Today’s Agenda

Sometimes we talk about “empowerment” as though it were some abstract kind of gift, to be handed down or given as a reward. But then along comes someone like Ruby Ross, who has built empowerment for herself, one brick at a time. Her story is today’s Testimony.

She talks about how she kicked alcohol in 1986, rebuilt her relationship with her children and then, in 1988, started registering voters for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. She’s been registering voters, hundreds of them, in South Los Angeles ever since. “I tell people that if you don’t vote and things happen that you don’t like, then don’t complain,” she says.

Ross, raising five kids on less than $1,000 a month, is proud of how far she’s come, but she wants more for her children and all children of South-Central Los Angeles. As she says: “I wish we could get . . . a theater, just some simple things there for them to do. Treat them with a little dignity, give them something to make them feel wanted.”

Making kids feel wanted has always been the gift of the best teachers, the ones to whom students respond like blossoms reaching for light. In Platform, some Southern California civic activists talk about teachers who changed their lives--the ones who, as Cal State Los Angeles Prof. Jaime Regalado puts it, “latched onto me and opened huge horizons.”

For most people, the memorable teachers are the good ones. But, as one of our Platform respondents reminds us, a small, casual act of coldness on the part of a teacher can cause a wound that still hurts years later.

Sometimes kids do feel like they’re just a bundle of other people’s expectations. The problems multiply for the children of immigrants. And multiply again for Asian-American kids, who suffer from the “model minority” syndrome. In the Youth opinion, Kim Tamura, a senior at Gardena High School, says she sometimes feels smothered by expectations. What she really wants is a life of music--singing it, composing it, playing it. “Not all Asian-Americans are interested in owning offices downtown or creating new aerospace cars,” she says.

While Kim Tamura fights too vivid an image, Filipino-Americans sometimes wonder if they’re seen at all. They’re the biggest Asian-Pacific minority in Los Angeles, as we find in In the Neighborhood, but they’re dispersed geographically and fragmented politically. Last spring’s uprisings, however, lent urgency to attempts to build a better ethnic power base.

It was a peaceful drive home from Grandma’s house until the hand with a gun appeared in the car window and fired. A terrified Ben Yandell and his family made it home safely from that confrontation on the street by the local liquor store, he writes in Community Essay, but that sort of violence is a frequent occurrence by the store. Why, he asks, can’t neighbors have a say in the license terms for places selling alcohol?

And in Getting Involved, a whole neighborhood rallies around to help one woman’s homemade effort to make Thanksgiving special for local homeless people.