Today’s Agenda

It’s not hard to spur food and clothing donations during the holidays, and surely there’s no such thing as too much giving. But why stop Jan. 1? Well, it’s not as convenient to donate during the rest of the year. People have to seek out drop-off points for the Goodwill, the Salvation Army, the missions, and so on. And it just seems so, well, impersonal.

But wait. Here’s a program that’s year-round, personal and simple. It’s run entirely by volunteers and every contribution is right for the recipient.

Called Shoes That Fit, the program at the Claremont Colleges is today’s Making a Difference. Requests for clothing for needy children in Pomona schools are tacked up on a bulletin board. Individuals take the cards, get the item and bring it to a volunteer coordinator who arranges delivery of the shirt or shoes or dress. The program is well-defined, serves a manageable number of people, gives contributors a sense of connection to the kids and, not least, it really works.

Shoes are a pretty simple wish to fulfill. Making things right in our cities is another thing. But dreams are necessary, too. In Platform, civic activists tell us their holiday wishes for racial harmony, economic empowerment, political diversity, health care for the neglected. Many of the things they ask for require not a lot of money, but new ways of thinking.

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Four youths on bicycles sail past four kids leaning over a car trunk. Moments later, bullets are flying. South Central? East L.A.? No, Huntington Beach. Eric Skindrud, one of the young men on a bike, describes in Community Essay his fear and terror in that moment, and his reflections later about the shootout that ended with one of the young men dead by his own hand. These middle-class kids with good educations still ended up in a gang, with guns. Did they understand the reality of bullets? Skindrud has his doubts and blames the saturation of popular culture with images of fake violence.

Some of those violent images come to us in rap music--the example everyone knows is Ice T’s “Cop Killer.” But what does rap mean to the kids of all colors and classes who are its fans? In Youth opinion, kids from the city and suburbs say they understand that the lyrics aren’t meant to be taken literally. And, they remind us, other generations had their own protest music.

They also pretty much think adults who pick out one objectionable lyric or denounce all rap are ignorant--that most of them haven’t really listened to rap. Some do agree that rap occasionally goes too far and divides groups rather than unites them. But another student says we don’t understand the good that rappers do--warning kids against drugs, giving them pride in their ethnicity.

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In our Sermon column, Presbyterian minister Gary Dennis reminds us that doubt is useful and helps us grow, whether we’re worrying about American intervention in Somalia or our personal faith.

“Faith never becomes absolutely clear,” Dennis says, and we can learn not only to live with doubt but to celebrate it.