COLUMN LEFT : Government Is More Deadly Than the River : Individual tragedies blind us to much greater daily suffering.

One image fixed California’s mid-February rain storms in popular memory. It was of 15-year-old Adam Bischoff being swept down the raging Los Angeles River. Would-be rescuers hung from bridges and lunged from the river bank, trying to reach him with hand or rope as the 28 m.p.h. current swept him along, while he screamed for help. It was all in vain. His body was discovered 10 miles below the spot where, on Feb. 12, he fell in.

A week later, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a task force to explore ways of preventing such drownings in the city’s flood-control channels. Local government officials have been enjoined to consider rescue methods including the permanent placement of nets along bridges over the channels, and even the stationing of motor boats along them.

It’s an old journalistic axiom that people comprehend disaster more easily in terms of individuals rather than multitudes, compelling images rather than diffuse reportage. The news cameras spent more time with whales trapped under the Arctic ice than with endemic malnutrition in, let’s say, northeast Brazil. But the civic reaction to the teen-age boy’s drowning shows, at a level of extreme caricature, how warped these news values are.

The risk of death by drowning in the flood channels of Los Angeles probably rivals the risk of death by being eaten by great white sharks, another non-event in the statistical computations of human disaster. The idea of mooring rescue boats in the flood control channels is about as silly as having the Navy and Coast Guard patrol the coastal shelves of the continental United States to keep the sharks from getting through.

There are some risks that society simply should not get excited about. Among them are great white sharks. Post a notice on the beach telling surfers and swimmers that, worldwide, sharks kill 25 humans a year, and leave them to figure out the risks. Though this will be no consolation to the Bischoff family, the same is true about the Los Angeles River, swollen by freak rains that may occur every 10 years.

The memory of Adam Bischoff preoccupied a council conducting its deliberations in a city that, every day of every week, has children suffering and dying, not in freak accidents but as the consequence of political decisions and social culpability. This is the “normalcy” that is disregarded in favor of the bizarre.

Flip through the compelling 1991 report, “What’s Happening to Our Children,” issued by the Los Angeles-based Children Now organization. Attach to each statistic some image as stark as Bischoff’s face.

In the last four years alone, California has seen a 41% increase in the rate of child abuse and neglect reports; a 25% increase in the youth homicide rate; a 42% increase in the rate of children placed out of their homes, typically in foster care; a 23% increase in the rate of young people who spend a part of their lives incarcerated, to a rate more than twice the national average.

These are horrors consequent upon human decisions. As the Children Now report puts it, far too politely: “Over a decade ago, California led the revolution for tax and fiscal reform. An unintended consequence was the devastation of the children’s infrastructure--schools, health clinics, child abuse prevention programs, etc.” In blunter language, this means that a bunch of tax-cutters and budget-trimmers lined up a generation of children on the banks of the economic equivalent of the Los Angeles River in full spate and kicked them in, while simultaneously laying off the rescue teams downstream.

Imagine another earthquake, on the scale of Loma Prieta. The news cameras would pick out the symbols of suffering and the world would weep. But social earthquakes occur every day in California: Three young people are murdered, 12 babies under age 1 die, 174 babies are born to teen-age mothers, 179 teens drop out of school, 306 babies are born into poverty. Such relentless suffering becomes background noise, part of the condition of the poor for which, speedily enough, the poor themselves get blamed.

One of the great achievements of conservative political economy has been to separate acts and consequences. For years we read news stories about the rise in homeless people, leaving unmentioned Ronald Reagan’s cuts in housing subsidies. If Pete Wilson succeeds in cutting welfare payments, we’ll pay the social and economic cost down the road. Remove $1 for immunization and pay $10 for children who get sick. Hold back on preschool education and pay fivefold for special education, public assistance and crime. These are “normal events,” against the true accident of Bischoff’s death. Accidents happen, but it’s the “normal events” that society must face and can deal with.