Finally, We Can Get Every Student and School Online - For Cheap

Many decades have had their “Moonshots.” They're The Big ideas. Typically, they’re supremely-expensive, societally-challenging, disruptive projects that go down in history as lasting achievements. In the 1930’s it was the New Deal. In the 40’s, it was victory in World War II. In the 1950’s it was the Interstate Highway System. In the 60’s it was, well, the Moonshot (and Civil Rights).

These "Moonshot" projects are costly, but necessary. They’re transformative, and frequently democratic in nature. They are national quests that are underwritten by the Federal government because either the private sector is not equipped to – or willing to – deliver. Yes, America is a capitalist nation, no doubt. We prize private ownership and initiative, but there are things that even the market cannot do. Not on a big level anyway.

The challenge of our age, the “Moonshot,” if you please, is national, affordable, quality connectivity. Everywhere, 24/7. Call it what you will – a national, low or no cost Wi-Fi system, Municipal Internet, whatever. 

Internet access is not a civil right, not yet anyway, but a good education is. And I really doubt that you’d be able to find any educator or parent who would not observe that there is no way any student can attain a quality education in 2014 without ready, constant, available broadband access. It’s a no brainer. The entire world is online and competing furiously on an international basis. My own students are well aware that their future competitors are not only in nearby schools but in places like Shanghai and Singapore as well. As a nation, we’re long overdue in bringing free, fast Internet into our public schools. This

Wireless Internet for every student in America:
It's now possible.

goal has long been part of our “Moonshot.”

If you asked any person on the street (or me as recently as two hours ago) how much it would cost to bring fast, wired and wireless (Wi-Fi) internet to every school in the nation, a lot of figures would come up. But the bottom line is, everyone – myself included – would tell you the cost would be prohibitive. Hundreds of billions of dollars, at least – maybe more. Most would probably think that it’s worthy goal, perhaps, but really, just not realistic in the near future. It seems like a huge, progressive dream, and something that, in these troubling economic times, might have to be done either incrementally or put on the back burner for more prosperous days.

Then I read an article – a blog post in this week’s Washington Post. According to the FCC and two highly respected organizations in the Ed-Tech world, a price tag has been revealed. For this estimation, this “ballpark figure,” every school in the United States could be hooked up to broadband access, wired and wireless. And we’re not talking about the kind of access you get at home – we’re talking big, thick pipes dedicated to massive amounts of uploading and downloading via fiber optic connections. To do this, it would cost Congress not $400 billion, not $40 billion...just $4 billion.

When I read the estimation, I gasped. It can’t be that inexpensive. To bring wireless access to every public school in America…that’s just huge. Every school means every school, from the mega-high schools of busy New York City to the rural hamlets of Tennessee…sea to shining sea…etc.  

The implications of such a plan would be revolutionary to say the least. And for this price tag – really the amount that the Federal government probably spends on toilet paper yearly – it’s worth it. We have spent more than a trillion dollars in Iraq since 2003. A trillion dollars! To kill people and break things in a faraway land! And what have we got for our trillion dollars? Iraq is falling apart, Al Qaida’s still on the loose, our allies aren’t any more secure and we have tens of thousands of disabled vets to care for. Why don’t we take just a fraction of such an expenditure and invest it in our children and our communities?

We can do this. We must do this. We can still do great things, but now, apparently, we can achieve greatness with technologies partially bought at places like Radio Shack and The Home Depot. The private sector won’t do it; it’s had a decade to step up to the challenge of bringing affordable and widespread web access to our schools. Instead, our tech companies are focused on what all companies focus on: profits, mergers and acquisitions. That doesn’t make them bad, but it does make them incapable of acting on this level for the public interest.

We can do this. Who’s with me?

Comcast's Data Caps Threaten More than Higher Prices

With recent news that Comcast plans to implement some sort of bandwidth/usage cap on its Internet users, it inadvertently and probably put a nail, at least from an ideological standpoint, in its soon-to-be corporate coffin. Now I know from a present-day perspective, that seems a bit extreme to say, considering that it’s one of the nation’s largest and most profitable corporations. Nevertheless, by implementing bandwidth caps, Comcast is doing more than falling off the Internet wagon; it’s shooting the horse. At the least, Comcast data caps ought to be declared by the Federal Government to be monopolistic activity and regulated; in an ideal situation, the Internet giant should be broken up into several rival corporations to drive prices down and internet speeds up. The U.S. Supreme Court did this in the early 1980’s by breaking up the old AT&T “Bell System,” and the result, frankly, was our modern-day communications

Comcast represents the same national 

threat as this corporation once did

miracle.

It bears repeating. The Internet is our network of networks. It’s very presence in our lives is something that is, frankly, without historical precedent. It is quickly forming into the economic backbone of the global economy, and that’s a fact that’s not going to change in future years, it’s only going to expand. And as one of the nation’s largest (and perhaps, soon to be the largest) Internet service providers, capped Internet represents an intentional plug on national economic growth and security. Internet caps are the equivalent of internal tariffs, an evil of the past that is outlawed in our own national constitution. There are so many reasons to reject the idea of caps, it’s not even funny. Here are a few:

1.   There is no bandwidth crisis. We know this because while Comcast and other big-time Internet Service Providers tell the FCC that there is, they’re bragging to their own investors that there is plenty of bandwidth to go around, and profitably so.

2.   New fiber optic cables and data compression technologies are amply keeping up with bandwidth needs

3.   Capping internet use and charging more for it will make all forms of digital communications and commerce artificially more expensive; it’s the equivalent to a physical attack on the national communications infrastructure in order to keep prices high

4.   We know from the short history of the Internet that today’s “Internet sipper” is tomorrow’s “power user” as more Internet use is the norm, not the opposite

5.   In places where Comcast and its monopolistic equivalents encounter competition prices have gone down and value for consumers has gone up; don’t believe me? Ask anyone from Austin, Texas, where the cable companies are being forced to compete with Google Fiber’s amazing packages…no internet caps there and speeds on par with South Korea’s (100 mbs+)

I could care less about Comcast and its quest for profits, especially if it comes at this kind of price. Our international competitors in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Israel don’t cap their web use, because they know they’d be insane to do so. With so many start-up businesses depending on broad Internet use from both sides of the business model (producer and consumer), they have no intention of stifling the digital commons or limiting it in any way. If anything, our international rivals are making web use less expensive and more ubiquitous. Just this year, Tel Aviv’s municipal government began a plan to make the entire city wireless – for free. Taipei, Taiwan is already wireless, with Wi-Fi available on nearly every street and alleyway.

What we need is more competition and antitrust enforcement. In America we believe in the right to private property, but not at the expense of endangering the growth potential of the entire national economy. That’s what the Sherman Antitrust Act and similar legislation are for. We don’t believe in monopolies and, in fact, regard them as a threat. And that’s not just me – Adam Smith, that “Father of Capitalism,” makes the exact same argument in the very Bible of Capitalism: The Wealth of Nations.

Comcast’s quest wring the national Internet market for every dollar even at the expense at destroying its most valuable aspect, that being the vast potential for individual and national financial growth, must be countered and reversed. It’s in everybody’s interest to do so, especially those who still embrace the ideals of America as a place for broad economic opportunity and an unregulated marketplace for ideas.

Mainland China's Cyber-Spying Raises Complex Questions

The recent revelations bythe U.S. government (via several indictments) that elements of the Mainland Chinese government are aggressively hacking into U.S.-based corporations to obtain technological secrets seem alarming. I mean, on one hand, it seems like the Chinese are actually attacking us, right? Their people, safely situated in a modest skyscraper in Shanghai, are trying to get at our people, or at least, our corporations' confidential information. It’s Them versus Us.

When I first read about this, I had the standard, American/Cold War emotional

Corporate manufacturers' loyalties
weren't much of a question when this photo
was taken during World War II at a Buffalo, NY factory.
But can a corporation be considered "American" today
 when it makes most or all of its products overseas? 

reaction. I was outraged. How dare they use their brainiacs to extract our nation’s trade secrets and technological know-how? Attacking our companies like that…hacking into their files…it’s an invasion…or at least, a virtual one.

But then the critical thinking began. I started to cool down, because this situation is much more complex than it seems, and our moral position in regards to unauthorized access to internationally-based information isn’t exactly a firmly-based one. So as this story develops, I’d like to raise some questions for further discussion:

1.   Don’t we do this all the time? Haven’t we been doing this for at least a half-decade? Really, I’m not a huge fan of Edward Snowden, and frankly, I regard him as a traitor, but that’s a subject for another blog. But even if a fraction of his exposés are true, and I doubt that it’s just a fraction – don’t we have an entire, billion-dollar agency that is dedicated to doing nothing less than recording almost every overseas batch of data, conversation, picture, etc.? Haven’t we managed to infuriate our enemies, and more importantly, our allies(i.e. Germany) with our aggressive, overseas data-mining and intrusive cyber-efforts?

2.   What is an “American Company” anyway? Major news outlets are reporting that many “U.S. Corporations” have been targeted by the Chinese government. But how do we define a corporation that’s actually on “our side”? Aren’t most, if not all of these large corporations, multinational in scope, with stockholders, funds, operational facilities and factories located in a variety of nations? Why would these corporations be particularly more loyal to our government when compared to others? Is there some kind of devotional or location test that makes a corporation “American” as opposed to, say, “Chinese”? Apple is an “American” corporation, with its headquarters in California, yet most of its materials and manufacturing derive from Chinese and South Korean material, employees and factories.

3.   Is the Internet devouring itself? Really, it’s worth considering. Over the past few decades the human race has created the greatest communications and knowledge-based network in its history; the Web has no precedent. It is a zillion things in one: it’s a post office, a library, a television, a university, a diary, a publishing house, a supermarket, a shopping mall, a bank, an atlas, a pharmacy, and on and on and on. If national militaries intend on making it into a battle zone, is it worth even keeping around in its present form? Have we created a superior form of technology whose wisdom has gone so far beyond us that, being the fools we are, we just cannot handle its inherently progressive power to bring us together? Perhaps we need to, as some kind of last good faith move, create a series of international treaties to protect it, like we do with the Law of the Sea.

4.   Where will it all end? How could the United States possibly stop China and other national and private entities from continuing with such behavior in the future? Are we going to start targeting hackers with drones like we do in places like Yemen and Pakistan? How far do we want to go with this? Would other nations be justified in doing the same? Would say, Singapore be justified in calling in a drone strike on a hacker’s house in Portland, Oregon if he was trying to break into Singaporean bank accounts? Or if such a hacker was attempting to interrupt an online, life-risking medical procedure? It’s worth asking, because using this line of thinking, it could happen.

So many questions. I don’t know where it all begins and ends. The Mainland Chinese aren’t good guys, that’s for sure. I’m not cheering for them. But whom should I cheer for? Who is “America” here, if anyone is, at all?

ow How

Echoes of An Infamous Anti-Semitic Jersey Past Are Heard in A New Report

This week the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published its annual report on Anti-Semitic incidents in the Garden State. The results, as reported in many of our area’s papers, are mixed. While it is true that an overwhelming majority of Jewish people living in New Jersey go about their daily lives without having to face this historic scourge, still, 78 incidents occurred in 2013. According to the ADL, these incidents involved acts of vandalism, assault and threats. 

Racism and discrimination in all their perverse forms are bad, but ‘modern’ Anti-Semitism is its own kind of historical nemesis. I’ve been in education for over a decade, and I can honestly tell you, most New Jerseyans, despite our state’s Holocaust awareness requirement, fail understand the danger of organized Anti-Semitism to humanity in particular, and it’s long history in New Jersey (of all places!). It’s worth a retelling.

Medieval anti-Semitism is rooted in the Christian Bible, which has been interpreted as blaming Jews for the conspiracy to arrest and kill Jesus. Much of this hatred was fed to Europeans over the centuries by the Catholic and later Luther-inspired Protestant Churches. To be fair, this belief in collective Jewish guilt has been formally renounced by the Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant Churches. Over the past three decades, in fact, the Papacy has gone to great lengths to embrace good Jewish-Catholic relations through Papal Synagogue visits and various edicts. I do not think that I would be inaccurate in stating that, at least in New Jersey, if any Christian priest or preacher got up on next Sunday morning and told his or her congregation that Jews were “Christ Killers” the parishioners would simply walk out, throw the preacher out, or both. But this kind of anti-Semitism isn’t what motivates modern day Jew haters anyway.

Modern, formerly "respectable” Anti-Semitism is not ancient. It’s not even German. It’s not from the Arab world and it had nothing to do with the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades. It wasn’t born in the desert or amongst some maniacal civilization. It emerged, largely, from one of the most cosmopolitan centers of European civilization, from a city that still prides itself on its Baroque architecture, its cobblestone streets, and its sumptuous coffeehouses. Modern-day Anti-Semitism was born in Vienna, Austria, between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I.

These people, whoever they are – be they punks, White Supremacists, or Klansman, who are going around New Jersey committing acts of hatred are believers, for the most part, in this kind of anti-Semitism. Though Modern Anti-Semitism’s origins are a bit complex, the movement really crystalized and gained respect and electoral power in Turn-of-The-Century, cosmopolitan Vienna. It was there that, in the effort to gain votes and create some kind of national identity out of a diverse population, leaders pointed to the Jews as a common enemy. These anti-Semites stipulated that Jews, both religious and secular, were a cancer on humanity. These people preached, to great success, that Jews, through their achievements in the professions, were climbing to the top of their fields in a conspiratorial plan. This “plan,” was to be executed at the ‘right’ moment, on some kind of international basis, when Jews would strike to enslave and degrade all Christians. The conspiracy theory took several forms, but this was the most common one. In the meanwhile, most Anti-Semites said, Jews, by increasing their power and influence, were out to make the lives of Christians impoverished and marginal.

The moment of “respectable crystallization,” happened with the election of one of the great urban mayors of the early 20^th century: Dr. Karl Lueger. Today Austrians like to forget about his intense anti-Semitism, as he was responsible for much of the modernization of Vienna. But at the time, Lueger’s intense hatred for the Jewish people – who comprised of a sizable minority of Vienna itself – was well known. Lueger used his tremendous oratory and persuasive powers to convince city voters that Jews were the main problem. In 1907, a few years before his death, Lueger told one reporter:

“A Jew must remember that neither Germany, nor Austria, nor Poland is his land. He must remember that wherever he may be, he is a stranger to the native population…I do not care about the welfare of the Jews. If their life here is miserable, let them go away.”

Today any big city mayor who made such a statement would be branded as crazy…insane. But these were the words of one of the most popular, elected politicians in the civilized world, and his words would not go unheeded. Under Lueger’s rule, Jews would be discriminated against, publicly assaulted, ridiculed and pushed out of organizations of all kinds. But his admirers were many, including one down-on-his-luck, failed artist and frequent inhabitant of the city’s homeless shelters and rooming houses named Adolf Hitler.

Now wait just a second. I thought this was a blog about New Jersey? What does an infamous Austrian mayor who died in 1910 have anything to do with anti-Semitism in, say, Newark or the Jersey Shore?

The respectability that Lueger gave to such hatred had transatlantic consequences, and this influence spread quickly. How quickly? He died in 1910; within a decade his organized, articulate anti-Jewish rhetoric would assist the growth of two of New Jersey’s most infamous – and powerful – hate groups: the Klan and the Nazis.

The Anti-Semitic Klan, partly due to the ‘respectability’ that Lueger and others had given the hatred of Jews and Judaism, spread rapidly here. Klan groups and “klaverns” organized by the thousands and the repressive organization established its headquarters in Newark. Amazing as the sight would be today, during holiday parades in several New Jersey towns and cities, Klan members marched by the hundreds – even the thousands – to promote their nefarious cause. Their organization published newsletters and newspapers and endorsed candidates running for local and state offices. 

The Klan held huge ceremonies in the summertime, particularly at the Shore. One New York Times article claims that a July 1924 rally near Long Branch drew 20,000 supporters. The Klan participated in open, publiziced acts of terrorism. In April of 1922 they burned a huge cross on top of Paterson’s Garrett Mountain that was visible throughout much of Passaic County. While publicly promoting itself as another civic organization, Klansmen terrorized Jews, Catholics and immigrants through assaults and even bombings. Amazing right? Yes, it happened right here, in New Jersey. And it wasn’t over.

The Klan’s national power faded in the late 1920’s due to a variety of factors, one being a major murder scandal involving its Grand Wizard. The movement’s deterioration was reflected in New Jersey as well. But by the early 1930’s, Anti-Semitism was back in the Garden State and in a big, terrifying way.

In the years before the Second World War, New Jersey was home to a major

New Jersey Nazi Camp, Andover, 1938

Nazi movement that called itself “The Bund.” Like its evil twin in Germany, New Jersey’s Nazis dressed up in brown uniforms, held gatherings in beer halls, and established their own “base camps” in places like Andover. Yes, I am not kidding here. In the mid-1930’s, there was a Nazi camp, with real, goose-stepping, Hitler saluting, anti-Jewish stormtroopers, in Sussex County.

Area residents, like my grandmother who lived in Irvington at the time, grew concerned and frightened. When a collection of Nazi organizations from New Jersey and New York sold out Madison Square Garden for a rally in the mid-1930’s, the movement was on the borderline of – and its frightening to say – respectability. I would like to report that it was the outrages of the Nazis in Germany that led to the Jersey Bund’s decline, and that is frequently taught, but it was more likely the efforts of the state and Federal governments to squash the movement that probably brought on its end. And, of course, The War.

So here we are again, sort of, but on a much smaller basis. The Neo-Nazis or the Anti-Semites or whomever you want to call them are in our presence, but they’re not respectable. The average New Jersey resident, of course, knows from our present perspective what these kinds of ideas lead to: violence, mass death, collective sadism…etc. We’re all decent people, right? We’ll continue to work together as a diverse community towards the future. Yes, we’ll have our disagreements, but this is all our land. We still believe in those ideals…don’t we?

Man, I hope so. But the ADL’s report of 78 Jersey-based incidents in 2013 does shake my faith. A little bit.   

As the Assembly Grapples with College Costs, It Bears Asking: Why Go to College Anyway?

This week the Assembly's Committee on Higher Ed is hearing from a wide assortment of voices - college presidents, faculty, students, graduates - in an effort to get to the bottom of why a university education has become so expensive in New Jersey, and what can be done about it. And from press reports, it's obvious to see that the committee, in the end, needs to grapple with the central questions concerning the complex relationship between students, expectations and a university education. Why should anyone go to college anyway? What is the value of a university education? What is the university? What's the point of attending? I often tell my high school students this: while it is true that college graduates make more money overall during their lifetimes than others, in the end, that's notthe purpose of a university education. A college education is not the same, in any respect, as technical training. Most professors will not care, at least not at the outset, of what your career plans are. In the end, and I believe this is not an oversimplification, a university (and the education it provides) is about the conversation. Or rather, it is a conversation. It's about people learning and exchanging ideas, generating new ones, publicizing concepts, accepting some while changing or disregarding others. We see this information exchange primarily in the form of the classroom and lecture hall, as well as in publishing in text and on the Internet. But, I remind them, don't let the lush lawns or the stately stone buildings or the basketball games fool you; those are beside the point. If you want to succeed in college and get the most out of it, you've got to accept the university for the idea factory that it is. I attended Rutgers University during most of the 1990's where I earned my B.A. in history and my M.A. in political science. While I knew that I wanted to become a high school teacher, I also accepted the fact that I probably wouldn't learn the ins-and-outs of the educational business until I was in it. That's not why I went to college. Though I earned several scholarships and fellowships during my time at Rutgers, I managed to graduate with some debt. It was worth it, because going to Rutgers transformed me -  or rather - set me on a path to become a better critical thinker, and a better communicator in both reading and writing. It boosted and directed my lifelong quest to learn. My experience at Rutgers introduced me, truly, to the complexities of this world and transformed a teen that believed in absolute truths into a young adult that was highly suspicious of all forms of authority in a world of gray. I attended Rutgers because I knew that there I would be exposed to all sorts of voices, both living and dead, emanating from the arts and sciences. I went because, to really understand well, at least for myself, I needed to learn and debate the great ideas with great minds in the classroom environment. This debate took many forms; sometimes oral, sometimes written, but always, alwayscentering on ideas. If you don't like ideas, if you disdain reading, if every second behind a desk grappling with abstract notions is viewed as a form of punishment, then by all means, don't go to college. It's not for everyone; and just because you don't want to go to college, it's not indicative of an inexorable slide into poverty. There are ways people can add ample value to their labor through technical training and other experience. I know many car mechanics, truck salesmen and restaurant managers who make a fine living and I know many college grads who are dead broke. College is not a gateway to riches - or at least riches in monetary form. It is an important credential, no doubt, but as a credential, I do not know of a singlebachelor's program that leads directly and immediately to a secure, lifelong job. No way. And any program that claims to guarantee a lifelong a job is being dishonest.   Students need to understand that college - at least the undergraduate experience - goes on for a long time; really for half a decade. It's not something that you can 'wing' per se, especially in the great universities like Rutgers, NYU, Princeton or UCLA. Getting through college requires a real shift in priorities, especially the priorities of the mind. This is why I have so much respect for those who have to work their way through college or come to the university in mid to late adulthood. They know that the average adult has zillions of priorities to cope with, but to be intellectually healthy and to grow, regardless of whatever situation you find yourself in, your curiosity and willingness to learn must be a prized value. It's true what so many grandparents tell their children: no one, ever, can take away what you've learned and earned, at least not what is intellectually earned. And perhaps in the end it may be all you ever have. Okay, perhaps I'm waxing too poetically here. I apologize for droning on. But we need to be honest with our young people about what a university education is, and what it is not, and what it can be expected to do.

Thanks Go to Montreal For First Opening My Eyes to the World

Growing up in Parsippany in the 1980’s wasn’t exactly like finding oneself situated in the middle of a cultural universe. Looking back from this global, hyper-connected age, I am only now beginning to understand how isolated and limited we were as children in the suburbs of Morris County. During most of the year, aside from perhaps hanging out with some friends, riding our bikes or chatting (locally) on the phone, there wasn’t much to do. The boredom could be agonizing.

I don’t blame my mother. A working single mom with two boys, she did the best she could to give us a middle class lifestyle in a decent neighborhood. We lived in one of Parsippany’s largest apartment complexes, Troy Hills Village. It was relatively safe, green, well kept and affordable. But it was boring, boring as all hell. And unless you drove, there wasn’t really anywhere to go. It’s not like I could take a bus to the Rockaway Mall, not that it was such an exciting destination, anyway. And until my later teen years I was too young to venture into Manhattan, which at that time was going through a very dangerous phase anyway.

But once in a while I’d get a break from the mundane. And the biggest break, one I remember so well, was when my mother and her then-boyfriend took me on a business trip to Montreal. It was 1982.

The 80’s were hard on the cities of the Northeast, especially New Jersey and

President Carter tours the South Bronx in the late 1970's;
for many of New Jersey's suburban and rural kids,
this was the common urban image of the 1970's and 80's

New York. Crime was rampant (and, at least in Newark, is again) and urban deterioration was at an all time high. The experiences I had with cities were limited and stressful ones. Aside from some field trips to New York Museums and a few frightening journeys down Newark’s dilapidated Springfield Avenue, I hadn’t seen much. And what I had seen I didn’t like. Oh, and there were those trips to the old Yankee Stadium, which introduced me to the devastated South Bronx at its worst.

This is why my first Montreal visit blew my mind. Just a six hour drive away (traffic permitting) from Northern New Jersey, it was like being transported to an alternate, albeit French-speaking urban universe. The streets were relatively clean. Public transportation was widely available. People actually treated the city as a place they wanted to be, not had to go to. When was the last time, as a New Jerseyan, you found yourself chatting with a friend at an outdoor café in Newark or Trenton or Elizabeth? My point exactly.

I want to do it again this summer with my son, if I can. I remember the drive there being just spectacular. Interstate 287, which I took every day and bisects Parsippany, turned into 87 which cut through the greening Hudson River Valley. Heading north through Albany, I was amazed at what I saw of the Adirondacks, and their snow-tipped peaks of early Spring. The Canadian Border was a blast (“don’t say anything or joke about smuggling!” my mother warned) and to see all of the signs change from English to French instantly widened my world. Canada isn’t the moon, but Quebec isn’t exactly home, and through my 11 year old eyes, that concept was beyond awesome.

We stayed in the Holiday Inn in Longueil, which is more or less the Hoboken of the Montreal Area. Situated opposite of the island city, I got a chance to survey this new, foreign land and all of its topography. There was the Saint Lawrence River – which seemed more alive than the Hudson – and the soaring bridges going over it. Montreal even had its own skyline, which looked more developed than what I had been expecting (most of the books on Montreal that I reviewed at the Central Junior High School library were dated from the late 60’s).

I remember my first sojourn into Montreal’s vast and efficient subway system,

Montreal's Metro: Efficient and Beautiful

The Metro. I recall the hush of the stations; everything was so much quieter and swifter than in New York. The trains ran on rubber tires. The stations were, or at least seemed, clean and safe and extremely colorful. The multicolor tiles, the red, illuminated exits proclaiming “Sortie,” the soft blues and the polished steel really struck me as remarkable. Public transportation, I thought, when well planned and affordable, brought a city its own form of freedom. And then there was the French. The smoothness of the French language, the elegant elocution of the Francophones, the children who seemed like little geniuses to me because they chatted in French with such ease. French advertisements, newspapers, magazines, directional signs…I wasn’t in America anymore. This wasn’t Parsippany. There was, I was realizing for the first time in my life, a real, live world out there. Functioning, working, buzzing…

I felt so far away from home and I loved it. The candy was different – it seemed richer, thicker and more chocolaty. The warm loaves of bread were like heaven and the breakfasts – really just ordinary crepes – tasted divine. For the first time in my life, America, the English language, the Yankees, all those things, were clearly not at the center of everybody’s life.

We went on a bus tour of the city that took us all over, from the Parisian streets of the Old City to the heights of Mount Royale. I remember being on top of the mountain, situated in a park in the middle of the city, and being able to survey the entire metropolitan area. It was exhilarating to see the vastness of my new foreign conquest; it went on and on. The churning St. Lawrence glimmered in the distance, peppered with islands. The skyscrapers and steeples of the city sat at my feet. People went on, living differently, living lives completely not oriented towards me or where I was from. Just wonderful!

We spent two or three full days there before heading home. I didn’t get to see Montreal for another decade, and I remember missing it terribly. I missed it so much, in fact, that during my undergraduate years at Rutgers I joined a student travel board just to plan trips there, and I returned at least four more times. Then I really got a chance to explore it, while at the same time doing a world of good for thousands of my fellow students at Rutgers-Newark, who otherwise, due to the realities of Newark in the 1990’s, couldn’t venture off campus at night – at least not on foot.

That first trip really opened my eyes to the wider world, and taught me that there’s really joy in going to a place where you and your culture are not the dominant one. It forces you to sit back and observe and learn. This summer, I hope to head back there again, to give my son his own first taste of the non-American world.