ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609240094
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Alan Sorensen
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A COUPLE of new employees undergoing "orientation" visited our editorial office Wednesday. Everything went fine until one of them asked: Do you run more positive or more negative editorials?
Huh?
I mumbled something about not keeping track. I paused. Then I observed that we try in the newspaper's editorials to be advocates for the community. Sometimes that means applauding success. Sometimes it means urging action or, yes, highlighting a problem.
I even let escape the words "constructive criticism."
Finally, orientation ended. I got back to work.
Then I remembered where I'd been the night before.
I was at a conference on youth development, organized by Roanoke's Teen Outreach Program. Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, had been scheduled to speak.
She was a no-show, citing the press of Washington business. But her son, Jonah Edelman, was at the Holiday Inn-Tanglewood to deliver the keynote in her place.
It was a tough position to be in. Among those gathered in the conference room, many had just learned of his mother's last-minute change of plans. They had arrived keenly anticipating the chance to see the nationally famous, pioneering advocate for children.
Luckily, Jonah proved impressive in his own right. His talk seemed to evoke a thing already abundant among the educators, youth workers and others in the room: something theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once called "the spiritual discipline against resentment."
As his words washed over the conferees, Edelman quickly converted the object of their attention from who he was not, to who he is. Jonah at 25, Yale- and Oxford-educated and with a doctorate in his pocket, had helped organize this year's Stand For Children in Washington. Now he's executive director of a group by the same name, trying to sustain momentum from the June demonstration while beginning to build a national network of advocates for children.
His was a rambling speech, casually delivered. But it touched eloquently on the difference that a reliable and giving person can make in the life of a child, and thence on many lives that the child one day will affect.
Jonah cited his own good fortune in having ancestors so touched. But for them, he wouldn't be speaking here today. Some call this early intervention.
The Children's Defense Fund issues reports urging such early intervention, often on grounds of "prevention." A penny spent today on Head Start or infant nutrition will save such and such tomorrow in special education, welfare, prison costs, etc. Sometimes in our editorials, too, we resort to this analysis. (See today's Opinion page.)
Marian Wright Edelman herself has admitted that she fixed on children's advocacy in the early 1970s in part because political concern is more easily solicited for kids than for the poor or minorities. Similarly, prevention offers a strategy for selling, as a cost-savings, what is the right thing to do. In effect: Better do this, or we'll all go to hell.
Still, I have read that Mrs. Edelman's more personal writings, as might be expected from a former civil-rights activist, do not calculate costs and consequences so much as they describe a spiritual journey. I know little about her, but I gather her social commitment is founded on the belief, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, in the "existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness."
Jonah himself, in his remarks to the conference, cautioned against too-constant a focus on prevention. Think, he said, about tomato plants. When we plant them, water them, nurture them, we're not imagining what they will look like - withered, diseased, dead - if we don't take care of them. Rather, we imagine the ripe, luscious tomato that is their glorious product.
He's right, of course. Accentuating the negative can distort our image of kids, most of whom don't get into trouble, and can also sap inspiration. Appreciating potential, not dreading the worst, is what sustains personal involvement with teens.
Cheri Hartman, director of the Teen Outreach Program, suggests that too specialized a focus on each ill of youth - from crime and pregnancy to dropping out and drug abuse - can neglect the problems' common roots and fragment the community's response. Concentrating on the young people and their potential to contribute, she says, can bring it all together.
The genius of TOP is in getting at-risk teens themselves into community service. Tell them they need self-esteem. But get them to volunteer in an organized environment for a caring purpose - reading to a child or visiting a nursing home - and watch what happens.
What happens is documented in an editorial on the opposite page. Demonstrably, TOP reduces rates of various youth-related pathologies.
I note this not to dwell on the negative, but because prevention of unhappy outcomes could help sell a good idea. The good people who put the idea into practice will in any case find their inspiration in the young.
I hope this counts as a positive comment.
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