Commentary : County Needs Self-Esteem Panel

Thank goodness that “Doonesbury” is too busy beating around the Bush to notice that our California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem is back in the news--this time on the county level.

It’s been close. California made the Five O’Clock Funnies from coast to coast when its self-esteem legislators were caught in the caustic cross hairs of cartoonland’s most cutting sharpshooter. Or is that a mixed metaphor?

Remember California’s Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem? This is the fruit of the labors of Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara). He had earlier studied enough of society’s “bad seeds” to notice a chilling relationship between violent behavior and individual self-esteem; drug abuse and self-esteem; teen-age pregnancy and self-esteem, and child abuse, family violence and divorce and self-esteem.

In September, 1986, Vasconcellos pushed through Assembly Bill 3659, to establish California’s 25-member Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, with Gov. George Deukmejian’s $245,000 budgeted blessing. Armed with the collective wisdom of ageless sages--the Gospels, Socrates, Plato, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau--California’s Task Force is trying to reverse the evil that men (and women) do in California’s 58 counties.

Trying to isolate and eliminate the root problems caused by damaged self-esteem is a little like trying to prune a path back to the Garden of Eden. Talk about overgrown vegetation.

Vasconcellos’ three-year Task Force is undaunted. To date, the state organization has accomplished a great deal:

Selection and funding of a University of California study of the relationships between societal ills and personal responsibility and self-esteem.

Last year’s passage of Assembly Resolution No. 64, encouraging the creation of county task forces to provide local perspective and highlight regional solutions to social problems.

A growing mailing list that today exceeds 3,500 concerned Californians, despite “Doonesbury’s” jibes.

A 15-member commission in San Francisco to research the link between low self-esteem and social problems--although no San Francisco funds were allocated.

And Orange County’s Board of Supervisors has approved a county fact-finding study that would identify local problems and the private and public sector agencies that may already exist to meet those needs.

Orange County’s rich diversity in population has blurred social and economic class distinctions in recent times, so much so that residents here might remark: “Problems? What problems?” But homeless sleep inside cars parked in the nicest neighborhoods around. Imagine Walt Disney reduced to raising his kids on welfare.

Poor, angry youngsters grow older but often no wiser. Damaged self-esteem, hopelessness and helplessness consistently surface years later--in irresponsible, out-of-control or completely apathetic adults who then breed the same qualities into the next generation. Without social intervention, many individuals heroically struggle to change their damaged destiny. It is a grueling battle, where individual courage has no equal.

But broken people too often turn to the wrong crutch: drugs, alcohol, indiscriminate sex, self-destruction or crime. Damaged self-esteem may create a warped value system that swaps love, self-respect and hard work for cheap counterfeits. Nature abhors a vacuum. Remove a person’s sense of belonging, likability, personal significance and self-trust and something is going to fill the void.

Orange County has been cordially invited to join with San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles counties in establishing its own self-esteem task force. Unfortunately, state organizers have sent enthusiastic encouragement and precious little else to county administrators toward establishing such a task force. No money. No objectives.

So here’s the deal:

The county is replete with caring, nurturing people who play by the Golden Rule, who don’t confuse knowledge with wisdom, who know that noble talk is a cheap substitute for one small act of common decency.

The county’s parents are the most involved, supportive and nurturing parents on the face of the Earth, grateful for an educational system that allows the world’s finest teachers to implement outstanding personal growth programs for elementary students today.

We work so hard. We have so much. And others have so little or stand to lose so much--unless organized efforts can show that somebody cares before the damage is done and the cycles of personal failure and self-destruction continue to cut a path into the county’s bright future.

Support a county task force to promote self-esteem. Get involved. Be a responsible person so your children will know what they want to be when they grow up. Prove “Doonesbury” wrong. Promoting self-esteem is not a laughing matter.