A recent incident at Wakefield High School in Massachusetts illustrates just how much our country has changed in just one generation – and not for the better.
A few weeks ago, a substitute teacher at Wakefield High School, who is also the father of a soldier who gave his life in Iraq, reprimanded a student who allegedly made a sarcastic statement about having to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher, Joseph Bellavia, is himself a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel.
Bellavia says that he reminded the student that her right not to stand during the Pledge was purchased through the sacrifices of soldiers like himself and his late son.
He says that as a result of the incident he was summoned to a meeting with the principal where he was told that his services as a substitute teacher would no longer be needed at Wakefield High School.
But that is a separate issue that is between Bellavia and the school administration. I would like to address a larger issue.
Continue reading ‘Standing Up for the Pledge of Allegiance’
Filed under: Columns & Essays, Community, News, Opinion, Politics, Wakefield | 23 Comments
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A Baseball Education
Last week, I attended my first Boston Red Sox opening day, a game against the World Champion New York Yankees. My father, Steve Sardella, was born 89 years ago this week in Wakefield, Massachusetts. These two seemingly unrelated facts are linked in my mind because my father was a huge Yankee fan, despite having lived his entire life just outside Boston.
I don’t know exactly how to explain my father’s allegiance to the Yankees. It may have had something to do with the fact that the Yankees were among the first teams to sign Italian-American players like Tony Lazzeri, Frankie Crosetti and of course, Joe DiMaggio.
Growing up, I received my early baseball education watching Red Sox broadcasts with my father on a black and white TV. Back in the days before cable, my father was reduced to watching the only televised baseball available, even if it was the Red Sox, a team that he detested as much as any Bronx-bred Yankee fan.
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Wecome to Rosefield
Last year’s highly successful merger of the Wakefield and Melrose Health Departments has prompted officials in the two contiguous communities to explore other ways that they might cooperate for mutual public benefit. There has even been talk of consolidating the Wakefield and Melrose police and fire dispatch systems as another way to save both communities substantial money.
Those discussions have led almost inevitably to a proposal that comes as no surprise to those who have been closely following regionalization trends across the commonwealth. If the state approves the proposal, Wakefield and Melrose will cease to exist as separate communities two years from now, merging to form the new city of “Rosefield” in the spring of 2012.
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The Cruel Art of Love
The Shape of Things at QP challenges our concepts of truth, art & love
Art and love: we tend to demand truth and honesty in both. But are such expectations fair or even realistic? And if love and art have the power to change lives, at what price? Those are just a few of the questions posed by Neil Labute’s “The Shape of Things,” the current production by the Quannapowitt Players in Reading, Massachusetts .
Directed by Nancy Curran Willis, The Shape of Things takes a provocative and at times uncomfortable look at art, relationships and love – and the impact that they have on our lives. The play centers on the lives of four college students in a Midwestern town who become emotionally and romantically involved with each other.
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Another 15 Minutes
“In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” may well be the most famous quote of the 20th Century. First uttered by Andy Warhol in 1968, it has taken on various forms. We refer to someone’s “fifteen minutes of fame,” or note that another’s “15 minutes are up.”
But Warhol’s remark proved to be far more prescient than even he imagined. Warhol died in 1987, before the explosion of two phenomena that would prove him right many times over: reality television and the Internet.
“COPS” (aka the best show on television) was the original reality TV show in the modern sense of the term, although the type of fame it bestows on its “stars” probably is not the kind that most would choose. Reality shows too numerous to name have followed in its wake.
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Filed under: Columns & Essays, Humor, Opinion | 1 Comment
Tags: Boston Magazine, celebrity, Daily Item, fame, Guardian, Kowloon, Mark Sardella, McWanks, microcelebrity, photo, photos, Scott Brown, Sen. Scott Brown, Senator Scott Brown, US Senate, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield Item
My Father’s World War II Photos
I’ve been thinking about World War II a lot lately. I guess it’s a combination of things. Certainly the ongoing effort to raise the funds to replace the crumbling World War II Monument in my hometown of Wakefield, Massachusetts has served as a consistent reminder.
The new granite memorial will be built on the same site as the current monument on the Upper Common. That wooden memorial, built in 1946, is now badly decayed, but the new granite monument will closely follow the design of the original. The new memorial will bear the names of all 2,466 Wakefield veterans who served during the war, with a central space reserved to honor the 71 who lost their lives in the war.
My father, Stephen, and his brother, Joseph (Puck) Sardella are among the Wakefield citizens who served their country in World War II. Their names are on the current monument and will be on the new monument. Both served in the Pacific during the war, my father as an Army sergeant, and my uncle as a Navy Corpsman attached to a Marine division.
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Whiners and Losers
If Martha Coakley had won the Massachusetts special election on January 19, 2010, do you think she would have embarked on a statewide post-election tour to thank the voters?
We’ll never know of course, but I’m guessing she’d have been sworn in and shaking hands in Washington – not at the Kowloon in Saugus shaking hands with voters 11 days after the election.
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A Lighter Shade of Blue
The result of the January 19, 2010 special election was supposed to be a forgone conclusion. In Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, a Republican hadn’t been elected to a Senate seat in nearly 40 years, we were told, over and over. Once Martha Coakley won the Special Democratic Primary to fill the US Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy, the seat was hers by right.
In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-1, Martha Coakley wasn’t even going to need to campaign, at least not very hard, to defeat Scott Brown, a mere state senator and a Republican to boot. There would be no need to spend millions on advertising. And President Obama certainly wouldn’t need to clear his schedule to come up here and campaign for Martha Coakley. She’s a Democrat, after all, and this is Massachusetts.
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Memorial “pavers” to go on sale
They’ve already raised over $25,000 from voluntary donations and the sale of t-shirts and sweatshirts. Now, the World War II Memorial Committee is about to embark on a major fundraising effort that they hope will bring them much closer to their goal of $200,000 – the amount that they estimate will be needed to replace the crumbling wooden memorial on the upper common with a new, granite monument honoring the citizens of Wakefield, Massachusetts who served during the Second World War.
The Committee will soon be selling granite “pavers” that will form a “Walk of Remembrance” around the new World War II Memorial, which the Committee hopes to have built by Memorial Day, 2011. Over the next month, local residents will be receiving a flyer in their Gas & Light bills with information and an order form for requesting a paver to honor a veteran. The forms will also be available at Town Hall, the library and the Senior Center. A complete packet of information will be provided once the paver order, with deposit, has been received.
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Election Ennui
Congratulations to the voters of Wakefield, Massachusetts. One in four of you came out to vote in the recent special primary election to choose Teddy Kennedy’s successor in the US Senate. Wakefield’s 26 percent participation was nearly double the statewide turnout of 14 percent.
Somewhere, the Founding Fathers must be beaming with pride.
In the past, I’ve vocally decried voter apathy. I’ve done my share of railing against low voter turnout in elections and poor attendance at Town Meeting. But now, I think I’m beginning to understand voter indifference, at least as it relates to the recent Special Senate Primary.
On the Republican side, there was essentially no race, a reality borne out by the fact that Scott Brown defeated Jack E. Robinson by a nearly 9-1 margin state wide. So a lack of interest in the Republican primary was easy to understand.
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Mark Sardella 