Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 19 February 1994 — Page 2

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THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19,1994

Dimensions of human tragedy in this world

EDITORIALS

How did we get here? The Indianapolis Recorder received a copy of an unpublished essay written by a high school student who attends an area school which contains several accounts which relate the ease with which one may purchase drugs in area high schools. The essay goes on to state which of these illegal substances, are the most popular drugs among various groups of students. Meanwhile adults seem to have taken to heart the words from an old rock and roll song that goes “don’t turn on the lights, cause I don’t want to see”. While it is hardly news that drugs might be easily available in local high schools, it is disturbing that adults seem to have come to accept this as an inevitability. The key phrase from the essay is “easily accessible”. Why is it so easy? Whose idea is that ? Who is responsible? Why can’t we do anything about it? Does anybody care? The recent stir caused when Indianapolis Mayor Steve Goldsmith and state representative Bill Crawford announced the formation of a coalition aimed at selecting individuals to run for the board of school commissioners has yet to die down. People are debating the wisdom of the mayor’s involvement in this effort and people are quickly taking sides. Eventually when people tire of talking about the political implications and the motives of everyone involved perhaps they’ll start talking about why it’s so easy to buy drugs during class breaks. Maybe people will start trying to suggest that someone is actually accountable for problems such as drugs in schools. It is good that high visibility leaders and politicians are entering the educational fray. Education needs a lot of attention from a lot of people before things will improve in the schools. Because, sooner or later the lights are going to go on and we’re going to have to face our children and tell them why we have all neglected things in our schools for so long. There are just too many excuses for the obvious shortcomings of schooling in America and in Indianapolis. What’s the excuse for the drugs in schools? Is itbecause we’re too busy to notice little problems like this? After all we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got enough school buses to get our kids to school so that they can be exposed to drugs. The biggest concern seems to be whether we leave kids on the bus. This is certainly a sad little problem but it gets far more press than does the drugs in our schools. A kid selling another kid drugs is a sadder thing than spending a night on a school bus. Where have we been for the last decade. Our children live in another world right under our noses so we should be happy that many more of them don’t self destruct. Young people are generally open and honest about the problems they face. We should start listening to them instead of becoming bogged down with trivia, red tape and excuses for our failure to take seriously the education of our children. Drugs and guns and alcohol and ignorance don’t belong in school. Our kids are telling us that our schools have two much of these things and not enough caring and teaching and wisdom and knowledge. We want the mayor involved in education as well as more parents and more and better teachers and strong and effective school board members and good and wise administrators. Our kids need our attention because we’ve figured out how to run school buses but we seem to have forgotten how to run schools.

Gov. Welsh Rules Out Bias on State Job May 6,1961 Governor Matthew Welsh, in a mid April statement to heads of departments and state institutions, noted that the last general assembly passed a bill with respect to fair employment opportunities,particularly with respect to the employment of colored people. Strikingly, in the pronouncement Gov. Welsh observed, “employment is to be made and people are to br retained on the ability to perform their jobs”.... And I want it distinctly understood that there is too be no discrimination. Let it be underlined .there is to be no discrimination”. The spirit of an open door to all applicants of the basis of there ability... is something new on the Indiana state political front.

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Jobs and the need for welfare reform

If you wonderwhy US. officials keep criticizing China publicly on human rights issues, or why Freedom House lists as “not free states” Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and others, let me tell you a story about the dimensions of human tragedy in this world: The refugees, hundreds of them, gathered on a strip of land between the borders of Somalia and Kenya. They were fleeing Somalia because of drought, because bandits had taken all they owned, because ceaseless civil wars left them frightened and homeless. The scene is common throughout the world. According to the Erst report of its kind from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of refugees worldwide stands at 18.2 million, up from 2.5 million 20 years ago and 11 million just 10 years ago. At least 25 million more persons are displaced within

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their own countries. In addition to wrenching individual suffering, the persistent rise in forced flight has also created international problems regarding human rights and basic issues of peace, security and stability. We’ve struggled with these in the United States in divisive debates over Haitian boat people and American troops in Somalia. We see them in Europe, where an ugly backlash of racism, neo-Nazism and xenophobia has arisen against refugees and economic migrants. In

both this country and abroad beleaguered governments are taking down the “welcome” signs and shutting their gates. “The traditional system for protecting refugees has come dangerously close to breaking down,” says Sadalo Ogata, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “The massive number of people on the move has weakened international solidarity and endangered, at times seriously, the time-honored tradition of granting asylum to those in genuine need of protection.” The U.N. report urges all nations to offer temporary protection to displaced persons, until they can be voluntarily repatriated. But it acknowledges that the special provisions made for protecting refugees are sometimes abused by people who have no valid claim to refugee status, and says this is undermining support for asylum in

a number of recipient countries. The capacity of the international community to respond has been strained to the breaking point, warns the report. The long-term solution, says the U.N. report, is for all countries and international institutions to emphasize prevention — to deal vigorously with the causes of flight before it occurs. “The protection that the international community can offer to refugees is not an adequate substitute for the protection that they should receive from their own governments in their own countries,” says the U.N. report, adding that even the most generous asylum cannot replace the loss of a homeland or relieve the pain of exile. “Societies in which no one has cause to fear persecution or generalized violence do not produce refugees.”

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The welfare system is in urgent need of reform. But I would be more optimistic about the prospects for sound reform if I didn’t know that political leaders historically manipulated stereotypes about welfare and its recipients. Remember President Reagan and his remarks about “welfare queen?” Or the endless rhetoric about “welfare cheats?” Or the absurd myths about people having babies to get on welfare? So reforming welfare carries with it the prospect of making the system more punitive and less able to assist poor people to become independent and achieve a descent standard of living. In fact, welfare reform has been a synonym for cutting benefits, not for making the system work better for the poor and the nation. Over the past decade welfare payments have been allowed to fall far behind inflation, in effect, cutting benefits drastically. And more stringent eligibility requirements have forced many needy families off the rolls or denied them access to welfare. But the numbers of people on welfare still kept growing, because poor people and minorities have been in an economic depression for over a dozen years. Ideally, welfare would not just make it, the way the federal and state system operates, but would address the problems of all poor people, most of who do not receive welfare payments. There’s general agreement that work is the answer to welfare. But someone once said that simple solutions are always wrong ones and while work is the answer to some aspects of the problems with welfare, it is not the solution for all welfare recipients. Many are too sick to work. Others cannot work without day care for their children. Study after study shows that people on welfare want to work. They do not because there are no jobs available for them, so real welfare reform has to include massive job creation. That’s the hard part. It’s easy to pass laws saying that after two years, people must leave welfare for work. But unless the jobs are there, that so-called “reform” becomes a cruel deception. Some estimates suggest that 2.3 million jobs will be needed, other more optimistic ones say less than a million. Current work and welfare programs employ only about 30,000 recipients,

so you can see how awesome the problem

is.

Of course, government should spend whatever it takes to get people prepared, trained and working. It’s a sound investment in America’s neglected human resources. But

recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children have children whose care is of paramount importance. If mothers are expected to work in low-wage jobs, someone will have to pick up the

tab for day care.

There’s nothing like work to give people feelings of dignity and self-worth and to help them escape the trip of welfare dependency,

jobs shouldn’t be sold as a panacea unless But we need to be clear about the fact that the we’re willing to make that investment. real problem in America today is a lack of jobs. In addition to the costs of job preparation, That’s why so many people are poor and why monitoring and job creation, health insurance many are dependent on welfare, aid will have to be part of a welfare package that If the Administration and the Congress are includes a work requirement or work incentives, really willing to invest in our people and in jobs since many poor people lose their Medicaid for all, then welfare reform has a chance to coverage when they leave for a job. succeed. Otherwise, it willjust be more rhetoric. Then there’s day care. By definition,

South Africa: peace in our land

PHONE (317)924-5143

Peace in our land — those words were seen on tee shirts, buttons, baseball caps and billboards all across South Africa on New Year’s Day. As a new year and a new day dawned in that country, the people were proclaiming, the people were praying for peace. As I traveled across South Africa for two weeks, I could feel a heightened sense of anticipation and hope in the air. Excitement crackled in the atmosphere. People spoke of the hope they have that their country will finally be theirs. They will finally be seen as full human beings by their government. Everywhere, everyone is talking about being able to vote. For no Black South African, no matter how old, no mater how intelligent or educated, no matter how responsible or experienced, no matter how lauded or wellknown, has ever been able to vote. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 62 years, the highest church official in the land, holder of numerous graduate degrees, Nobel laureate and winner of countless prizes and awards, has never voted. Nelson Mandela, lawyer, political leader, Nobel laureate, has never voted.

Everyone is talking about being able to vote. Sadly, we here in America, we here in Black America, take that right too often for granted. Our ancestors and some of us have gone to jail for that right, have been beaten and threatened for that right, and yes, died for that right. We have a lesson to learn from our brothers and sisters in South Africa about the importance of voting. We have another lesson to leam as well. One taxicab driver told us how South Africans look to their African-American brothers and sisters for leadership and guidance. That historically has been the case. Indeed, Tutu tells us of first reading Ebony Magazine as a young man and being inspired by the stories of African Americans who were succeeding in America. But, have we, inheritors of the legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune and W.E.B. DuBois, inheritors of the legacy of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, lost that ability to hope? Have we lost that ability to expect a better future? A few months ago the Washington Post carried the story of an eleven year old girl who is planning what she will wear to her

own funeral. Our children have no expectations of living beyond the day, week, the month. Our babies are bom with AIDS, some will perish without hope for the future. Thousands upon thousands of African-American men have given up all hope of ever getting a job and aren’t even counted in unemployment figures. Professor Cornel West has written that our young people are engulfed in nihilism — in.lives without hope, without meaning and without love. That hope even of the slaves, that hope of a better tomorrow for our children and their children, has somehow been dimmed. South Africa faces enormous challenges in the months and years ahead. It must put together a new government of all the people. It must implement its new Constitutioa It must find jobs and build housing for millions who

have never had them before. It must combine unequal educational systems. It must merge a muchhated defense force with local police forces. It must rebuild a sanctions-devastated economy. It must undo five decades of apartheid and hundreds of years of neglect and colonialism. The year of the new South African, perhaps our hope can be rekindled by our brothers and sisters in South Africa. Perhaps their hope, their expectations will be contagious and will help encourage, reinvigorate and refresh those of us in America. For the past two decades, many of us here marched and boycotted, cajoled and donated to help our South African brothers and sisters achieve freedom. Yet, even when Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, even when I visited South Africa two years ago, I did not expect to see this day come. In twelve weeks the people of South Africa, all the people of South Africa will choose new leaders. Let us rejoice in this miracle. Let us be inspired by this much longed-for and hard fought victory. Let us pray for peace in their land. And then let us get busy working for peace in ours.