Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 28, 1994                   TAG: 9412290042
SECTION: EDITORIALS                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CYNTHIA L. CALLAHAN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GOV. ALLEN CAN KEEP HIS TAX CUTS

For women and their children and their dispirited men; for addicted people who are working hard to recover; for the mentally ill who struggle toward health and stability; for the disabled who cheer themselves with each successfully negotiated task; for our elders who wish to live comfortably at home.

Gov. Allen proposes to wrestle from us most of Southwest Virginia's stopgaps to poverty, crime, domestic violence and illiteracy. His vision has no heart. He would so impoverish us that we would gladly accept his prisons and their life-negating duties, such as holding a gun on another human being our every working day.

It's time for us to dislodge the fossil in our brains that holds compassion in contempt. Is our grace and salvation really in tax cuts, prisons or clear-cut forests? What is it that we don't have enough of? What do our lives lack that we feel duty bound to take the most from those having the least, and to bestow more to those having so much?

Is it on principle that we disdain those who don't work outside their homes, despise children whose fathers don't claim them or our elders because they're old?

Allen may keep my tax cut in the same elitist and meanly fashioned coffer where he keeps his political ambitions. In fact, I'd gladly pay more in taxes if I were assured that my 87-year-old neighbor would get indoor plumbing, that 60 adults in the New River Valley would learn to read this year, and if 25 drug-addicted human beings received substance-abuse treatment and became productive members of society.

I'd pay more taxes if, in 1995, 15 fewer children were hit and neglected by their overwhelmed and unprepared parents because the Department of Social Services intervened on those families' behalf. I'd pay more taxes to support preserving our forests, our police and probation officers, public-health nurses and public transportation. I'd pay more taxes for public television and radio, Total Action Against Poverty, the Global Studies program at Radford University, and the agribusiness endeavors at Virginia Tech.

However, Allen may return to me the portion of my taxes that would go toward Secretary of Education Beverly Sgro's pet project to further enhance salaries of the highest paid at our universities.

Am I really such a lone voice? Or are my compassionate and enlightened compatriots keeping silent because they're afraid they'll be publicly dismissed by Allen, who seems to believe the voices of dissent are those of immature and misguided children whining because we can't open our Christmas presents?

Cynthia L. Callahan of Christiansburg is a substance-abuse counselor.