Comment on this story Wednesday, July 7 • The Associated Press reports that state legislators have passed a law enacting stricter requirements for obtaining “disabled” tags to park in handicap-reserved spots. It seems that several state officials had been fraudulently obtaining handi-tags by claiming that impotence constitutes a chronically debilitating condition. Thursday, July 8 • The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Utah State’s Kermit Hall, a close runner-up to John Petersen in the recent University of Tennessee presidential search, as saying he lost the UT presidency due to “last-minute, back-room wrangling” by trustees. Baloney. Hall lost because no self-respecting institution of higher learning wants a president whose first name is “Kermit.” Friday, July 9 • The News Sentinel reports that Oak Ridge’s Y-12 nuclear weapons compound will send $10 million worth of radioactive material to Canada. That seems awfully punitive, even for the country that gave us Nickelback, Bryan Adams and Keanu Reeves. Saturday, July 10 • A handful of guards at a Nashville prison are disciplined for negligence in the escape of a trio of handicapped inmates last month. The gullible guards reportedly didn’t realize that ADA regulations concerning accessible exits don’t apply to barbed-wire-topped fences. Sunday, July 11 • Dollywood theme park in Sevier County hosts a group of yo-yo experts from the Duncan corporation, the world’s best-known manufacturer of the toy. It being the height of tourist season in Pigeon Forge, however, there don’t seem to be any more yo-yos around than usual. Monday, July 12 • President George W. Bush visits Oak Ridge National Laboratory and delivers a speech that observers say is “very impressive.” And we agree; some reports even have it that the President spelled “ORNL” correctly on four out of five references. Tuesday, July 13 • The News Sentinel reports that Bush’s visit to the UT-managed ORNL was mostly uneventful. There was a moment of panic, though, when Bush walked into one of the lab’s university-affiliated classrooms, and found himself surrounded by instruments of math instruction. Knoxville Found What is this? Every week in “Knoxville Found,” we’ll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you’re the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you’ll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn’t cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send ’em to “Knoxville Found” c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902. Last Week’s Photo: For the past 20 years, the students at Thackston School Branch have joined with friends and families in a parade to celebrate Independence Day. Bicycles, tricycles, wagons, strollers and more are festooned with ribbons and flags and are navigated along a two-block stretch of Lake Avenue. Members of Knoxville’s police department provide security and roadblocks for the event while the fire department provides escorts. The parade is followed by a cookout featuring hot dogs and, of course, apple pie. First to identify this scene is a veteran of several TSB parades, David Atkins, who will be receiving a copy of WWE Originals, a compilation CD featuring musical works by notable composers such as “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Booker T and Rey Mysterio. Meet Your City A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend KNOX COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD Monday, July 19 5 p.m. Andrew Johnson Building Boardroom 912 S. Gay St. Work session. CITY COUNCIL Tuesday, July 20 7 p.m. City County Building Large Assembly Room 400 Main St. Regular meeting.

Tennessee/Tel-Aviv Trajectory
An alternative route toward peace in the Mideast

It’s a long way from East Tennessee to the West Bank of the River Jordan, both geographically and culturally. But an initiative funded through the East Tennessee Foundation is set to span that distance. Its mission is to help bridge the educational gap between Israeli and Palestinian children who are their own worlds apart on issues of cultural understanding.

Women in the embattled region, brought together last year by the Nobel Peace Commission, asked for help in creating a school curriculum that would promote that understanding. Their conclusion, according to ET Foundation President Mike McClamroch, was that it may be too late for grownups to gain the fundamental knowledge and emotional considerations that could lead to lasting peace between their peoples, but not for their children. They wished for outside assistance in bringing a peaceful perspective to their children’s schooling.

How that request got to East Tennessee at all is a circuitous story that ultimately hinged on the willingness of Scott Niswonger, the Greeneville businessman and philanthropist, to take a flyer at what was then just an undeveloped and untested idea. The subject was broached by Joan Brown Campbell, the former general secretary of the World Council of Churches, who convened the delegation of Israeli and Palestinian women in Oslo last year, in a chat with Oliver “Buzz” Thomas, the executive director of the Niswonger Foundation and board member of the ET Foundation. Thomas, who had worked with Campbell several years ago as legal counsel for the National Council of Churches, was appearing at a forum on religious freedom in Chautauqua, N.Y., last summer, and he was immediately interested in the issue as Campbell described it. He talked with Niswonger about it, and a project began to take shape. It’s still being developed under the auspices of the Global Peace Initiative for Women, whose founder, Dena Merriam, says her group is identifying schools to be served in Israel and the Palestinian lands in the coming term, with the hope that by the 2005 school year a pilot program will be underway.

The ET Foundation is serving as the conduit for a $75,000 grant from Greeneville’s Niswonger Foundation to develop the curriculum.

Thomas’s discussions with Campbell and others steered the Niswonger Foundation, which has committed about $5 million in assistance to East Tennessee’s poorest school districts in the past three years, away from an earlier concept of helping to rebuild destroyed school buildings in the Mideast. “The focus should not be on the buildings but on what goes on inside the buildings,” Thomas says the women of the region were telling them. “What Palestinian children were learning about Israelis was: ‘They are the people who took our land and are bulldozing our homes,’ and what Israeli children were learning about Palestinians was: ‘They are people who hate and kill Israelis,’” Thomas says. The challenge is to create a school climate and classroom experience that promotes the possibility of peace through shared understanding of each other’s cultures, identities, and needs, he says.

Thomas says Campbell’s experience in Oslo was illuminating. About 20 prominent and influential women on each side were flown to Norway to participate. Included were the Palestinian minister of Women’s Affairs and at least three women members of Israel’s Knesset, along with the woman who teaches theology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

The first 36 hours of the women’s meeting was “a disaster,” characterized by confrontation, yelling, and blame-casting, Thomas says. “Midway through the second day, one woman stood up and said, ‘We must sing,’” he says, trying to imagine a group of contentious men coming to a similar conclusion. The women wanted to come up with a song they all knew, and they found one, Thomas says, “They all stood, held hands, and sang ‘We Shall Overcome.’ It was the one song they knew.” The occasion gave way to dancing, singing of other songs and tears of relief that they could communicate without bitterness, Thomas says. “Before they left, Israeli women were making appointments to visit Palestinian refugee camps, and Palestinian women were making appointments to visit Yad-Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem—because they’d been taught that the Holocaust never happened,” he says.

They turned to the concept of educating their peoples’ children in a new way because “no matter what the men do in the ‘peace process,’ we will never get along as long as we continue to hate,” Thomas says the delegation concluded.

The curriculum project is a means of melting away some of that hate, he believes. “If it succeeds, expanding it is more than we can pay for, and that’s what we want,” he says, explaining that he’s had discussions with representatives of other, larger foundations about the possibility of joining in its expansion.

“We’re the guys who were willing to roll the dice,” he says. And McClamroch agrees. “It’s a risk,” he says, “but Scott Niswonger has done that, taken such risks, in his business life, and he’s been just as successful in his philanthropy as he has in his businesses (LandAir and ForwardAir, the giant trucking and freight-forwarding companies). It’s the right place to put our focus and effort. That something potentially this big is arising in East Tennessee is really exciting.”

The East Tennessee Foundation, in its 18th year and just past its $100 million milestone in grant awards, is ordinarily directed toward the 24 counties it is set up to serve. It has granted money internationally on occasion in the past, including providing money for preserving architecturally historic features in England and Central Europe, McClamroch says.

For Thomas and Niswonger, the experience is entirely new and well worth trying. “Who knows if it will work out as we hope? But it’s got a good chance, we believe, because of the women who are behind it and because of the way one of those women put it:

“‘We are tired of burying our children.’”

—Barry Henderson

Sun Shed on the Sphere
Citizens speak up for World’s Fair Park

Back in April, the City of Knoxville opened the request lines, so to speak, for public comment on the World’s Fair Park. What did we, the citizenry, want to see happen to the Sunsphere, the Tennessee Amphitheater, the Candy Factory and other structures in downtown’s backyard? In addition to 12 letters, the city received more than 100 emails, the equivalent of 63 pages of single-spaced comments, recommendations and wishes concerning the park and its surrounds.

That much input is hard to sum up in a few words, says city spokesperson Amy Nolan.

“I thought there was quite a variety of comments,” she says. “What we were pleased most about was the interest it shows. It does confirm what the mayor thought, that there was interest in the World’s Fair Park and how it can be a better utilized asset for the city, especially the Sunsphere.”

A preliminary and unscientific study of the emailed comments conducted by Metro Pulse reveals that certain words appear with some regularity. Perhaps that frequency of expression can be used to gauge the level and style of citizen interest on the park. Consider the number of times emailers used the following words: restaurant: 50 times; parking: 41 times; concert: 40 times; children/kids: 39; art: 29; music: 19; free: 17; gift shop: 7; residential: 5; condo: 1.

Most respondents seem overwhelmingly attached to the park and its buildings as they are now—with only some renovation and increased use. Only one of the 100 email comments suggested tearing the Sunsphere down; another said that the monument should be scrapped if it continues to be left underutilized. At least two were in favor of tearing down the Tennessee Amphitheater; although the amphitheater received more impassioned pleas for repair. “As it sits rusting and unusable, it only continues to deteriorate, and will eventually reach the point at which restoring it will be such an undertaking that any fiscal conservative will have to conclude that it will need to be taken down. This should not be allowed to happen,” wrote one. “Talk about demolition by neglect,” wrote another.

Many people want, above all, for the Sunsphere to be open to the public, both as a tourist attraction and as a point of pride for locals. Many mentions of “restaurant” in emails were for putting dining back into the Sunsphere.

Many folks recalled fondly going to concerts on the World’s Fair Park lawn and wondered why similar concerts and festivals don’t occur with as much frequency anymore.

Some of the more obscure suggestions for the park include a “huge water park facility” with a “lazy river water ride.” One respondent suggests putting a butterfly house in the Sunsphere. Several respondents want the Sunsphere illuminated at night.

Now that Mayor Haslam and his team have gotten a piece of the public’s mind regarding its various hopes and dreams for the World’s Fair Park, the next step won’t be instant fulfillment. This is government, after all. Nolan says the administration will consider its priorities, which ideas deserve priority implementation, which structures to focus on first. There are no deadlines, no timeframe. “Discussions are ongoing,” is how Nolan puts it, which means the city is still open to suggestions from citizens, tenants in the buildings in question, and all stakeholders.

—Paige M. Travis

July 15, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 29 © 2004 Metro Pulse