Six Long Islanders share wishes for 2011

Sergio Argueta, executive director of STRONG Youth, a gang-prevention intervention agency based in Hempstead:

A kid on the North Shore takes a syringe loaded with poison and shoots it into her veins. On the South Shore, a teen loads a gun and shoots it at a stranger. On the East End, adolescents mob up and look for individuals with darker skin tones and foreign accents to assault. On the West End, an adolescent spray paints hate symbols on houses of worship.

We acknowledge the futile loss of life and, overwhelmed, too often forget we have the ability to save our youth. The most effective drug prevention programs are those that inject love into the hearts of our children. Successful anti-violence initiatives beat back aggression by teaching compassion. Anti-bias curriculums are aimed at sensitizing hearts and sobering minds.

The most important tools in saving our children are caring and nurturing adults. This new year should mark a rebirth of our commitment to children, family, youth services and community.

Tullio Bertoli, Brookhaven planning commissioner:

In the new year, Long Island must move toward creative regionalism. We should create a constant conversation among our jurisdictions about post-suburban issues. Planning, as a process, should move easily across boundaries, its only goal to create solutions at once locally acceptable and regionally effective.

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards." We need to look harder at past planning and decide what worked and what didn't. While our general suburban region is made up of multiple smaller political jurisdictions - which some argue enhances local control in a good way - the hard truth is that local fractiousness makes it difficult to address the many pressing regional issues on our Island, issues that are simultaneously critical both to environmental health and to our economic recovery and betterment.

Adopting the spirit of a more collective creative regionalism - one that crosses political borders without erasing them - will let us kick-start conversations on the critical planning issues that actually give local decision-making the power to have any real effect. That deep breath taken, the march toward profound and positive improvement can begin.

Mary Donnelly, high schoolteacher who lives in Babylon:

The advantage to teaching English to high school students is the chance to discuss character development - in both literature and in life. Talks we have in class allow us to explore key issues like friendship, loyalty and discrimination. As Gene Forrester grows more envious of his friend Finny in the timeless "A Separate Peace," for example, students see firsthand how the bonds of friendships can often sour.

Ninth-graders in particular are at a critical time in their lives. In high school, they begin to forge those unique and special friendships that last through their adult years. One wish I have for my students is that they develop a keen judgment of character: that they choose their friends wisely. Students shouldn't be intimidated into offering friendship to someone because they're concerned about being bullied or tormented. They shouldn't be afraid to step away from the pack, choosing not to concern themselves with so-called popularity - which, as we adults know, is fleeting and basically insignificant later in life.

I hope that they begin to understand which relationships can be abusive and destructive. And that friendships built on mutual trust and respect are real, and are beautiful.
 

Fred Lee, owner of Sang Lee Farms in Peconic:

As many as 35 million to 49 million people in the United States are living at or below the poverty level, with an almost equally staggering number of Americans don't have enough food or are hungry today. Yet obesity is at historic levels. How could we have so many hungry - and yet have so many people overweight?

A lot of folks aren't eating properly with the food dollars they have available. Many of today's "food items" aren't really food. Family farms on Long Island, committed to sustainable or organic, non-genetically modified production, not only make environmental sense, but they give consumers a healthy option. Eating fresh local fruits and vegetables not only addresses the carbon footprint problem of transporting food from distant points, but it addresses recommendations to increase daily consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables.

My wish for 2011, is that those of us with wealth contribute time and resources to change the system where "material stuff" seems to count more than the health and well-being of our communities.

I wish that everyone in the United States could have better access to fresh, local vegetables and foods that are healthy. We may be spending tens of billions of dollars annually for homeland security but, I suspect that as a nation, we are at a greater risk of falling prey to our own ill health, brought on by a food system and lifestyle that can use a huge improvement.

V. Elaine Gross, president of ERASE Racism, a regional organization based in Syosset:

2010 left me troubled. Working to eliminate structural racism was increasingly unfashionable last year. Many told us we were in a "post-racist" society. In one case involving New Haven firefighters a year earlier, the Supreme Court ruled that attempts to redress historical inequities were in themselves racist. Thus, the products of structural racism - segregation and systematically limited opportunities for African-Americans and Latinos - either didn't exist or were deemed unworthy of government attention.

But segregation in housing and public education in northern suburbs like Long Island is not a figment of our imagination. The assertions of colorblindness by the courts, elected officials and others are attempts to obscure, rather than cure, the problems of unequal opportunities and often ruinous outcomes for far too many African-American and Latino children.

A black student has only one-third the chance of a white student of attending a high-performing Long Island high school, and more than three times the chance of being relegated to one of the lowest-performing Long Island high schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Segregated housing patterns will not be reversed overnight, even with the 2007 fair housing laws enacted in Nassau and Suffolk. But there is no justification for 124 unequal school districts.

My wish for 2011 is that Long Islanders will decide once and for all to take action. Inequity for some of us diminishes all of us.

Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, Suffolk County poet laureate:

For the poets of Long Island: This is for the women who write poetry in blood, the men who write it in the backbreaking work sweat, the soldiers who write it in their battle-wound-free-flowing-in-the-sand, and the short-order cooks who scrape the grease off their skin to scribe their lines.

This is for the masons who write their words in wet cement and then chisel it in dry concrete, the tattooed women and men baring their poetry on their arms, backs and legs, the ones that are doing the inking, and the cop writing tickets to make quota turning his pad over to write the best lines ever written.

This is for the fire men and women running in and out of flames, who write their poems with soot and ash on burnt wood, for the dentist using pulled, rotted teeth and dental floss to create a mobile of words, and the teachers cutting out words from term papers to paste into place for the perfect sestina.

This is for the farmer who writes his poems in the dirt with his hoe, the fisherman who pulls the guts and skin from a catfish and sees the one true poem before him, and the beggar grubbing for your change and using McDonald's napkins to write the Great American Cantos.

And this is for the lover using his skin as her page, the mathematician who writes poetry in binary code, and the midwife who delivers the child and writes on the floor boards of the newcomer's home a two-word poem in brilliant, red letters, Bright Blessing!!