Initiatives in California

John Balzar’s provocative article “Initiatives: Time for Reform?” (front page, March 27) points to this decade’s acid test of democracy. How can the American people persuade their President and Congress to use more than half the funds they continue to spend on war, to improve the quality of life of the great majority of Americans instead?

Our Presidents and Congress remain too beholden to the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about, to make significant cuts in the 52 cents out of every federal tax dollar and 60% of discretionary funds they continue to pay for wars--past, present and future.

If we are to transform our corrupt, destructive and dysfunctional warfare state to a law-abiding, more democratic, life-enhancing peace-fare state, the initiative will have to be taken by us, the people at the grass roots.

As author of the denominational, Unitarian-Universalist resolution that began the 1981 state ballot campaign for a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze, I was most encouraged to read that was the only “contemporary” state ballot initiative “to qualify wholly with volunteers collecting the signatures” instead of paid petition collectors.

In 1981, with close to unanimous endorsement of the Unitarian Universalist annual General Assembly and $2,900 of seed money for the campaign-to-be, voted by the small and far from affluent congregation of Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society, my wife Jo and I journeyed across the state seeking support to place a freeze initiative on the ballot in 1982. Fierce competition for the spot on the ballot from Jobs With Peace resulted in a statewide peace group conference held in Fresno. The conference voted to support placement of the freeze proposition on the 1982 ballot. Home petition parties launched the collection of petition signatures needed to qualify the freeze proposition for the state ballot. Proposition 12 qualified for the ballot, then went on to win a better than 51% majority despite President Reagan sending his biggest guns to attack the it in the state with the lion’s share of weapons contracts.

For a “peace dividend” initiative to be placed on the California ballot in the presidential election year of 1992, and then win, it will take a serious effort, as in 1981, to unite potential sponsors this year.

What the Proposition 12 proved, and the East Germans, of all people, came to appreciate, is that the ballot initiative is potentially one of democracy’s most powerful tools.

NICHOLAS V. SEIDITA

Northridge