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Show Lehi Free Press New Utah! - Wednesday, January 20, 1999 - Page 2 Opinion Goldilocks Reaching for King's dream As we marked the accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King this or Human Rights past Monday Day. as some in Utah are pleased to call it it would be well to remember that we are still a long way from the dream that gave the man such power here to achieving the ideal of racial harmony that most of us profess to believe in. The evidence suggests that racial tolerance is much more widespread now than it was in Dr. King's day, but discriniination remains in many more subtle ways. That a minority in our midst with limiting opinions is still causing damage to innocent people is undeniable, and we will never get to where we need to be as a community until such viewpoints are completely and sincerely eradicated. Dr. King acknowledged at the beginning of the same speech that the Emancipation Proclamation was not enough to truly free the slaves. "One hundred years later," he declared, "the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination." Now, 35 years after he spoke, most of the manifest evils of his time have been all but erased, at least as far as our laws are concerned. Yet he knew, and it is still true, that only when the hearts of men and women everywhere truly change when all of us truly believe and think and act as though race is just another way that human beings are varied and interesting and beautiful will the day arrive "when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, Tree at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'" Wherever we are individually located along this journey's path, may this year be one of progress for us all. to move us. He was one of the driving forces of the civil rights movement, and much admirable and necessary progress has been made since his day towards equalizing opportunities for all persons. Still, we believe he'd be horrified at some of the directions the movement is taking now. For example, today's tortuous political and ethnic "correctness" is the exact opposite of what he preached. He didn't want to see race or ethnicity define everything; what he hoped for was the day when race would define nothing, when it would, in fact, disappear as a criteria altogether. These are his own words, spoken at the rally in 1963 that became a benchmark along the path of the civil rights struggle: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be that all men are created equal.' ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their charself-eviden- t; acter." What present events in Washington tell us about our nation's character would have been as disconcerting to Dr. King as it is to most Utahns, but that is another matter altogether. Instead, let us ask how close we are v. The Three Bears, for pain, suffering and court costs It is a pretty sad day for America when NBA action isn't on television and the Clinton impeachment crock, I mean, proceedings are, so I think it is time for a story. I must warn you, however, this tale is not politically correct, although no living creatures were harmed in the writing of it. This is the modern-da- y story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Once upon a time, there was a teenage girl named Tanicia, who was affectionately called "Knothead" by her friends (because she braided her waist-lon- g hair so tightly, and "Goldilocks" by her parents, because they used to do it in the cutest little ringlets when she was but a toddler. (It only took one time of her parents using the family name in front of her friends that she let them know in no uncertain terms that they absolutely were not, under any circumstances, to ever embarrass her again by calling her Goldilocks where anyone could hear it.) So anyway, Tanicia was hanging out at the mall with her friends one day and when she stayed in the nose ring department too long, they took off without her. Being 15, Tanicia was not used to walking home, or even taking the bus, but it certainly looked as though she had no other choice. She had no clue where she was going, but she decided she might as well start off in one direction. This girl had absolutely no clue when it came to direction, and it wasn't long before she found herself in the forest on the other side of the freeway. She was following what looked like a sidewalk, but was not on the side and wasn't made out of the concrete she had seen in front of her house. She had heard the word "path" when she upstairs. Maybe they would have a was younger, but had no concept of what a path looked like. Having no other options at hand, she continued down the path until she came to a little cottage. This didn't look like the condo that her friend Buffy lived in, nor did it look like the high rise apartment down the street. And it was so much smaller than the four bedroom home split-levhome where she lived. It was a small, earthy looking building with a grassy roof, and although it looked so different from what she saw in the city, it was, nevertheless, attractive. She turned the knob on the door, and finding it open, and thus believing that she had every right to go in if the owners wanted to keep people out, they would have locked it she went in. Tanicia was perplexed: there was only one room, a kitchen of sorts, and no dining room, no living room, and no television. There was one thing that looked familiar to her, and that was the lunch on the table. She went to the center of the room and found three bowls of some kind of soup. She tried the stuff in the biggest bowl and found that it had tofu in it. Boy, was she ever glad it was too hot to eat. She then tried the middle sized bowl, which contained barley, and she was equally glad that is was too cold. Finally, the smallest bowl held chicken noodle, something she liked, and she ate it all up. Seeing the stairs off to the side, Tanicia decided to look around Nintendo or something to da All she found, however, were three . beds, again in three .sizes. She was none would sure of only one thing be as comfortable as her bed at home. She tried the first one, and sure enough, it was too hard; the second one was too big. It never occurred to her that beggars can't be choosers, or in other words, that since she was trespassing, she really had no right to complain about someone else's bed, or that perhaps she was just whining to much. Fortunately, she found the smallest bed to be tolerable, and she curled up and went to sleep. While she was asleep, the owners of the cottage returned from their jaunt in the forest. "Somebody's been eating my porridge," bellowed the father, followed by a similar complaint from the mother. "Somebody ate all of mine," screamed the youngest one, who always seemed to get his way. Mother hurried to the stove to serve him up some more to shut him up. Hearing a noise upstairs, the trio moved to the second floor, where they inspected their sleeping quarters. "Somebody's been sleeping in my bed," yelled father and mother, in turn. "Somebody IS sleeping in my bed," wailed the toddler, kicking the blond girl as he did. "What do you think you're doing," yelled Tanicia, clearly startled by the entrance of the Three Bears. "Why don't you, like, just go and give me a heart attack. You think it's funny, well, it's not." With that, she ran down the stairs and out the house, back on the path to the city, where she called her daddy's lawyer to see if she could sue for her pain and suffering. experiences here, but there were enough of the other kind that when we left, as soon as we could manage after the birth of our second child several months after graduation, we declared that nothing short of a direct call from the prophet would ever bring us back to Utah and we were only half joking. We returned to my husband's home state of Texas, but left there after five years when he hit a stone wall in his career progression. He had worked bis way up in his company to management, but there were no persons of color ranking any higher, and after he was twice denied promotions when he was clearly more qualified by every criteria except ethnic group, we decided to move on. In Arizona we encountered no professional problems, but our children did. There is a sizeable Hispanic community there, but they wanted nothing to do with our children because they had a white mother, and they were rejected by the white children for the opposite reason. A job at BYU about as close as we ever expect to get to that call from the prophet brought us back here after eight years away. We researched neighborhoods very carefully before choosing one where we thought our children had a chance for acceptance. I'm happy to report that our experiences this time have been overwhelmingly positive. With the exception of occasional run-in- s with people still unable to overcome narrow viewpoints, we feel we have been judged on our own merits, which is all that we ever wanted. Still, I hear enough remarks in my work, especially from people who don't know my family or background, to know that old attitudes are still hanging on. I'm not the only one who sees it, either. When our oldest daughter was engaged to marry the son of an old pioneer family, her future father-in-lawho himself was very accepting and supportive, felt he needed to warn them that they might encounter problems too, just as our bishops had cautioned us 20 years earlier. Fortunately, things have gone really well for them so far. I truly hope they stay that way. el Discrimination declining, but still a problem As the "human rights" observance approaches each year, it causes me to reflect on what I have seen in my lifetime of the evolution of race relations in the world, and particularly the United States. My own experiences may perhaps be instructive. Though I don't differ in appearance from the majority of the residents of this valley, I do count once hated and hunted groups in my ancestry and was made acutely aware of that during my formative years. Prejudice is not the exclusive province of Americans, of course. I grew up in Asia and was regularly shunned by foreign nationals just because I came from the wrong part of the world. As a teenager in Tehran, a group of us were stoned by local college students who were angry at aid their king, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was accepting from western countries, especially the United States. Only the quick action of our Iranian drivers saved us from serious harm. When the Iranian revolution swept the Shah from power and brought the religious right to the forefront, religious and ethnic minorities were ruthlessly persecuted, including middle class ethnic Iranians whose only crime was having done business with Westerners. We had long since left the country, but it took my father 18 months to learn the fate of all his old associates. Those who were caught were summarily executed; those who escaped did so with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of us don't like to believe that such hatreds could exist here, but they can and they do. We don't often suffer from extremism as they do in the Middle East, but much of the violence in this country still has a racial factor. So, too, do more subtle forms of intolerance. My husband is of mixed European, Native American and Oriental derivation, and lived through circumstances of extreme poverty right here in America in his youth. Through education and other choices however, he has risen beyond the limitations of his background. deep-seate- d When we went to our bishops and stake president to get our recommends for the temple, we were warned that a "mixed marriage" such as ours would likely encounter challenges that people of more similar backgrounds wouldn't face. We nevertheless went forward, secure in our decision and determined to overcome whatever difficulties there might be. They were more right than we had any reason to suspect at the time. We first came to Utah shortly thereafter as relative newlyweds to pursue further education at BYU. We arrived on the day of late registration with neither living quarters nor job (though we thought we had one, until he reported for work). With the help of good people we found a place in Springville and were soon settled in. My husband was called into the elder's quorum presidency three weeks later. Our first soon followed, as there were several men in the quorum who simply refused to report to him for PPIs. We had many varied and wonderful eye-open- er This is what follows happily ever afters And they lived happily ever after. Haven't we heard that a million times? It the classic storybook ending. And if you've ever seen Into the Woods, by Stephen Sondeim, youH know what happens after happily ever after, and it isn't always happy. This is a brief update on the most like a fairy-tal- e story I've ever told. I repeated the tale of my Kristy, and her husband, Ian, who came from Nottingham, England, to woo and wed her, to someone at a Christmas dinner recently. She said it was the one of the most romantic stories she had ever heard. Few columns I've written have ever received the kind of attention as those I wrote recounting their courtship and then the difficulties they had with immigration and other issues on their way to getting married. What followed is evidence to me that America is still the land of opportunity. The hook for the story is that Sunday afternoon Kristy gave birth to a beautiful baby boy in American Fork Hospital (Scott was 18 inches to r i step-daught- long, for those who care to know.) He arrived six days late and after about 10 hours of labor, and today hell go home to be part of his family in a nice two-bedroo- m condominium in Orem owned by his parents and the mortgage company. His father has a good job, his EefciSTm Press New Utah! (ISSN No. HUT?.,, 309-50- member of CSLjrJ. NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ASSOCIATION fl that when Ian and Kristy married, he had no job, no income, no car and no real property. Kristy worked for a local business and owned a compact car. Ian had some good computer skills and a sparkling personality. A few weeks after his wedding, he found a job maintaining personal computers for a company that leases computers to local businesses and universi-tieHe bought a small truck, and went to work. It still makes me chuckle to see Ian driving around in his red pickup. These vehicles are almost in his native England. Lorries are popular for hauling things around, but open bed pickups are rare. But here is our English lad running around the country in a red Sonoma pickup, hauling computers and comput s. - non-existe- nt Published weekly by iew(aliicws 'II W & Both returned missionaries, they have been embraced by their LDS ward, where Ian is president of the Elder's Quorum. With this new change from a couple to a family, Kristy hopes to become a e mom, devoting herself to her new full-tim- family. From the looks of things, Scott has been bom into a home where he will be loved and nurtured. In two years, this young couple has carved out a future for themselves and their children out of nothing more than faith, industry and optimism. You can still do that in this great country, even if you come here from another land, if you are willing to work for it After alL happily ever afters are made of hard work and hope, not fairy tales. Circulation Deadlines Smturt 'itarcHaddodi .. .........I..... Russ Daly Subscription price $24 per year Periodicals Postage Paid at American Fork, Utah . Display Advertising POSTMASTER; Mod mdrMt chmgt to 59 WM Hah, Anwfcan Fork, Utah MOW . . . ........, .Brett Managing Editor City Editor .. .Tuesday, Classified Advertising 9 .756-527- 3 Publisher !! 59 West Main American Fork, Utah 84003 happy. Telephone Numbers Advertising News 1521-685- (U.S.P.S. No. A parents love him, and he will be well provided for. That's remarkable when you realize er parts and getting on just fine. A few months later, the young couple moved from their basement apartment in American Fork into a condominium in Orem, where they were owners rather than renters. They still have a monthly bill, but they are paying on a mortgage rather than rent. Last year, Ian found a job with better pay and more opportunity for advancement with an Orem business that markets telecommunications equipment I don't understand the job, but he is very w noon .Monday, 5 p.m. Monday, 2 pm mid-lev- Reader's Forum Firefighters were We were excited for the opportunity our children would have to be exposed to other cultures and their customs and Editor Thursday, Jan. 14, 1999 was an values. But given the recent scandal my extremely stressful day with the tragic fever has cooled to the point of nonexisfire that severely damaged our son and tence. How do I tell my children that deception, bribery and prostitution were daughter's home. The Lehi Fire Department really did the means by which the games were a heroic job. They were so good in consol- secured for Salt Lake City? ing and comforting our little grandSurely current and recently resigned daughters. Thanks to all the efficient members of the SLOC are parents and and men in the Lehi Fire grandparents. Was the current mess the legacy of the games they wanted to leave Department. Thanks also to friends and neighbors with their loved ones? who have been wonderful in providing In my book, if something is wrong, it's meals, offers for clothing and sharing of wrong no matter what is at stake. Maybe their time and attention through this in the 908 this is business as usual, but difficult time. one has to ask themselves, is nothing We appreciate all for your help, love sacred anymore? If we had to bribe, and consideration. It's been uplifting for cheat, lie and prostitute ourselves and us as a family. others to get the world to want to come Jim and LaVee Strong here, then the price was far too high for me and mine. We never should have tried for the Olympics if we didn't have the moral courage to play by our own Editor rules, and not the warped rules of others. As a sports fan and Utah enthusiast, And as for Tom Welch: It is my underI couldn't help getting caught up in standing that we prosecute people for the things you did, not pay them. Shame "Olympic fever." I submitted an application to volunteer, as did thousands of on everyone involved for the black stain others, I'm sura I was even willing to this will be on the majority of people take the risk of paying extra taxes if the with integrity who reside in this state, Olympics came to Utah and ended up in Kelli J. Nielson the red. American Fork Sports Community Calendar Letters to the Editor Obituaries . .. Monday, 2pm Monday, 10 am .Monday, 10 am .Monday, 10 am Tuesday, 11 am. great well-train- ed Olympic shame We welcome letters to the editor. AH letters must Include the author's name (printed AND signed) and a telephone number. We reserve the right to edit ters for clarity, punctuation, Uitiimtt.&tUt), 2 pm. Weddings el let- taste and length. Letters are welcome on any topic. HOW TO RFftftH By Mail P.O. Box 7, American Fork, UT 84003 In Person 59 W. Main, American Fork By Fax 756-527- . 4 By editor newutah.com 'POOR CO! |