Owego Rotary Club Rotateller

While we did not have any visitors or guests, it was nice to see Wilma and Carl again.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Carolyn Wright (coming home tomorrow from visiting her granddaughter in Wisconsin), Carl, and Judy.

MUSIC:

OUTBOUND ORIENTATION:

The students who will be outbound next year will be at the Treadway on Sunday for an orientation. Cookies, et.al. are needed. If you cannot bring them to the Treadway, Orv said that they could be left at their house and they will make sure that they get there.

STUDENT EXCHANGE:

Wilma shared a postcard from Jollen Butterfield in Brazil. Staci’s mother just came back from Bolivia and there is quite a bit of unrest there. Perhaps we can find out more from Andres.

TRIVIA NIGHT:

Glenn said that Wanda has forgiven him. Orv reported that a good time was had by all. We had an excellent team which came in fourth (just behind Matt’s team) but way ahead of Kiwanis.

FINES:

PROGRAM:

Matt introduced Eric Watkins who updated us on the Youth Court. It is his fifth year in the program. The goal is to make young people responsible. The success is that only 4% repeat in the first year. The usual statistics are between 25 and 35%. Eric has 100 young people involved. They learn about justice and public speaking. Crime is down about 25% in Tioga County as a result of this program. There are 90 of these courts in NY and over 1000 in the country. They sentence the young people who must admit their fault. Most of the violators get a term of community service. They also must make oral and written apologies and write a reflective essay.

Waverly is having the largest youth problem in the county followed by Apalachin (due to a lack of things for the young people to do). When the NY State funding stopped 11 of 13 funded programs died immediately.

Athletes Care is a program in which varsity athletes address 4th grade students. This group and those involved with Youth Court go to Albany each year. They also do two Street Fairs each year which are usually attended by between 500 and 1000 people. Our program runs on grants from the Truman Foundation. Eric stated that few of the graduates of the program go into law, but 95.5% of them go on toe college.

Steve asked about community service as a punishment. I have often wondered about this but Eric did his masters thesis on this and said that enforced community service can be a stimulus through exposure for students to get involved in more service. Orv asked about Eric’s background.

50/50 Steve

The following excerpts are from an article by David Brion Davis in the most recent issue of American Heritage. They caught my attention because I must confess that some of the facts are new to me. The article addresses the changing views of historians about the causes of the Civil War. Coming across these changes in perspectives and "new" information frequently make me wonder how even those who try to be informed about current events can gather and assimilate data to make informed decisions.

Few Americans know that by 1820 nearly 8.7 million slaves had departed from Africa for the New World, as opposed to the 2.6 million whites, many of them convicts or indentured servants, who had left Europe. Thus by 1820, African slaves constituted almost 77% of the enormous population that had sailed toward the Americas, and from 1760 to 1820 this emigrating flow included more than five African slaves for every European.

When teachers tell their students about the forming of "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," how many note that in 1775 the slavery of blacks was legal in all 13 colonies? That it continued to be legal in NY until 1827, in CT until 1848, and in NJ until 1865?

A crucial and final point: a frank and honest effort in classrooms to face up to the darkest side of our past, to understand the ways in which social evils evolve, should in no way lead to cynicism and despair or to a repudiation of our heritage. The development of maturity means a capacity to deal with truth. The more we recognize the limitations and failings of human beings, the more remarkable and even encouraging history can be. Acceptance of the institution of slavery can be found not only in the Bible but in the earliest recorded documents in the Mesopotamian Near East. Slavery was accepted for millennia, virtually without question, in almost every region of the globe. Even in the nineteenth century there was nothing inevitable or even probable about the emancipation of black slaves throughout the Western Hemisphere. This point is underscored by the appalling use of coerced labor in the twentieth century, especially in various forms of gulags or concentration camps. Yet the history of the New World slavery and antislavery shows us that people can change course, that they are not compelled to accept the world into which they are born.

	Rotary Club of Owego, NY ROTATELLER
Tuesday, March 8, 2005 Gary Williams, Editor

Rotary Club of Owego, NY ROTATELLER