More shooting in the Pico neighborhood!!
By Charles Springer
How many of our youth have to be shot, killed or imprisoned until we get it? Where is the logic in cutting education and the programs that help build our nation’s youth into a positive force in this country for tax cuts for corporations and the rich?
How is a youth from a low-income area any different from a youth who has the means to go to private schools?
When a quality education is denied from the K-12 level, our children suffer immeasurably. Their fragile hearts and minds erode into confusion and disarray. Couple that with the cuts in the junior colleges across the board and you have just the type of thing that has been happening in the Pico neighborhood across the county.
These cuts are creating an atmosphere for kids of seeing no way out of the low-income cycle this regime has created. These children, who some think of as stupid, are far more intelligent than they are given credit for. They learn through observation and osmosis from the people they see as “cool” in their neighborhoods.
Most of the time, if they have no positive authority figures or role models around, they go to the gangs, drugs or worse, winding up homeless on the streets as runaways.
While this is a well known fact of life in these areas of the city that are most affected, in the upper echelons of the political and corporate arenas it is given the blind eye. This is blatantly obvious with the cuts in the education spending on the state and federal levels.
I strongly feel our leaders are too out of touch with those they are supposed to represent and the ones who keep their eyes on their constituents are too few and far between to make a major difference. The youth of this nation are the future of this nation and if they are not given the positive guidance and encouragement through quality education to achieve more in life than their parents, then we all lose in the long run.
When I was growing up my father used to push me to make good on my education. I went to a private grammar school and a private college prep high school on the southside of Chicago. I was fortunate to have this higher form of education as my father went to a public high school, also on the southside.
He wanted me to achieve higher than he did and gave me an incentive by going to college himself and earning a B.A. and a double master’s degree. He was a leader who did not ask me to do anything he was not willing to do himself.
This is also the way I learned to be a leader in the Marines — never ask subordinates to do anything you are not willing to do yourself and do not expect to lead if you have never learned to follow.
I really do not think any but a few of our elected leaders have met any of these criteria for leadership. They seem to be conducting their own agenda despite the fact that we have shown them through protests, letters, petitions, threats of recall and impeachment how “We the People” feel about their backroom politics, blatant coporate glad-handing and their bald-faced lies about no child being left behind.
Well not only are children being left behind, they are being outright denied the well-rounded quality education they deserve. They are being denied the opportunity to achieve to their highest potential and shown they are not worth the time of day by the present regime. (Charles Springer, is homeless and lives in Santa Monica) As north of Montana parents of both private and public elementary school children, we enthusiastically support Measure S.
SMMUSD is facing a catastrophic loss of funding from Sacramento. There is truly nowhere else to turn other than the residents of our two communities. Every great society has recognized the need to fund education for all and, in times of need, to come forward to make sure programs are not decimated, as will be the case with the Sacramento slashes.
For those with the fraudulently misleading signs saying Measure S hurts the poor, pray-tell where will the poor go to educate their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews?
What will the cost be to society for those children left behind because of much larger class sizes, less intervention, no preschool access for the poor, etc.?
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 26, 2003. Read the original PDF.