Costa Mesa Council’s Decision to Evict SOS

The swirl of issues in a plural society such as ours mitigates against the perception of any deliberate social policy. It is the rare individual in political office who can rise about the cacophony of civic discourse and consistently render sound and prudent judgment. The reasons for the scarcity of such leadership may be the result of a certain malign tendency in democratic societies.

The regrettable consequences of this political norm were clearly demonstrated by a majority of the members of the Costa Mesa City Council. In one single evening these individuals decided to act against Share Our Selves (SOS), a voluntary social service program in the community, and invoked even more capricious measures against Latino day laborers seeking employment in the city. If there be any consistent principle guiding their actions it is a myopic preoccupation with the fearful frets of their constituencies and not a commitment to the common good.

Their actions abdicate any role in providing responsible civic leadership. They have chosen, instead, to become the passive vehicles for an increasing moral privation of public life.

Our public life runs the risk of becoming increasingly atomized and isolationist. In such a society what other norm will guide our decisions other than the same private fears and personal concerns which undermined the voluntarism of Jean Forbath and SOS? How can such a community understand the efforts of those most marginalized to gain access to the employment so necessary for any fruitful participation in our county? In the public chambers where the language of commonweal should be paramount and where the norms of our social contract should enlighten social policy there now reigns the frightening apprehension that its agents may be mute on these matters and unable to articulate the common good beyond that which the polls suggest.

Women and men are elected to public office with the intention of enlivening the spirit of community and civic responsibility. In Costa Mesa such spirit, as exemplified by SOS, has apparently become an adversary to the interests of the city. The pursuit of work, the hallmark of what it means to be an American, is no longer acceptable if one happens to be Latino. These matters, considered by the Costa Mesa Council and so crudely treated by it, are part of the abiding concerns of other city councils as well as the Board of Supervisors. Inherent in how we dispose ourselves to them will be the critical choices about the nature of our public life in this county.

Strong leadership is needed to provide both the vision and the language that will allow us to escape the social disintegration that the actions of Costa Mesa portend. Fundamental to such leadership will be that virtue which instills courage in the face of public recrimination and insight in the face of the status quo. Without that virtue, divine in nature but so vitally human, we risk, as a society, becoming but an amalgamation of clanging cymbals and empty-sounding gongs (1 Corinthians 13:1).

FATHER JAIME SOTO

Episcopal Vicar for Hispanic Community

Diocese of Orange