PERSPECTIVE ON THE MAYOR’S RACE : A Glass Half Full, Not Half Empty : The former mayor of California’s second-largest city looks at how Los Angeles can brighten the urban future.

Los Angeles casts a great shadow, not just because of its colossal wealth, history and size, but more recently because of what the city has come to fear--itself.

Only great cities can cast great shadows, but Los Angeles has forgotten that and seems paralyzed by the sheer size of its darker side--homelessness, riots, AIDS, gangs, drugs and the absence of any polestar to guide it.

Few cities in the world enjoy the vast resources of Los Angeles and fewer have the explosive potential of the Pacific Rim lapping at their shores. Yet, here stands Los Angeles “in crisis,” accepting the opinion-molding class’ sentence of “ungovernable.”

I say prove these “experts” wrong. Marshal the tremendous and unique resources you have. More government, more taxes or more “leaders” cannot fix what ails you. You can.

Start by applauding what works. Trillions of dollars and millions of people pass through Los Angeles every day with remarkable predictability. Huge numbers of neighbors and ethnic minorities not only live their lives, but enjoy them. Declare these neighborhoods “safety zones” and promote even more art, music, education, sports and pedestrian life in them.

Shore up the “at risk” neighborhoods. Do not abandon one street, one wall or even one bus stop to graffiti, vandals or petty looters. Demand community-based beat cops and storefront health-care centers. Take back these areas block by block. And cheer for those domestic troops still laboring in the trenches: teachers, nurses, judges, small-business owners, clerks, bus drivers, pilots and postal carriers.

Do not close one safe place for children. Libraries, fire stations, basketball courts and supervised park and recreation centers deserve protection. Throw a greater city presence into these neighborhoods with bookmobiles, police reservists, street cleaners.

Use your universities. Make each taxpayer-funded university directly responsible for one of these “at-risk” neighborhoods. Put the colleges to the test in a real-life laboratory. If professors and their graduate students could develop the atomic bomb to end World War II, they can certainly create a prototype inner-city program to prevent the next urban war.

The federal government can indemnify the university and its participating faculty, the state can grant tenure, promotion and rank based on community service (instead of the current publish-or-perish system) the college can offer course credits for the students and the city can provide in-house environmental, code, legal and zoning advice to all participants.

Unleash the brain power and energy of these sociologists, linguists, business majors, journalists, engineers, architects, computer programmers and medical, nursing and law students into these “adopted” neighborhoods.

Tap your native talent for imagination. Since a disproportionate amount of income of non-affluent Angelenos is spent on the entertainment industry (movies, videos, music) and since many in Hollywood are blessed with a social conscience, it seems reasonable to ask the entertainment industry to commit 2% of the profits from a given number of movies, record or concert sales to an at-risk area’s rebirth.

Accept good ideas even if gangs generated them; for example, hire students from “the ‘hood” to clean up the restrooms, hallways and classrooms in their schools. The indignity of filth should be eliminated.

Accelerate technological change. Push for the French minitel system, which places in almost every home a free personal computer connected by phone to the library as well as to news, reference and database holdings. Schools can teach children computer literacy; children can teach their parents. Computers can be donated by the industry or foundations. Such a system could introduce 21st-Century technological literacy into homes now trapped in poverty and fear.

Ask every L.A.-based foundation to dedicate two years’ worth of giving to these adopted at-risk neighborhoods.

Never vote for a politician who seeks to divide you by fear.

Take a pledge to commit one courageous act a day. In some neighborhoods, that means opening the shades; in others, going to the store or clearing a corner of sleeping drunks; in still others, demanding greater accountability of public servants. Call the police, videotape the drug deals, mail the information to the press, the mayor. Crime will not disappear, but cheer each improvement you make.

Finally, remember the words of another who feared her own great shadow, but eventually fought back the darkness, Helen Keller: “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.”