their parents. We love every single kid.”

On Thursday, a reporter at the press conference asked whether the very young staff had been trained for the emergency. “We never had a training like this before,” Monica replied, “because who would imagine ‘Oh, what if the bridge falls off?’ But we do have training in first aid and to get the kids to safety.”

She described what happened after the kids were off the bus, but panicking and crying and afraid the bus would explode. “We gathered all the kids up. Once I got them all in one section, I told them to line up – there’s air conditioning and water and I’ll buy you guys something to eat. All the staff helped with all the kids. My co-worker was the one who made the whole list to see if all the kids were there.”

“We always knew where all the kids were at.”

The young staff come from the Waite House neighborhood. “I came here when I was a kid,” said Monica. “I volunteered, and I’ve been working here for five years.”

Waite House is in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis. U.S. census figures from 2000 showed a median household income of $21,353 in Phillips, compared to a citywide average of $37,974. Some 31.9 percent of Phillips families lived in poverty, compared to 11.9 percent for the city as a whole. Unemployment was more than twice the city average.

Tragedies shine a light on heroes. After the cameras and national press move on, the hard work of daily, dedicated service will continue.

The fifty younger kids and their older “brothers and sisters” are at Waite House every day. Every day, the staff—including the teenage staff—encourages, prods and praises the younger children into learning lessons in discipline and leadership, into practicing cooperation and fair play, into an appreciation of education. Youth program participants earn points by reading books and by community service, and those points earn field trips and recognition.

“Our workers grew up here,” says John Richard, head of adult education programs at Waite House. “They are the slum kids everybody says are the problem. Some are from immigrant families. It was their coolheadedness and clear thinking that saved the day. If this isn’t an example that inner city kids can be part of the solution, not the problem, I don’t know what is.”

The focus of Waite House’s youth programs, director Francisco Segovia says, is leadership development for youth. At Thursday’s press conference, Segovia and Pillsbury United Communities executive director Tony Wagner stepped back out of the spotlight and let their young leaders shine.

The kids on the school bus need our help. Jeremy Hernández—named a hero by the “little brothers and sisters” he guided to safety—had to drop out of Dunwoody College last year because he didn’t have enough money for tuition. Julia—the youth director at Waite House—is still in the hospital with a broken back and two broken feet and more than 150 stitches in her arm. Many of the younger kids on the bus lack medical insurance.

We can all help. Donations for scholarships and medical care can be made over the phone by calling toll free 888-642-3040 or by mail to the Pillsbury United Communities, Development Office, 1201 37th Avenue North, Minneapolis, MN 55412. Please specify the Waite House Bridge Disaster Fund when mailing in donations. You can also donate through the Pillsbury United Communities web page and can designate that your donation go to Waite House.

If you go to the website, take a look at the descriptions of Waite House and Pillsbury’s other community centers. They are doing everyday, grassroots work in our communities with families and kids who need a helping hand. Monica Segura of Waite House said it well: “Our youth program is like a big family. We are really close with the kids and their parents. We love every single kid.”

The family needs help. Let’s give them a hand.

When the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River, people around the world watched the orange school bus that fell with the bridge. That bus was filled with 50 kids and eight young staff members from Waite House, along with the bus driver and her two children, all returning from a field trip to the Bunker Hills water park.

On the orange bus on Wednesday evening, kids kept asking Monica Segura, “Are we almost there? Monica, Monica, are we almost there yet?” She tried to distract them, leading them in a song about elephants. She remembers checking her watch at about 6 p.m., thinking that they were running late and parents would soon be calling Waite House to see where their children were.

When they got to the bridge, Monica remembers, kids got up out of their seats to look at it, pointing at the river. She told them to sit down—every counselor knows you have to keep the kids in their seats on the bus. Then she saw a semi truck swerving, and the bridge went down, “like in the Power Tower at Valley Fair when it just lets you go.”

“I grabbed the two kids I was with to keep them from hitting their heads,” Monica recalled. “All we saw was all this dust—no heads, nothing. We were quiet a minute until Jeremy got up and jumped over the seats and opened the door—that’s when we all reacted.”

The kids call 20-year-old Jeremy Hernández a hero. He was asleep when the bus got to the bridge, worn out after getting up early and then spending a long day in the water park with the kids from Waite House. One of the kids woke him up when they reached the bridge, and the next thing he heard was a big bang. “I thought we were in a car accident,” Jeremy said. “The bus crashed down … then it crashed again and it stopped. You could hear the kids moaning and crying and you couldn’t see them because of the dust.”

Jeremy reacted instantly, diving for the back door and then superintending a speedy evacuation of children, staff and bus driver. “I just remember grabbing and putting them down, grabbing and putting them down, handing kids to the guys who came to help.” Jeremy didn’t leave until everyone was off the bus, and then he checked around the bus to make sure that no one was lingering near it.

“They’re like my little brothers and little sisters,” Jeremy said at a press conference on Thursday. “I’ve been working here for five years. It’s like they are a part of me.”

Monica agrees. “Our youth program is like a big familiy, we are really close with the kids and their parents.  We love every single kid.”

On Thursday, a reporter at the press conference asked whether the very young staff had been trained for the emergency. “We never had a training like this before,” Monica replied, “because who would imagine ‘Oh, what if the bridge falls off?’ But we do have training in first aid and to get the kids to safety.”

She described what happened after the kids were off the bus, but panicking and crying and afraid the bus would explode. “We gathered all the kids up. Once I got them all in one section, I told them to line up – there’s air conditioning and water and I’ll buy you guys something to eat. All the staff helped with all the kids. My co-worker was the one who made the whole list to see if all the kids were there.”

“We always knew where all the kids were at.”

The young staff come from the Waite House neighborhood. “I came here when I was a kid,” said Monica. “I volunteered, and I’ve been working here for five years.”

Waite House is in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis. U.S. census figures from 2000 showed a median household income of $21,353 in Phillips, compared to a citywide average of $37,974. Some 31.9 percent of Phillips families lived in poverty, compared to 11.9 percent for the city as a whole. Unemployment was more than twice the city average.

Tragedies shine a light on heroes. After the cameras and national press move on, the hard work of daily, dedicated service will continue.

The fifty younger kids and their older “brothers and sisters” are at Waite House every day. Every day, the staff—including the teenage staff—encourages, prods and praises the younger children into learning lessons in discipline and leadership, into practicing cooperation and fair play, into an appreciation of education. Youth program participants earn points by reading books and by community service, and those points earn field trips and recognition.

“Our workers grew up here,” says John Richard, head of adult education programs at Waite House. “They are the slum kids everybody says are the problem. Some are from immigrant families. It was their coolheadedness and clear thinking that saved the day. If this isn’t an example that inner city kids can be part of the solution, not the problem, I don’t know what is.”

The focus of Waite House’s youth programs, director Francisco Segovia says, is leadership development for youth. At Thursday’s press conference, Segovia and Pillsbury United Communities executive director Tony Wagner stepped back out of the spotlight and let their young leaders shine.

On this Sunday, I visited the 16th Street Baptist Church, where Addie Mae Collins, 14. Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley were struck down by hatred and racism. On September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan bombers killed four young girls and wounded more than two dozen other people in a church on Sunday morning. Their deaths came just a few weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the March on Washington and gave his famous “I have a dream” speech.

I’m traveling with the Chicago Children’s Choir, as they celebrate their 50th anniversary with a concert tour of civil rights sites in the South. It is a privilege to spend time with these young people and a joy to hear their music. And I am on pilgrimage, walking on sacred ground, standing in the places I could only watch on television and pray over as a young teenager on a Minnesota farm in the early 1960s.

Today in the 16th Street Baptist Church, the choir sang “Birmingham Sunday.”

On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.

I know we were standing on sacred ground. This is the very church where Denise and Addie and Carole and Cynthia prayed and sang and went to Sunday school. This is the very church where, on Monday night after Monday night, brave people gathered from 1958 onward to plan and work and organize to win freedom and justice and equal rights. I stood with members of the congregation and guests and two choirs and we all linked arms and sang “We Shall Overcome” in the same church where Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Fred Shuttlesworth sang the same anthem.

This morning I talked with elders in Birmingham. Some of them were not much older than me, but we are the elders now. They marched and they shrugged off threats and they persevered in the civil rights movement. It’s better now, they said, but not all better.

The world is better now, they said, because Birmingham is integrated and so is the whole country. It’s not better because integration has not ended prejudice or discrimination—that will take generations, one told me. He also said that he saw the same divisions, setting one race against another, playing out again as politicians try to turn African Americans against immigrants, black against brown, inciting and pandering to prejudices.

Another way in which it is not all better is that the children and grandchildren do not feel the same things we felt. “The same things” does not signify the pain and the fear and the loss of so many good people. “The same things” signifies the commitment to struggle for a justice, the joy in comradeship in the struggle, the faith that a better world is possible and that it is our job and our privilege to build it.

I hope that this tour gives at least some of our children a taste of the past, a taste of the struggle for justice and the joy that is in it, a taste of the faith and the hope that are needed to join in that still-vital struggle for peace and freedom and justice.

The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can’t do much more than to sing you a song.
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.

[The song, “Birmingham Sunday,” was written by Richard Fariña]

What do you say as life winds down? I know it is right to visit old friends and family, but I don’t know what to say. And that’s complicated further as family paths diverge so far that the only bridges are shared names, weddings, births, deaths.

I could talk about next week’s trip to the South, next month’s work, impending graduation and college plans, but I cannot banish the looming thought that the person I tell the stories to will not be here to see the graduation, indeed might not be here when we return from the southern trip.

What if I asked outright how he feels about life coming to a close? But the immediate family doesn’t want to talk about this, and it’s not my place to raise the questions they so gracefully avoid/evade. So I sit in the room, listening to the conversational patter about relatives I don’t know and the stories so well-worn that even I remember them.

I hope that just being present serves as a sign of respect and affection. That may have to be enough.

I met Juana in May. She was one of the people who fasted for ten days to try to move the conscience of the nation toward comprehensive immigration reform. I wrote an article about Juana and the fasters then. A few weeks later, I saw another article about Juana, this one written by a student in a journalism class at St. Thomas.

And today was the third time that I saw news about Juana. Yesterday the immigration agents found her and took her away in handcuffs. Today I saw her nine-year-old daughter crying. Today I stood with Juana’s friends, and I cried, too. Patrick Ness, a stalwart young activist, said, “Our hearts are broken tonight.” And not just for Juana Reyes, but for every immigrant mother torn away from her children because the laws give her no way to be here legally. A few weeks ago, another immigrant mother who had lived in Minnesota for more than a decade was deported, leaving behind her husband and children. They have legal status. She does not.

For Juana and for Sarah, the law gives no way out of their predicament and no way into the United States. For millions like them, there is no line to stand in to become legal residents.

In a few days, I will be going on a Freedom Tour of cities where the battle for civil rights was waged four and five decades ago. I believe that the plight of immigrants like Juana and Sarah challenges us to another battle for human rights.

I’m ready to put up a Neighbors Against the Burner sign in my yard, because I’m convinced that burning refuse-derived fuel (RDF) is a bad deal – economically and on environmental/health grounds. On the other hand, I want to be clear that this doesn’t mean I’m against any power plant going up across the freeway at Rock-Tenn. I’m not. I believe that a power plant burning non-RDF biomass fuel can and should be built to provide affordable energy for Rock-Tenn’s recycling operation, and possibly also for district heating in some part of the Midway neighborhood.

For background on Rock-Tenn and why it needs a new power source, see
Re-fueling Rock Tenn: environmental and economic challenges
Who’s on First? Keeping track of the players
Following the money: who pays and who profits
Garbage or green energy: a look at the issues around RDF

The economic down-side of RDF should be easy to see. For starters, consider the fact that the current RDF production plant in Newport has been subsidized by taxpayer dollars since its beginning. Or the fact that the RDF fuel produced in Newport is so undesirable that the plant has to pay Xcel Energy to take it and burn it. If taxpayers are going to pay millions of dollars in subsidies every year, I’d rather see the money go to paying farmers to grow prairie grass for fuel and/or to increasing the Twin Cities’ recycling percentage, currently about 40 percent to something closer to the 60 percent recycling/composting for municipal waste reached by the Netherlands and Austria. or the 69 percent recycling/composting rate achieved this year by San Francisco.

Health and environmental issues are harder to pin down. Hours of discussion at public meetings and hundreds of pages of reports do not conclusively prove that burning RDF causes cancer or heart attacks or other health problems. Note the weasel word: conclusively.

The British Society for Ecological Medicine’s report says:

There are no certainties in pinning specific health effects on incineration: the report makes that clear. However this is largely because of the complexity of exposure of the human race to many influences.

Cancer may take 10 or 20 years to develop. Birth defects may have multiple causes. Some people are more vulnerable to contaminants than others. Some contaminants build up in the body over time. Some contaminants interact with others in ways that have not yet been identified. People move, so studies of public health around incinerators do not find all of the exposed population.

So scientists speak cautiously. The evidence linking municipal waste incinerators to health problems “is consistent with” causality for adult and childhood cancer and birth defects. The evidence “suggests” a wide range of illnesses connected with municipal waste incinerators.

The British medical report goes on to discuss the precautionary principle.

This principle involves acting in the face of uncertain knowledge about risks from environmental exposures. This means public health measures should be taken in response to limited, but plausible and credible, evidence of likely and substantial harm.

When it comes to RDF, plenty of evidence points to probably dangers. The garbage that goes into the system includes a wide variety of toxic materials. Burning RDF has produced fine particulate emissions (a health hazard in themselves), as well as toxic metals and hazardous organic compounds. Burning RDF also leaves a residue of ash, which is classified as hazardous waste and has to be put somewhere.

Proponents of RDF talk about new emissions control systems and about gasification. Of course, they also say that current systems work just fine.

I don’t buy the arguments. If ever there was a case for the application of the precautionary principle, RDF incineration is that case. We do not need to add more fine particulate emissions to the Twin Cities’ already-polluted air. We do not need to risk emissions of heavy metals and toxic organic compounds. We do not need to make our city the laboratory for conclusively proving –twenty or thirty years from now – that RDF incineration actually causes pulmonary or cardiac illnesses or cancer or birth defects.

Time and time again it has been found that what we did not know about chemicals proved to be far more important than what we did know. As an incinerator generates hundreds of chemicals, including new compounds, we can expect many unpleasant future surprises.

There are alternatives to RDF. We do not need to take a chance with the health of our cities and of future generations.

Paranoia strikes deep—into your life it will creep. Buffalo Springfield, 1967

The U.S. Army now classifies the media as a threat – along with Al Qaeda, warlords and drug cartels. The classification is part of an Army slideshow, which you can download on-line at http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/opsec-blog.pdf.

There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me that I’ve got to beware.

Besides the media, soldiers and their families are apparently security threats. A 79-page order, issued April 19, warns about breaches of operations security—OPSEC in the military jargon—by soldiers writing e-mails home and blogging about their experiences in Iraq. Soldiers must clear e-mails and blog posts with their commanding officers before sending them (2-1(g). Failure to comply with OPSEC “may be punished as violations of a lawful order” under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). And those “not subject to the UCMJ who fail to protect critical and sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure may be subject to administrative, disciplinary, contractual, or criminal action.”

There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Disclosure of “sensitive and critical information” violates OPSEC. What is “sensitive and critical” info? Giving an explanation, Maj. Ray Ceralde, the Army OPSEC program manager, explained that increased numbers of parked cars in a Pentagon lot and increased Pentagon pizza orders on January 16, 1991 could have signaled the next day’s beginning of Operation Desert Storm. That meant these facts were “sensitive and critical information.” (There’s some speculation that the whole pizza/parking lot story is an urban legend—but what do the facts matter, when security is at stake?) Some “critical and sensitive” information is specifically listed, and its disclosure prohibited, by the order, including photos of “Improvised Explosive Device (IED) strikes, battle scenes, casualties, destroyed or damaged equipment, personnel killed in action (KIA), both friendly and adversary…”

Though the 79-page order provides several descriptions of “sensitive” and “critical” information that may not be communicated, none of them provide much guidance to the soldiers, civilian employees, family members, or media who are the targets of the OPSEC order. In a neat Catch-22, the order itself is classified as “For Official Use Only (FOUO)”, and paragraph 1-6e says that FOUO information is “sensitive.” That means the order itself is “for official Government use only” and may not be distributed or circulated. (If you are not afraid of prosecution, you can download Army Regulation 530-1 at http://blog.wired.com/defense/files/army_reg_530_1_updated.)

Bottom line: virtually any information of any kind could become part of a complicated puzzle that could aid the enemy. Virtually any soldier, civilian employee or contractor could be prosecuted for communicating the wrong information. The only way to be sure you are not breaking the rules is to keep your mouth shut and tell no one back home what is actually going on.

That means no pleas for body armor. (E-mails in 2004 broke open the story of unprotected U.S. soldiers.) No scandals about unarmored Humvees (2004-2007). No reporting on torture of prisoners (Abu Ghraib). No truth-telling to families about death-by-friendly-fire (Pat Tillman). No whistle-blowing on a squad that rapes a fourteen-year-old girl and murders her whole family (Mahmudiya). No leaks about massacres (Haditha).

Remember: the media is the enemy. War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength.

Paranoia strikes deep—into your life it will creep.  Buffalo Springfield, 1967

The U.S. Army now classifies the media as a threat – along with Al Qaeda, warlords and drug cartels. The classification is part of an Army slideshow, which you can download on-line at http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/opsec-blog.pdf.

There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me that I’ve got to beware.

Besides the media, soldiers and their families are apparently security threats. A 79-page order, issued April 19, warns about breaches of operations security—OPSEC in the military jargon—by soldiers writing e-mails home and blogging about their experiences in Iraq. Soldiers must clear e-mails and blog posts with their commanding officers before sending them (paragraph 2-1g). Failure to comply with OPSEC “may be punished as violations of a lawful order” under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). And those “not subject to the UCMJ who fail to protect critical and sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure may be subject to administrative, disciplinary, contractual, or criminal action.”  

There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Disclosure of “sensitive and critical information” violates OPSEC. What is “sensitive and critical” info? Giving an explanation, Maj. Ray Ceralde, the Army OPSEC program manager, explained that increased numbers of parked cars in a Pentagon lot and increased Pentagon pizza orders on January 16, 1991 could have signaled the next day’s beginning of Operation Desert Storm. That meant these facts were “sensitive and critical information.” (There’s some speculation that the whole pizza/parking lot story is an urban legend—but what do the facts matter, when security is at stake?) Some “critical and sensitive” information is specifically listed, and its disclosure prohibited, by the order, including photos of “Improvised Explosive Device (IED) strikes, battle scenes, casualties, destroyed or  damaged equipment, personnel killed in action (KIA), both friendly and adversary…”

Though the 79-page order provides several descriptions of “sensitive” and “critical” information that may not be communicated, none of them provide much guidance to the soldiers, civilian employees, family members, or media who are the targets of the OPSEC order. In a neat Catch-22, the order itself is classified as “For Official Use Only (FOUO)”, and paragraph 1-6e says that FOUO information is “sensitive.” That means the order itself is “for official Government use only” and may not be distributed or circulated. (If you are not afraid of prosecution, you can download Army Regulation 530-1 at http://blog.wired.com/defense/files/army_reg_530_1_updated.)

Bottom line: virtually any information of any kind could become part of a complicated puzzle that could aid the enemy. Virtually any soldier, civilian employee or contractor could be prosecuted for communicating the wrong information. The only way to be sure you are not breaking the rules is to keep your mouth shut and tell no one back home what is actually going on.

That means no pleas for body armor. (E-mails in 2004 broke open the story of unprotected U.S. soldiers.) No scandals about unarmored Humvees (2004-2007). No reporting on torture of prisoners (Abu Ghraib). No truth-telling to families about death-by-friendly-fire (Pat Tillman). No whistle-blowing on a squad that rapes a fourteen-year-old girl and murders her whole family (Mahmudiya). No leaks about massacres (Haditha).

Remember: the media is the enemy. War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength.