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Show The 'radical' vote , ;alt I ake Citv and it is fairly ap- The primary elections are over for Sa t Lake i uiy reasonable parent that young people turned out t . vo .te . rat numbers. Their efforts were reasonable enK.gh to get youth-oriented candidate into the mal elect ons nd V minority-supported candidates placed fa. ly no new 18-19-would have done at least a little worse if there had 20 year-old vote. Rr,rkpn Lee saw fit to condemn But Tuesday night Salt Lake Mayor J. Bracken Lee sa the new voters as "radicals" who never should have been g oting privilege. He made his fantastic statements anc genera zations in roughly this order: 1) Lee stated that as far a f he w" e new would never have voted for the 18-yearKld vote; 2 Most o the ne voters are radicals and won't vote responsibly for respon sb le c an didates; 3) The new young vote is powerful and dangerous ,n that could sway elections, "as it seems to have done ir i h , s case. Point one of Lee's statement we have no quarrel with He i has eve y right to hold his own opinions for whatever reasons he fee s ust, ty them. Fortunately, the question of the 18-year-old vote wasn t left up to The second point of the Mayor's statement we can call nothing short of fantastic generalization and pure nonsense. Mayor Lee is indulging in stereotyping of the most inhuman kind, imposing maority generalizations on a largely defenseless minority group. In calling most young voters "radicals" he is taking what he thinks to be the worst elements among us and applying them to all of the 10,uuu new city voters. We doubt seriously that there are 10,000 "radicals in Utah, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming combined, much less 10,000 of them in Salt Lake City alone. Mayor Lee further categorizes the new young vote as irresponsible Me is quite likely incensed at the fact that a bearded, longhaired candidate could make it through the city primaries. He must be taking lessons from his associate, Commissioner Catmull, equating long hair with radicalism and calling it all intrinsically bad. Lee is obviously succumbing suc-cumbing to the temptation of accepting the most convenient stereotypes as truth, rather than thinking out the truth rationally. And as to swaying an election, we doubt if anything of the kind has been done. First of all, nobody's been elected to anything yet. And although a 50 percent participation figure for city election primaries isn't too bad, especially for a group new to the experience, the power of that group is still at a disadvantage to the silent majority. If all of the city's "radicals" should vote for the same man, they could still not elect him without help from the "straight" vote. Perhaps the only reason a longhaired candidate made it into the finals is because the large number of candidates split up the straight vote so badly. We ask the Mayor to stop making nonsensical allegations unless he can back up his opinions' with some rational thought. The rhetoric of fear and suspicion never made anyone any legitimate friends. Further, we would remind the mayor that his own political history is filled with some of the most unorthodox politics in Utah. Were the people who supported him "radicals"? We ask the mayor to consider the answer carefully, especially before resuming his series of parting potshots. |