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This is the first in a series of weekly columns that will explore what I believe are pertinent and important issues of our time. Issues that involve the many communities inhabiting our surroundings, our workplace, classrooms, residence halls and student u nion. They permeate once fortress-like neighborhoods, invade our private conversations, and relentlessly hound our conscience for recognition and respect.
These issues are sometimes frightening and provocative, sometimes met with hostility and malice, but are always thought-provoking, timely and in need of consideration. These issues are what I collectively call "Another Perspective."
They represent the many communities that make up our world. Each community has a perspective all its own. Each contributes to this democracy in its own way, and if we are to believe that this is a republic for the people and by the people, the relevancy o f their perspectives cannot be ignored. For any community to reach viability, every community must be considered.
Communities are also constituencies. The disenfranchised and impoverished need a voice, as do the middle class, the working-illiterate and the student. Within each constituency are communities with ethnic diversity, class structure and international flavo r.
Successful African Americans who still fall victim to insidious segregation must also fight indifference from an economically challenged, white middle class. Hispanic Americans feel unwelcome as the discussion of immigration rages onward, seeking someone to blame for rising unemployment. Native Americans continue to fight apathetic local officials, depressed economies and dogmatic federal legislation.
Women, who never envisioned that the choice of what to do with their bodies would have to be decided by the Supreme Court continue to struggle for equity. Children are threatened by the rhetoric of an election year as welfare reform creates an uncertain f uture. And after decades of protest, a law that protects children from the tobacco industry suddenly appears from a puff of smoke.
This nation's labor force, already wounded by corporate downsizing and exportation of jobs, is inadequately trained and undereducated to face competition from workers around the world. Legislators, unforgiving of the perceived ivory towers of higher educa tion, cut funding and reduce budgets and shift the financial burden to tuition-paying students. Programs once thought to help lift the underclass and under-represented are now attacked as discriminatory and antiquated, no longer subject to reform, but sla ted for demolition by an intolerant population.
The many communities with other perspectives, including nontraditional students, single parents, graduate students, etc., are relevant in their own right and must be heard.
I am not so bold as to assume that I am their voice. I do not speak for the Hispanic community, children or all students. I do not assume to know what is best for the entire African American community, our youth or those moving through our justice system. I am not here to say who is more deserving or where efforts should or should not be concentrated. I have never lived on a federal reservation, nor am I a member of the elderly community. I am not a single parent, nor am I disabled.
But I do understand as one who has fallen victim to single-minded apathy and has experienced the pain of discrimination, as one who grew up in an inner-city neighborhood and now seeks higher education, as one who has seen the devastation of downsizing and the anguish of gang warfare, as one who recognizes that those who work in our state, local and federal legislatures are influenced by those with the loudest voice, and as one who knows that those with the funds and resources scream the loudest.
I realize that those who come from different worlds have traveled different paths and bring with them another perspective. That can only help us all.
I am here only to remind the decision-makers and the so-called power-brokers that their constituency is diverse, but with fungible needs. "Another Perspective" is here to present the other side, an alternative view, a separate, but not necessarily distinc t, vision. We all want to be well-informed, and it is another's perspective that assists us in becoming just that.
David H. Benton is a third-year law student, member of the ASUA President's cabinet , and Arizona Student Association board member. His column, 'Another Perspective,' appears Tuesdays.
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