Pledge of Allegiance controversy

Defying pledge is a principle as American as they come

By Howard Goodman | Commentary

It seems ridiculous that the Palm Beach County School District should pay $32,500 to settle a lawsuit from a Boynton High teen who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
We're talking about a classroom dispute that never should have turned into a federal lawsuit. But it did, thanks largely to the overreaction of teacher Cynthia Alexandre when Cameron Frazier, 17, refused to rise and recite the pledge in her algebra class on Dec. 8. The situation was a first in her fourth-period class, since the pledge usually is said earlier in the day.
According to the lawsuit, Frazier told Alexandre he has sat out the pledge since sixth grade and didn't intend to change.
Some teachers take a relaxed attitude toward the pledge. The high-school student I live with tells me it's been months since the pledge ceremony has even been held in his classes.
But in this instance, the lawsuit states, Alexandre reacted to Frazier's refusal by saying: "Oh, you wanna bet? See your desk? Now look at mine. Big desk, little desk. You obviously don't know your place in this classroom."
Alexandre went on to call Frazier "ungrateful," "disrespectful" and "un-American," then summoned an assistant principal, another administrator and a school cop to take him to the office, the lawsuit says.
Alexandre assumed she had state law on her side. Since 1942, a Florida statute requires students to get a parent's written permission to be excused from the pledge. And even then, the student must stand at attention while it's recited.
But the state statute is contradicted by federal case law that says a student can't be forced to say the pledge or salute the flag.
This gave the ACLU some powerful ammunition when Frazier turned to the First Amendment advocates for help.
"We get several of these requests a year," said Jim Green, an ACLU attorney from West Palm Beach.
"Usually we send a letter and the school officials back down."
Not this time. The school district waited until a lawsuit was filed -- and then caved. Last week, the district's lawyers agreed the state statute was unconstitutional. They settled on the ACLU's terms and handed Alexandre a written reprimand. The $32,500 mainly is for legal costs and a "nominal" award for Frazier, Green said.
The suit continues against state education officials. The ACLU hopes to get the state statute overturned.
It's tempting to look at all this and say, "There go those liberals again, encouraging people to spit on this country's symbols."
No. What this case says is that no one should be forced to speak or think in lockstep.
That's an old principle, as American as they come. It was best articulated in 1943 in a U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the right of a Jehovah's Witness to defy a West Virginia law requiring students to salute the flag each day.
This was in the midst of World War II, when the United States was fighting for its survival against Nazi Germany and militarist Japan.
Still, the court voted 6-3 to say that freedom of expression includes the right to decline to salute the nation's most cherished symbol.
As Justice Robert Jackson, writing for the majority, wrote: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion."
Imagine that. Even in wartime, the authorities can't dictate what is or isn't cool to say or believe.
In other words, no teacher or principal ought to be ordering a student to say the pledge.
No Capitol cop should be hauling from the gallery someone with a T-shirt reading "2,245 dead -- How many more?" as happened to Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan, arrested before last week's State of the Union address.
And neither should cops eject the wearer of a shirt reading "Support the Troops -- Defending our Freedom," as was Beverly Young, the wife of U.S. Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young, a Republican from St. Petersburg. 

Freedom always has a price. This time it's $32,500 in local taxpayers' money.

Homelessness amid plenty

Palm Beach County is synonymous with wealth. But county policies toward the homeless were pure see-no-evil. Here's one blast I took at the commissioners over the situation.






COUNTY'S VIEW OF HOMELESS A DISGRACE

Date: Thursday, February 2, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

The place needs a coat of paint, probably a new ceiling.

A good dusting, at the very least.

Westgate Tabernacle Church looks as down on its luck as the poor and homeless it welcomes under its leaking roof.

Associate pastor Alan Clapsaddle looks beyond the appearances. "We're a community of love," he says.

He's a former deputy sheriff from Pennsylvania who wears a golden cross on his neck and speaks with practicality and tenderness about the people his church embraces -- people with schizophrenia, sexually transmitted diseases, drug and alcohol addictions and with out-of-wedlock children.

"Whosoever will, let him come," is the operative injunction. It stems from Revelation. It isn't easy to translate into day-to-day life.

After Hurricane Wilma

When you write for a newspaper in Florida, you write a lot about hurricanes and how to cope with them I did this piece two mornings after one of the biggest ones hit us.






OUR GOOD LIFE HAS CHANGED . . . FOR NOW
For Cecile Levant, the search for a cup of coffee took her all the way from Century Village in Deerfield Beach to North Federal Highway in Boca Raton.

And to, of all places, a hardware store.

She stood outside the front door of Belzer's Hardware Co. on Wednesday morning with her fellow huntress, Merlene Humphrey, a home health aide who works in that same Century Village.

They had money in their hands from five neighbors who had the shared hope they'd come back with the small item that loomed large in their notion of survival: a Master Glow Backpack/Expedition Stove.

It is a contraption with two pieces: a grapefruit-size propane canister and a spider-shaped metal stovetop, which can grip a small pot or a can of beans, and heat it over a flame.

This feat seems almost like magic when the electricity is out for you and 6 million of your fellow South Floridians.

It was the second post-Wilma day that Levant and Humphrey made their way to Belzer's, their second 20-minute wait to be let in the door.

"I love a cup of coffee in the morning," said Levant, a pert white-haired woman in a pink workout suit, explaining her need for the stove. "That's why I'm so determined."

Rosh Hashana shooting

This was a story that the cops reporters covered copiously. I was hoping to capture the elements that were particularly hurtful to this community. A child nailed it:






SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING EVEN PAINFUL TO GOD
Date: Thursday, October 6, 2005
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

The hole was about 2 1/2 inches wide, as indicated by the stick-on measurement left by detectives, and surrounded by webbings of shattered glass.

It pierced a wall-length window of the Chabad Weltman Synagogue west of Boca Raton.

Josh Goldberg is 6. He wore shiny black shoes and dress pants, his holiday wear, and stood on the sidewalk surrounding the shopping-center synagogue where he goes to Hebrew school once a week.

He stared with a look of sorrow at the uncovered hole and the shattered glass.

"The old man," he said, "shot a part of God's heart."

Hurricanes, from Alpha to Omega

If you write a column in Florida for any length of time, you're bound to write a lot about hurricanes.

You don't often get to write anything funny about these hugely destructive events, but every now and then, just to relieve the tension, I'd try to raise a smile.

FEMA follies

FEMA did too little, too late in New Orleans after Katrina. The problems were different in South Florida. Here, FEMA doled out sacks of money to people who suffered no hurricane damage at all. Made me wonder if anyone there had any brains at all. Hence:






ARE YOU FEMA MATERIAL? TAKE THE TEST
Date: Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY


Dear Applicant:

Thank you for your interest in joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As you know, this is a challenging time for our agency. Hurricane Katrina and the news media have created a difficult working environment.

We are looking for the very best people to perform the vital work of rebuilding the Gulf region and preparing for future disasters and terror attacks.

You can help us by filling out the following aptitude test.

(Note: If you have executive experience in Bush-Cheney election campaigns, or were a college roommate of an executive in a Bush-Cheney campaign, you may skip the test. You're in.)

A record-making artist

Here's a guy I loved profiling, a Boca Raton retiree who played on Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" and untold other records I grew up with.

New Orleans: Vulnerable, Irreplaceable

It's Hard to Imagine New Orleans After Katrina

HOWARD GOODMAN | COMMENTARY

Jeff Fisk, who has lived all his life in Deerfield Beach, is a yard supervisor at the United Parcel Service hub for deliveries from Pompano to Delray.

Last year, this slender working man spent many off hours researching, designing and making a costume to transform himself into the 400-pound Fat Bastard, the repellent Austin Powers character.

It was foolishness. But there is a rational explanation.

He was giving his all for Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

In the past 10 years, Fisk and a number of his friends have traveled almost every February to New Orleans' prolonged party, a week or more of drinking, dancing, costumes and debauchery.

The South Floridians are such regulars they've been admitted to a "krewe," a semi-select organization that stages the parades and costume balls that have been the city's signature since the 1700s.

"We've been kind of welcomed with open arms," said Fisk, 45, of his reception into Krewe Tuck.

Michael Bowders, 42, a fellow krewe member from our parts, said "It doesn't feel like people have the same walls between the social classes as they do here.

"My friend who's close to a millionaire will go down to a bar and drink and talk with a homeless guy, and it's no big deal.

"And then there's the architecture," added Bowders, who manages a camera store in Fort Lauderdale.

"My friend Jeff and I just love to walk around and we look at the intricate detail, and we love it.

"But it's got me so worried," he added. "Everything is made of wood ..."

I knew what he meant.

It was a day for worry if you love New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina was roaring through Louisiana.

They call New Orleans the city that care forgot. But with winds blowing away sections of the Superdome roof, it looked like care was finally catching up.

Bonnaroo, the new Woodstock

One of the things I can legitimately brag about is the fact I actually attended the 1969 Woodstock festival. Really. My teenage son is a music lover in the same way I was. So to take him to this generation's equivalent of the massive camp-out/rock'n'roll show, I couldn't resist.





AH, MEMORIES OF WOODSTOCK COME FLOODING BACK
Date: Thursday, June 16, 2005
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

The mud smell was familiar.

I recognized it from 36 years ago. The same mixture of sulphury earth, rainwater, sandal leather and foot sweat was Woodstock 1969, intact.

The scent of patchouli and marijuana was the same, too.

And so was the descent into a life of grime: The lack of showers for five days, the revolting Port-a-Sans, the problematic sleeping.

Ah, yes. That brotherly feeling of bonding with thousands, all getting gross together.

I was living it again, this time with my 15-year-old son, Ben.

He holds an enthusiastic, if exaggerated, reverence for the fact that his old man attended the original Woodstock Festival, the 400,000-strong crest of the counterculture.

So, obliging and music-loving dad that I am, I was glad to take him to the closest modern equivalent, a festival in Tennessee called Bonnaroo.

Bonnaroo is an annual event, created in the spirit of the old Grateful Dead. The fourth rendition began Thursday evening and ran practically non-stop until midnight Sunday. About 80 bands played on five stages on farmland 65 miles south of Nashville. About 80,000 people set up camp.

Everyone seemed to be 20, wearing tie-dye and capable of dancing for hours at a stretch.

"I haven't seen anyone as young as me," Ben said after we'd walked around awhile.

"I haven't seen anyone as old as me," I said back.

Woodstock was notable for the kindly vibes amid disaster conditions. That, and the killer lineup (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, et al.).

I remember one day's diet consisting solely of dry oatmeal and water.

But at the well-organized Bonnaroo, there was plentiful pizza, shish kebob, chicken teriyaki and local barbecue. You could even get the comfort of a morning latte.

At Woodstock, the apotheosis of the Generation Gap, we were rebelling against established American values.

At Bonnaroo, my son and I were bonding generations. Reveling without rebelling, I showed him how to decline the friendly offers of intoxicants. We did this party drug-free.

The music was great. And Bonnaroo did retain that Woodstock warmth.

A last errand

I was always close with my father, and when he died I wrote this tribute.






A DAD WHO GAVE HIS FULL ATTENTION -- AND HIS LOVE
Date: Sunday, August 29, 2004
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY


The last real errand I ran for my dad came when he sent me to the library to find F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in large-type print.

This was his last-gasp effort to try to read. For at least six weeks he had been unable to make out words on the printed page, having fallen victim to cataracts and then an operation that didn't prove to be the cure that he'd hoped for.

For a lifelong reader, a man who kept a constant stack of books by his bedside -- juggling most of them simultaneously -- this was an unimaginable curtailment of his quality of life. It seemed the thing that was finally cutting off his joy of living, forget the dozens of pounds of weight he'd lost in his 10-year battle with colon cancer or the weakness that kept him from walking to the dining room at the North Shore Retirement Hotel.

His eye doctor had suggested large-print books, and he was running with that idea. So three Fridays ago I was in the Evanston, Ill., public library for the first time in many years. And thinking what a full-circle experience it was.

Because almost 50 years ago, going to the Evanston Library was our Saturday ritual. We'd pick up a stack of books to read that week and return the stack we'd plowed through the week before. He and I, and my two sisters as they grew old enough to come along.

In my recollection, we did this every week. We'd go to the library and to Charley Moy's laundry, where he had his shirts cleaned and lightly starched for work, and to the Huddle in the Orrington Hotel for milkshakes. Some years there were YMCA swimming lessons, which never took for me but always ended in the most delicious chocolate marshmallow ice cream cones.

I don't doubt that my own love of reading came from those excursions and his example. I know that it was from his reverence for writers that I grew up thinking that writing was the most honorable of professions.

I know that he had wanted to be a writer himself. As a Chicago teenager in the 1930s, he had in fact edited the Roosevelt High School Rough Rider. But World War II and life's practicalities denied him his chance. I know that I chose to go into journalism in part to fulfill that dream for him. Not that he ever asked me to. And not that I didn't love that dream for myself. I was just lucky that my talents, such as they are, coincided so well with a career goal that had my father's great respect.

I knew even at a young age that those Saturday outings were unusual. That it wasn't expected for a father to take time each and every week just to be with his kids.

All my life I've heard about fathers who were too busy for their children, and I knew -- even in the 1950s, when the absent suburban father was the nation's cultural norm -- that I had something different. I had a dad who gave me his full attention, as well as his love.