From the Editor
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés

On September 10, 2001, my baby dropped in my womb, but on September 11, he changed his mind. Who could blame him? The world was a totally different place from one day to the next. On the 10th, the World Trade Center was still standing tall; planes weren’t used as weapons, thousands of people in the US hadn’t died in an all out assault against us. On the 10th, my baby would have been born into a world where “we” weren’t at war, where we were still blithely untouched by international terrorism. On the 11th, I felt the life inside me hold still, move back up and away from my pelvis. I couldn’t stop looking at the media images of the twin towers being hit, on fire, collapsing, crushing thousands of lives. The baby held still, and I had nightmares about my beloved city, the buildings I watched being built that served as beacons home. I couldn’t stop thinking about the destruction, the death, the dangers; the baby was quiet, sitting high, staying put. For the next month, first Anthrax scares, then images of the US bombing Afghanistan plagued my mind. On October 14, I was admitted to the hospital to have a baby, whether or not he wanted to be born—and he didn’t. Victor Enrique Milanés was delivered via C-section; we could argue about which method is more violent, but the end result, the first breaths and cries of a baby were heard. And he was welcomed, and he is beloved and we, his family, pitied him the world we gave him.

The world we teachers now inhabit includes a country at war against an entity—terrorism, but in practice, we are warring against one of the world’s poorest countries. Our students, no matter how young or old, no matter how sophisticated or jaded, are affected by the images of devastation and sound bytes of caustic rhetoric. I believe that teachers today are in an unusually precarious situation if their curriculum includes critical thinking. As a tenured university professor, I have enjoyed the sanctuary of academic freedom, and part of my pedagogy is to entertain and utter provocative statements regarding our culture, history and politics. I am not so comfortable these days doing what I normally do; I am made to feel like a traitor questioning US policies, especially in the Mideast. My students are not expressing much tolerance these days; they aren’t getting much of it modeled around them. Teachers spend important time with students; we have always known our impact on young lives. What are we supposed to teach during wartime? Are we doing our students a disservice if we point out hypocrisies? Shall we follow and lead blindly in the interests the nationalistic status quo? It is good to know that at the annual convention this year, NCTE resolved to “continue to support literature and writing instruction as a means for understanding loss, anger, war, and difference; language study as a vehicle for understanding conflict, propaganda, and democratic discourse; and critical literacy as an instrument essential to an informed citizenship and global understanding.” I hope that we all can teach justice and I pray for the sake of my newborn son and everyone that the world will change again, not back in time but forward, to a time when we are all responsible for peace.