The Spark

About one in five students in the U.S. report being bullied. Most of them say were bullied because of their physical appearance, race/ethnicity, gender, disability, religion or sexual orientation.

Bullying is nothing new. What is new in the last 20 years is it is not just something that happens on school playgrounds or hallways. Technology, especially with the advent of social media has created a whole different way to be bullied and emboldened bullies.

What are the best ways to reduce or stop bullying? About one in five students in the U.S. report being bullied. To talk more about bullying on The Spark Thursday was Leah Galkowski, a coordinator with the Center for Safe Schools.

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Does it seem like there’s been more near collisions on the nation’s airport runways recently?

The New York Times reports there have been more near misses than are actually reported in the media. The Times reported  that in January, a Delta plane almost collided with an American Airlines flight that was on the wrong runway at JFK. The pilot slammed on the brakes.

The next month, in Austin, a FedEx cargo plane came within 100 feet of a Southwest flight packed with passengers.

The Times report also said there is an ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers and more planes in the sky which can lead to problems.

On The Spark Wednesday, Scott Miller, Deputy Director of Marketing and Public Relations at Harrisburg International Airport said HIA hasn't had any near misses recently and he said the airport's design is one of the reasons,"It's one of those things in which we are fortunate in the sense of with a one runway system, we don't have all of the intersections and cross runways that you'll find in Boston, Fort Lauderdale, JFK, places like that, because it's where the wind patterns are. We only need one runway. So it's a much simpler process here. And it's easier, so to speak, from a training perspective because there's just less to teach."

Belinda Svirbely, HIA's Deputy Director, Operations and Security was also on the program,"Our aviation system is full of professionals who are very good at their job. Training is paramount. So we train everybody that operates on the airside, whether that's a mechanic who taxis an aircraft around, whether that's a maintenance employee who's driving the airfield. They all get training to recognize where the runway is, where the taxiway is, radio communication procedures, safety areas that are built around the runways to ensure that there is no interaction with an aircraft that's landing or taking off. So training is paramount to our safety programs. But so are the meetings that we have on a regular basis to ensure that everybody is up to speed with what's going on and answer any questions or concerns that might be out there."

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Watering, harvesting, foraging, pruning, autumn planting. What does late summer-early fall mean for the garden or your plants and trees?

Horticulturalist Erica Jo Shaffer was on The Spark Wednesday and said that trees may need more water than a lawn at this time of year,"If you see that your trees are already starting to lose leaves or show autumn color, that means they're stressed out from not having enough water. And they're starting to respond to that by losing some of the leaves that would be requiring water. So water your trees. It's so important. Your lawn is going to be fine."

Shaffer said mature trees need about an inch of water a week.

Shaffer indicated that you start a vegetable garden now, even though temperatures will get cool soon.,"You can start again, you can start lettuce seeds again. These are the things that like cooler temperatures. So we're going to go to cooler. I harvested my own lettuce for Christmas dinner four years ago. Yeah, you can buy little frost claws. And when it was over 32 degrees, I'd pull the cloth back. And when it wasn't, I'd leave the cloth on. There was snow on it and I pulled it back and was able to harvest lettuce. So you can do lettuce, you can do beets, you can do carrots."

Autumn is a good time to maintain a lawn too Shaffer explained,"The fertilizer should be higher in the second number, which is for roots. If you go put a high nitrogen fertilizer on your lawn right now, it promotes top growth and we want to promote root growth. We want it to get situated. If you have an aerated your lawn in a in a long time, it's nice to aerate."

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Who knew Star Wars would become a cultural icon when the first film premiered in 1977? But it is and probably more popular today than it was in the 70s.

A new book is out to mark the 40th anniversary of the Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi.

It’s called From a Certain Point of View and features 40 writers who were told to watch the film, choose a no-name character with no backstory and tell that character’s story from their point of view.

Patricia Jackson, who is an English teacher at Central York High School and self-identified Star Wars geek, wrote one of the chapters and appeared on The Spark Tuesday,"I wrote for Star Wars a long time ago, about 20 years ago, with a company called West End Games. So this wasn't my first rodeo, but I was very lucky when my agent, Sarah Megabus, wrote to me about a year ago and said, Hey, Patty, would you like to write Star Wars again? And I thought after Disney bought their franchise, I would never be able to get my little fingers on Star Wars again. But here was my chance. All I had to do was watch Return of the Jedi and choose a character that had no backstory. I think I watched the movie way too many times and might need therapy, but I chose the scout trooper who knocked Luke Skywalker off his bike and was able to tell that story, which was super cool."

In Jackson's story, the scout trooper is Black,"When I watched the original Star Wars episode for A New Hope, I went home and wrote my first little novel, and the character that I wrote looked like the character I saw blond hair, blue eyes and white skin. And I grew up believing that was the default for all heroes. So therefore, I could never be the hero. I could never be beautiful. And it wasn't until I was in my fifties that I was like, Wait a minute, wait a minute. You can tell a story where the character looks very much like you. So it was very important to me to include that character as Black in the story."

Jackson said it was important to her that her character was Black and talked about an experience she had as a teacher,"I had a child who was sort of a naughty child who wouldn't come to school. And when we found out we were Star Wars fans,  I told him, if you start coming to school on a regular basis, I will let you read this story. And I walked in across the room as he read the story and his head popped up and he walked over to my desk and he said, Miss, is this character really Black? And I said, Yes, he is. And he was like, Miss, I'm going to hug you. And that's why representation matters. And there was some pushback because in this story I talked about how this scout trooper had to work harder at the academy than his other peers. And there was pushback, "Patty, that suggests racism." Yeah, that's my world. That's what I live in. And there was some push to change it, and I refused to do so. And I probably cost myself a Star Wars contract in the future. I don't care, because it matters to me. And it mattered to that child. And it matters to every Black and brown child out there to be able to see themselves in every franchise and not to have to be something that they're not."

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Peace. Harmony, Civility. At a time when many Americans and much of the world are divided by politics and sometimes religious beliefs with the two overlapping at times, there still are people coming together to promote unity and diversity.

The Harrisburg Harmony Walk, which will include Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs among others, is scheduled for Sunday, September 10th.

Rev. Cynthia Mara, one of the founders of InterReligious Forum of Greater Harrisburg joined us on The Spark Wednesday to talk about the event,"We walk between different houses of worship Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Islamic and also at the library. People from other religions speak like Sikh and Baha'i and Buddhist and others. And at each stop, a leader of that faith speaks from the heart, not from Scripture or anything, but from the heart about the value of cooperation among religions. And so people hear that at the stop, and then people walk together and they get to know each other. One of the times somebody said to me as she was walking along, talking to people of various religions, she said, this is the way it should always be."

Mara added,"It is so sad what's happening in the world that religion is so often used, misused, abused as a reason to harm people of other religions. And it also is used as a reason to separate people. And when people of different religions or any difference are separated, that breeds fear. Instead, with the harmony walk, those walls are just dissolved and people come to know that people in these other faiths. They have different religious beliefs. But although we don't talk about that, so many of the themes that cut across the great world religions are the same. Compassion and justice and all of those. And when people come to find that, our similarities. A much greater than our differences. It can help to contribute to peace."

The Harrisburg Harmony Walk begins at 3 p.m., Sunday September 10, at the entrance to the Goodwin Memorial Baptist Church and ends at Hadee Mosque.

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Remember the old adage “finder keepers, losers weepers?” Apparently, that saying isn't consistent with what's legal

A Chester County man learned that the hard way when he found a $3,000 wad of cash someone dropped at a grocery store in Gap, Lancaster County last year.

After he was identified through security video, the man was charged with a misdemeanor by police, was fined and ordered to perform community service.

LNP/Lancaster Online crime and safety reporter Dan Nephin has been covering this case and joined on The Spark Tuesday, "This man found money. He didn't see anybody around. He went home with it, didn't spend it, but it was captured on video and he was subsequently recognized. Police show up and he gave the money back. But there is a charge. There is a law that says when you find lost or misplace or mis-delivered property or cash, you have to take steps to get it back to its rightful owner."

Nephin was asked what the man should have done when he found the money,"What he should have done under the law is he should have went to the store (saying) I found this money or the police department in this case, it would have been the state police. But he should have taken some some steps to reunite the money with its owner."

What punishment did the man get? Nephin told us,"He got into a program for generally first time offenders or generally nonviolent crimes. It's called accelerated rehabilitative disposition. And it's essentially probation without conviction. In this case, he was given 20 hours of community service and then court costs. But all told, added up to over $2,000."

Nephin found that the level of charges depend on how much money was found or the value of what was found. Anything over $100,000 would result in a first-degree felony.

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Where have all the spotted lanternflies gone? It’s a question many Central Pennsylvanians have been asking this summer. After a few years of seeing overwhelming numbers of the invasive insects, it’s very noticeable there aren’t as many around this year.

Not that they’re missed, but not as many lanternflies makes it feel like an unusual summer. But it is good news for the fruit trees and other plants the lanternflies can damage.

Julie Urban,  an associate researcher in entomology at Penn State University was asked on Tuesday’s The Spark why there aren’t as many spotted lanternflies in the central part of Pennsylvania this year,”The short answer is, I don’t know. The longer answer is it’s unlikely (they’re gone). And so we know that spotted lanternfly populations are extremely patchy and that you might have a really high density in one area and a couple of blocks away — not very high at all. And so a colleague of mine likened the spotted lanternfly spread to throwing a stone into a pond. You have this wave that moves out, but then you still get subsequent ripples behind it. And so their populations are patchy. I hope that potentially populations are smaller in eastern Pennsylvania, perhaps due to the governmental control efforts, but also because we’re seeing it spread and we’re seeing really high numbers in newer areas like Pittsburgh in our state and continued high numbers in Manhattan and other places. I don’t want people to let their guard down yet.”

The first spotted lanternfly found in Pennsylvania was discovered in Berks County in 2014. Nine years later, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the invasive insect that is native to Asia.

Urban described one of the unknowns,”I think one of the big questions is how far can they move? We know they’re not great fliers. But does that mean that they can’t get caught up in a thermal and blow pretty far? Or with this constant movement, their feeding, moving, feeding, moving. How far can they really move? And so my concern is that we might be underestimating this true dispersal distance.”

Urban pointed out a researcher in West Virginia is dissecting lanternflies and using DNA to identify the plants they’ve consumed as a way to know where they’re come from.

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Two weeks ago Lancaster Township supervisors in Lancaster County voted to ban single-use plastic bags in the township joining more than 20 other Pennsylvania municipalities and over 450 across the country. The Lancaster Township action encourages consumers to utilize reusable bags and will allow businesses to charge customers for paper bags.

Single-use plastic bags are bad for the environment or they.? A report in 2020 from the Pennsylvania Legislative Budget and Finance Committee found that less than 1% of litter collected in 2019 in Pennsylvania was single-use plastic bags.

With us on The Spark Monday was Faran Savitz, Zero Waste Advocate, with the environmental group PennEnvironment who talked about why single-use plastic bags have a detremental impact on the environment,"The real problem with single use plastics and single use plastic bags is we use them for just a couple of minutes on average, and then we throw them away and don't really think about them. But the problem with plastic is there is no away whether that bag is going to a landfill, whether it's ending up in an incinerator or even worse, straight in our environment, it's harming us in some way, shape or form. Plastic bags can choke our wildlife. They can clog storm drains, making flooding worse. They can the effects of heavy rainfall worse, they break down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic called microplastics that we know they're in our air, they're in our water, they're in our food. We're eating, breathing and drinking them. Our wildlife consume them and they can cause a whole host of health effects. And that's not even to mention the fact that plastic comes from somewhere. Plastic is made, by and large from fossil fuels which harm our climate. They harm our air quality, our water quality. So at every step of the way, those plastic items we use for a couple of minutes are harming us. They're harming our health and they're harming our environment."

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On August 28, 1963 -- sixty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the iconic "I have a dream" speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Some 250,000 people crowded on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument focusing on employment and other discrimination, civil rights abuses against African Americans and support for the Civil Rights Act that the Kennedy Administration was attempting to pass through Congress.

At the time, it was the largest civil rights demonstration in the nation’s history.

But how did the March on Washington come together and did it have an impact?

Michael G. Long has co-authored a new book More Than a Dream -- The Radical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and has also edited another new book Bayard Rustin – A Legacy of Protest and Politics.

On The Spark Monday, Long said the march helped to get the Civil Rights Act passed but added,"The march also had an impact in the sense that it created a template for future marches. One of the things that Rustin did was to focus on massing numbers. He wanted the Black masses to be present for the marching. Philip Randolph, the director of the march, and they turned out 250,000 on that day. There was some controversy because he'd cut out civil disobedience for the day. Originally, the march was scheduled as a two-day program, which would include a massive sit in in Congress. And Rustin eventually cut that out, focusing on amassing 250,000 people, which is what he did, and future movements, so that there was big numbers as an important thing. What Rustin did on that day was to serve notice on Congress and on the White House and on the Supreme Court. You couldn't be a member of those institutions and not comment on the March on Washington for jobs and freedom."

President John F. Kennedy opposed the march as Long described,"He said that the march would intimidate people. We don't want to put on a big show. Those were his exact words. And he really pressured them to call off the march. And Philip Randolph, who had organized the 1941 March on Washington to discuss to end discrimination in national defense industries, said to Kennedy quite point blank, there will be a march, Mr. President. And Kennedy left the 90-minute meeting frustrated. And I love that point because it shows that the Black civil rights leaders were in charge of the civil rights movement and civil rights legislation at that point. They were the ones who were pushing it. They were the ones who had the leverage."

Long said Dr. King inserted the "I have a dream" segment of the speech, "King left behind his prepared comments and launched in his dream a refrain. And that's when the people really got into the march. They were as flat as King's flat speech up to that point. But once he started to recount the dream, they were captivated. It was like a religious revival. If you watch footage, people in the march are raising their hands. They're throwing their heads back, they're closing their eyes. They're thanking the heavens."

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Filmmakers Sugey Cruz and Greg Poppa joined forces to form Foxy Phoenix Productions, which is a film company aimed at creating compelling and impactful films that captivate audiences and inspire meaningful conversations. Their most recent film Cold is a heart-wrenchingly, tragic tale of Carmen, a grieving mother who wakes up in a strange house with only a vague note from her guide, Samuel to direct her next 1000 days. Carmen, portrayed by Sugey Cruz, wakes up in a world she doesn’t recognize and is given the task of fixing her vehicle or spend eternity in purgatory.

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