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Show PAGE 2 THE ZEPHYRJUNE 1992 E bU 1 a social worker. tl ferito was a that think condition to I started poverty fioed were so similar that that were no las. magnifier while while P to. the birrier between fee race ptinful, I aune to see how fcwnldaMe I.ttended wge fairly well balanced. rdiUy Vhen 1 was growing up In Unrisvllle, toe schools hint of rscU tension. But end there was up to that ktad of atmosphere Tlwm w no rwdys at alL Atonepotnt I Louisville wu another story. The Ides was T. HfchSdioaL was assigned to establish a boy's group at Booker Washington i them pUce. thed of their limited raviroraM. mdtata staplytoget some of these boy. out I I kid well with thought it would be It sounded easy and since usually got along a lot of fun. been. These seventh graders were But I didn't realize just how limited their environment had have anything to do with xne. It took several hostile, angry and afraid. They did not want to I encounters and many hours to team that was the first white person that had ever attempted to establish a personal relationship with them. They had known whites in authoritative roles their entire lives, they had never been around (teachers, cops, store owners), but otherwise, in wMb nonnlp Their entire existence consisted of the ten square blocks that surrounded their vIT ? rJwKneoole tawa page two rabnce thTtonlof i Jim Stiles Sometimes I think that life is nothing more than a series of humbling experiences. Last month, as the May Zephyr was being distributed around Moab and hauled to the post office for mailing to subscribers, all hell was breaking loose in South Central Los Angeles and inner-citiacross the United States. While, as one subscriber put it, we "whined and sniveled" about arrogant tourists and an excess of motels, fellow Americans who have never taken a vacation in their life exploded in an orgy of violence and anger fallowing the acquittal of the four policemen charged in the Rodney King beating. No summary of that case is needed here, and I can hardly imagine there is a reader of this paper who wasn't as sickened as I at file verdict What I am reminded of is the fact that we don't live in the "real world" in Moab, Utah, which is precisely the reason so many people want to come here. Vacations are, by definition, a means of escaping reality. Few of us who live in Moab can even begin to relate to the idea that walking to the comer market for a quart of milk could be a life or death proposition. Those Moab citizens who were bom and raised here cannot relate to it at alL Hie rest of us don't want to remember. Many of us have had our share of bad luck, tragedy, and hard times. But who in fids town can say they live utterly and completely without hope? Emily Dickinson wrote: "Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without words And never stops-alL But today there are people who don't even know what the word means. They live a life of survival and little else. A different world. The riots in LA. affected me in a special way. They reminded me of my last job in Louisville, Kentucky before I loaded my life into a Volkswagen bus and came West In 1975 1 got a job as a social worker with the Board of Education; I had no special qualifications far the job.. J majored in "oversleeping" in college. But it was something I wanted to da As a case worker, I received referrals from teachers mostly, who observed problems with students who came from low income families. Sometimes, it was as simple as discovering that a child needed glasses and was having academic problems as a result My job was to get him the glasses. I'd set up the appointment with the optometrist arrange for the medicaid payment take file child to five examination and Bee that he was properly fitted. Easy. But it was rarely that simple. The families that I dealt with lived lives that I could not have imagined before I took that job. The hopelessness of their lives was generational ..families could not remember living any other way. Consider five life of Marie Farley (not her real name). At 31 she was die mother of seven children. Her husband had abandoned her years ago, returning only to get her pregnant and, on his last visit, to beat her so savagely that she lost all her upper front teeth. She could not speak to me without visibly flinching and I learned to bring along a female to make her fed less threatened. I tried to help her with baste needs ...there were resources available when she ran out of food and the next AFDC check was still days away. I tried and finally succeeded in getting her to an orthodontist to repair file damage her husband had caused. But I could not alleviate the desperation that filled every day of her and her children's lives. Her 15 year old daughter felt the desperation as keenly as anyone. She longed to escape the life she was bom into. But what were her options? We can't consider her life from our point of reference. You have to get into her shoes and walk around in them for awhile. For file daughter of Marie Farley her choices were limited. So she got pregnant She had a baby when die was 16 years old, she dropped out of school and moved in with her boyfriend. Today that baby is 15 years old and I wander what choices she has. es able to take them to places that I had taken far I Eventually we became friends, and was to the circus. For these ldcfa, the zoo could just granted. I grew up going to parks and zoos and as easily have been on Mars. was right and I'd saved enough money, I Throughout the year, I knew that when the time wanted to move West It had been my dream since I was 18 years old. But when the time came to go, I never felt like such a traitor in my entire life. I visited the families and tried to explain that I was leaving and that another case worker would be contacting them in the near future. I I'd established an honest They showed little emotion, even the ones with whom thought to Utah and its red rode attraction I tried to leava-thecouldn't I explain my y friendship. could dreams no at all? have deserts. But who can dream of desert vistas when they That was more than 15 years aga The division in America is worse than it was then; it's far worse than I realized, watching fee world pass by from the relative safety of Moab, Utah. Cable TV and CNN brings us the images, but it can't convey the smell of fear or the taste of desperation. Not really. at . I'm still concerned about this plethora of motels and the long lines at City Market, and I still think lycra looks goofy on most people who choose to wear iL The County Commissioners and the City Council and the Mayor still frustrate me to pieces and I still think that Jimmie Walker's Book ruffe Road is one of the dumbest ideas to come along in decades. I'm sure that future issues will devote pages and pages to the issues that afreet our daily lives. the boys at Booker T. High or the Farley family. Their "limited environment" But don't t was not a choice but a circumstance of their birth and the luck of the draw. It's only natural that our greatest cares and concerns are those that fall within the gaze of our view, but we can't create a "limited environment of our own. I'm not Bure what we can do in a real way in a small rural town to affect positive change. But denial is not the answer. In much the same way that people from urban areas fed a vested interest in wilderness, we should fed an equal concern for the plight of these cities and the people who reside in them. We need a broader view. In fids world, we have to look beyond the desert vistas from time to time and remember ' and help the people we never see. And no one needed to be reminded more than me. . fix-ge- ng ever-shrinki- er ' . I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themseives; if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. Thomas Jefferson , THE CANYON COUNTRY ZEPHYR P.O. Box 327 Moab, Utah 84532 (801) 259-77-73 Jim Stiles, publisher production managers Gary and Susan um of the media. At long last, Knutson and Torres and I agree on something Why file national press takes such delight in destroying the reputations of presidential candidates completely escapes me. At the same time, I have difficulty understanding how the incumbent, like his predecessor, slips and slides his way through file quagmire of his own making without a scratch. Yet, it's Gin ton who has been labeled, "Slick Willie." I am admittedly an admirer of Bill Qintan. The gauntlet he has been forced to march through would make a lesser man run and hide and never show his face again. But Clinton, on the other hand, has endured accusations about his courage, his ethics, his morals, and his patriotism with a display of all the good and decent qualities he's accused of lacking Think about iL Gould a man be that bad and withstand this relentless onslaught with such grace and fortitude? I was particularly offended by a recent cover story in TIME magazine. The cover picture revealed a negative of a portrait of the Arkansas governor. The bold type headline read: "Why Ginton Can't Be Trusted. The headline didn't ask if Ginton could be trusted; TIME, apparently, has already made up our minds for us. The inside story was just as brutal The question is not whether Bill Ginton ever smoked marijuana-t- he question is: who the hell cares? Doesn't it matter that all this happened 20 years ago? Life is a teaming experience as all too many of us know. Who would want to be the same person we were when we were sophomores in college? We live, we have experiences, we make mistakes, we team from those mistakes. We go on, whether we like it or not Rnd me a person who made no mistakes 20 years ago, and I will show you a very boring person. Did Bill Clinton cheat on his wife? I don't know...probably, to hear him describe five troubled times Suit he and Hillary survived. But the key word is: SURVIVED. He and his wife survived the bad times and after all these years, their marriage is stronger than ever. Isn't that what matters? Any relationship that was borne of the 60s and is still viable today is something of a mirade in my book. I admire them for their persistence, if nothing rise. Finally, is Bill Ginton a draft dodger? NO. Was Bill Clinton a scared and confused young man in his early 20s who wanted to make the right and moral Hwidm about his participation in the Vietnam War but lacked the years and file wisdom that comes with age to be sure he was doing the right thing? ABSOLUTELY. We send our young men (and now our young women) to fight our wars for exactly that reason. I read the tetter that Clinton sent Us draft board in 1972, and I only wish that I could say I was as sensitive and eloquent as he was at such a young and vulnerable age. One notable exception to file Gin came, ironically, in TIME. Essayist Strobe Talbot knew Clinton in 1972 when they and another friend from Seattle agonized over their future. Questions of right nd wrong tormented the three of them daily, and they grew very dose. Eventually, they moved in different directions. A year later, Talbot teamed Out their friend from Seattle, more troubled and confused than either he or Ginton had realized, was dead. He had taken his own life. As Strobe Talbot recalls, "When I called Bill and told him the news, there was nothing slick about his grief. And yet, the g continues, while the venerable and wise TIME asks the question: "Is Bush Getting A ftee Rider It barely looks far an answer. But here is file reality. George Bush and his predecessor have in 12 years managed to come dangerously to destroying the economy of the United States. It took 200 years for the government of this country to accumulate a $1 trillion debt. It took Reagan and Bush just 10 years to triple it No country can survive and run a government in this fashion. A sour economy affects the entire social fabric of I am sick black-and-whi- te now-infamo- contributing writers Jade Campbell B.J. Eardtey Jane & Jones Cherie Gilmore T. Scott Groene political specialist Ken Davey food editor Willie Flocko historical photos Herb Ringer poetry Frank Lemon roving reporter Robert Fidghum copyright 1992 THE CANYON COUNTRY ZEPHYR all rights reserved The Canyon Country Zephyr is a monthly newspaper, published eleven times a year at Moab, Utah. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of its vendors, advertisers, or even at times of its publisher ( ton-bashi- ng CUnton-bashin- us |