What about the Other Guy?

I always find it ironic that the Nobel Peace Prize was created by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of the explosive dynamite. According to his will the Peace Prize should go to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Today Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize. She is just 17 years old, making her the youngest recipient of the award. Since being shot by the Taliban for the crime of wanting to go to school, this young woman has become the darling of the international media. This is not to say she is not deserving of the award or the attention. She certainly is a brave person and worthy of the accolades.

But no more worthy than Kailash Satyarthi with whom she shares this year's prize. Satyarthi has devoted more than half his life to children's rights and has saved nearly 80000 lives through his efforts to eliminate child slavery. Yet, in the sycophantic coverage of this year's award he is merely an afterthought, hardly mentioned.

Just goes to show that truly good people often go about their lives with hardly any recognition. Probably more telling is that such people hardly ever seek the recognition.

To be sure, the Peace Prize, more so than the other Nobel prizes, allows the Committee to make a political statement. They certainly wanted to make a statement to the Bush Administration when they gave the 2009 award to Barack Obama during his first year as President.

And they make mistakes. In 2007 Polish born Irena Sendler was nominated for her efforts in World War 2 to smuggle children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. She saved over 2500 lives from the Holocaust. She, too, never really sought recognition for this and quietly passed away the following year at the age of 98. Instead the Nobel Committee decided to give the prize that year to Al Gore for a fucking Power Point presentation.

Another person certainly deserving of the award was Mahatma Gandhi who was nominated numerous times. At least the Nobel people have come to admit their mistake. As one of the committee members said in 2006, "The greatest omission in our 106-year history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace prize. Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace prize, whether Nobel committee can do without Gandhi is the question." He's right. Gandhi probably couldn't have cared less about it.

If the Committee actually followed the directive of Nobel's will, they would would stick to giving the award to a person, not any group or organization. For all the good work of Amnesty International, it was Peter Beneson's idea to start the group. Like so many others deserving of the recognition, Beneson, probably shied away from the spotlight and let others take the credit.

The real peace makers in the world go about their lives quietly, doing good things their entire lives. They feed and clothe the poor. They try to right wrongs. They fight injustice when they see it. They speak their minds without fear of consequences. They disobey unjust laws and go to jail for it willingly. In short, they try to do the right thing.

We've heard a lot about one brave 17 year old girl. Maybe we should award those other people, too.

For Students I Had That Day

Like December 7, 1941. Like November 22, 1963. Like April 4, 1968. Like 9/11.

It seems as if days that affect us the most involve the passing of someone. It might be horrific events like Pearl Harbor or the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. King. It might be images of planes flying into buildings seared into our memory by television broadcasts around the globe. It could be a sudden death of a loved one or even a death that is anticipated after a long illness.

Such days don't have to involve the passing of someone we knew or even ever met. They don't even have to mean someone passing from their corporeal form.

I know I will try to find a way to watch the last game Derek Jeter plays at Yankee Stadium this year. I know I will watch the last show David Letterman does just as I watched the last Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson.

I will watch the last show hosted by Craig Ferguson if only to hear him say, "It's a great day for America."

These are days that change us, change our lives, change the way we view things. The days we never forget, the days we hoped would never come, the days that cause us to smile and shed tears.

Icons and institutions that I've grown up with and learned to appreciate and love over time do that to me.

I used to tell my students a story about traveling home to Chicago to see my parents the Christmas after the first Mayor Daley died. We were driving into the city on the Eden's Expressway. As soon as we hit the city limits, I felt a sense of sorrow. My wife, who was not born and raised there as I was, turned to me and said, "Something's wrong. Something's missing."

I simply said, "Daley's gone." It was as if the entire city was in mourning.

Such days of passing affect us as individuals and collectively as a society. That's why we can all remember what we were doing, who we were with, where we were even decades later.

Thinking back to this day 13 years ago, I remember being at my classroom computer and getting a report from the AP about the World Trade Center. I think I was one of the first in the building to know about it, but the news spread quickly, and a few other teachers were able to tune their televisions to the news. Students wanted to know what was happening.

Eventually the principal made an announcement.

I know on the way home, for the first time in my life, I actually wanted to go buy a gun. I didn't. Instead, I stopped at the local driving range. Sometimes hitting something, anything, really hard and really often is a cathartic release. When I got home, I hugged my wife and children, as probably did many Americans that day.

My strongest memory of that day, the one that comes back to me on this anniversary, is that of the students I had that year. Amid the uncertainty of that day, the lack of information, the terrible nature of events, the images we all saw, they worked.

They read what they were supposed to read. They wrote what they were supposed to write. Like the firefighters and police who ran into the buildings, my students worked. They did their jobs.

They did their jobs without question.

I think, in part, that is what Kitty Donohoe has in mind when she penned this:

I was really proud of them that day. I was proud to be their teacher.