Gestures of Faith That Can Turn the Tide

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps held its annual scholarship ceremony last week. The event was a non-story, as usual. It came and went like any of a hundred nice things that occur daily. The crowd milled. The homeboys goofed off. The babies fussed in their fancy outfits. Some of the guests were late to the buffet line and had to finish their paper-plate lunches during the speeches. Some got pushy, elbowing their way in.

There were 67 recipients of the $500-to-$2,000 grants--a record. The awardees sat up front, in their khaki-colored Conservation Corps shirts and pressed pants. They were mostly in their teens and 20s, mostly bound for trade schools and community college, mostly well-groomed for the occasion. The ones with dreadlocks had tied them back neatly. The pierced ones wore discreet studs. A kid with a spiked Mohawk hairdo had painstakingly laquered it.

The script was like that of any number of other good-cause celebrations--thanks to the donors, testimonials, applause. The conservation corps offers a GED program along with paid job training, so a lot of the beneficiaries were high school dropouts. It was sobering to remember, in this information economy that, yes, there are still people who don’t finish high school.

“I’m the first one in my family to attend college,” said Norma Juarez, who grew up in the Aliso Village housing project, the child of “an abusive alcoholic from whom we escaped when I was 3.”

“I had five members of my family die very violently,” testified David Nieto, the ex-gangbanger son of a paranoid schizophrenic. The corps sent him to places like the Grand Canyon and Santa Cruz Island. “My eyes,” said the goateed 22-year-old, “opened to life.”

“I allowed other people to make my decisions for me,” said Denise Haynes, a South-Central L.A. dropout. What this meant, she went on, was that at 18, she married a man who beat her brutally until she ran away. “There I was, without a high school diploma, no job skills, my life didn’t have any meaning.” Haynes, now 26, is a freshman at L.A. Trade Tech.

She read her story from a piece of paper. Her voice kept catching as tears wet her face.

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It’s understandable that nice things shouldn’t make headlines. Nice is normal. It’s how humans naturally are when they’re not in some sort of emotional pain. And these have been nice times. The stock market is booming. The federal budget surplus is whopping. It was almost a jolt, at that scholarship ceremony, to be reminded how many SOS signals there still are in this nice, boom-time economy.

But boom times have a way of turning the few who are still hurting into a kind of statistical variation--a glitch to be glossed over. If you can’t succeed in this economy, people assume, you must be lazy, as if that weren’t another word for demoralized and depressed. In such an atmosphere, it’s easy to lose sight of the need for second chances--for gigs like the conservation corps, the Job Corps, YouthBuild, whatever. In recent years, whole swaths of otherwise nice people have become not just resigned, but self-righteous, about giving up on the weak and unlucky. Any boat not lifted by a tide like this must be un-liftable, the thinking goes.

Well, some boats may need more intensive lifting than others. But that wasn’t the sense you got last week, standing under that big tent with the aspirations, however fragile, of those 67 young lives.

“My probation officer said I needed a diploma and a steady job, which is why I came here,” said Christian Vargas, a 19-year-old who said he was directed to the corps after getting summary probation on a drug charge.

“But now I’m thinking about going maybe to, like, L.A. City College.” Vargas clutched a $1,000 scholarship. It had been awarded to him in memory of a friend and corps member who was killed by a stray bullet this month.

Norma Juarez said she now hopes, eventually, to become a nurse or physician’s assistant. David Nieto, the ex-gangbanger, said he wants a degree in environmental science. Denise Haynes, the once-battered wife, wants to be a social worker. It is possible to forget that sometimes the mere act of wanting can be, in itself, an achievement.

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps held its annual scholarship ceremony last week, one gesture of faith among hundreds that are no less notable for transpiring in the midst of a rising tide.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.