Hostages to Misplaced Priorities : Before long America will have to face the reality of shortages in education funding

Even in an era of “compassion fatigue,” no one is too jaded to share the sorrow felt by the parents of a kidnaped child. A little girl, let us imagine: Where is she? What are they doing to her? What are they making her do? The man or woman does not walk who cannot share the agony in such questions.

Some years ago, the terrorist Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaped heiress Patty Hearst. In its custody, Hearst, a college student at the time, was prevailed upon to join in crimes, including bank robbery.

Friday, in an essay published in The Times, author Garry Wills compared Hearst’s experience to that of ghetto children “kidnaped at birth, brought up in circumstances far more demoralizing, more disanimating, than those of any Fagin’s den in Dickens.”

“Black and Latino children,” Wills wrote, “commit crimes under far more imperious influences than Hearst’s brief period of captivity faced her with. Until these children become our own, we continue to twist and distort them into our enemies--and these are enemies we cannot afford to have.”

By a cruel irony, this essay appeared simultaneously with a report that the Los Angeles Unified School District is considering a drastic plan to shorten the school year by 17 days and require teachers to accept salary and benefit cuts of as much as 15%.

Chalk up one for the kidnapers. Suburban families suffer the same breakdown as ghetto families of all races; there are no significant differences in this area. We’re all in trouble. But, in the end, children everywhere are everyone’s children. When schools are weakened and teachers abused, it is as if the doors are flung open to the kidnapers: See these kids? You take them. We give up on them.

It doesn’t stop at elementary or high school. East Los Angeles Community College recently turned away 5,000 students: no money, no room. No room either in the California State University for many eligible high school graduates. Cal State San Diego is cutting core departments and firing tenured faculty. Other Cal State campuses are in comparable distress. Non-resident fees may be tripled at the University of California. Non-citizen fees may jump 2,000% in the community college system.

Nothing can be done, of course, unless we raise taxes, and we can’t do that, can we?

Or can we? And dare we ask as a nation whether we need to spend $44 billion buying 20 B-2 bombers when $160 million--less than half of 1% of that amount--could save Los Angeles teachers and schools for a year?

America’s worst enemy is not the nuclear invader but, in Wills’ sense, the kidnaper. Tragically, the kidnaper has friends among our own people.