At UMass, cowards and sneaks

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At UMass, cowards and sneaks

This is about stealing that has the state's imprimatur, about a state health care worker who offers students abortion pills, about a University of Massachusetts bursar with a yellow streak up his back, about a health facility that should be shut down, about a situation that should have been exposed months ago. But I didn't want to rock the boat then. I didn't want to put my daughter at risk of not getting into the courses she needs to graduate. I didn't want to embarrass her. I still don't.

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Real life fear is worst of all

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It's the story I hear most often. I will be listening to someone tell me about a day spent at the beach 30 years ago, a glorious day. Everything was perfect until.

And suddenly I will be listening to a different story, a story stained with bewilderment and betrayal and tears. I will be talking to a woman whose husband drinks - he didn't always drink, he used to be a nice guy. You should have known him when.

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Today's kids are forced to become adults too early

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You sit and listen to kids talk today and it about breaks your heart because they're not kids anymore. They know too much. They've lived too much. They're only 6 or 8 or 12 or 14 and they have adult worries. Their parents are divorced or their mother's an alcoholic or their father's abusive or has a girlfriend or is never home or is always home because he lost his job two years ago and hasn't worked since.

They spend their days in front of TV watching people cheat and lie - on the news, on soap operas, on sitcoms.

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Court's hate ruling is a crime

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The language is weighty and obtuse. It bewilders. It intimidates.

The whole process intimidates. Nine Supreme Court justices, theoretically the smartest people in the country, unanimously decide that a cross burned on the lawn of one of the first black families to move into a Minnesota neighborhood is merely an exercise of free speech, a right of all Americans. And we, ordinary citizens who don't wear robes, who don't sit on the highest court of the land, are made uncomfortable by the decision but feel that within the body of ponderous words, there must be some truth, some noble justification that we simply don't understand.

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America '92: TV, movies make it a tough place

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In 30 years this country has gone from being a place where you could picnic in the woods, walk the streets at night, cut through an alley, sleep without locking your doors, drive without worrying about getting lost and ending up in a neighborhood where people will kill you, drive without worrying about a boulder crashing through your window, or a bullet smashing through your head, send your child to school without fear that someone will take a shot at him on the bus, or beat him up in the school yard, or knife him in class.

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Victims always pay the price in system that mocks justice

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Anger is self-destructive. You have to let go of it. You have to get past it. That's what psychiatrists say.

Priests say it, too. And ministers and rabbis. Turn the other cheek. Hate the sin but love the sinner. Forgive.

Ten years ago, I read "Victim" by Gary Kinder. It told the story of Cortney Naisbitt, 16, the youngest son of Carol and Byron Naisbitt, a sophomore at Utah's Ogden High School. On the afternoon of April 22, 1974, Cortney flew solo for the first time. Flying was his passion. Soloing had been the culmination of a dream.

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Crash survivor is living proof that seat belts save lives

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"19-year-old survives car crash" the headlines should have read, because his not dying miraculous. But it wasn't news. Surviving never is. People walk away from car crashes every day.

But Erickson shouldn't have. He fell asleep at the wheel while driving home from Boston on the VFW Parkway. His Toyota pickup truck careened over an embankment, ploughed into trees, spun around and landed back on the park-way facing the wrong direction. The truck is history. Erickson survived without a scratch.

People say he was lucky. But he was more than lucky. He was smart. He was wearing a seat belt. The seat belt saved his life.

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Bush was right: We must revive `family values'

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The phrase has taken a beating in the last few weeks.

Say the words, "family values" and your commercial value plummets. It's safer to be snide, easier to drag out Ozzie and Harriet and sneer, "Yah, but look what happened to them!" It's far more fashionable to denigrate the notion of family than to think about what family really is.

Family is not Ozzie and Harriet.

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They just want to save lives - seat belts

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All they want is to get their message to the public.

A cop called to the scene of a fatal car crash, who has to knock at yet another door and tell one more mother, father, husband, wife, that their loved one is dead, doesn't want to do this anymore, wouldn't have to do this with such frequency, if only people would wear seat belts.

His message is this: People don't have to die in car crashes. People don't have to be seriously injured.

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We are forgetting the true victims of Los Angeles

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Newsweek's cover story this week is about the riots in Los Angeles. There's a two-page picture-spread of the city's destroyed buildings. A couple of pages are dedicated to political analysis. There's a section on race and crime, a page about the ethnic diversity of L.A., a page about welfare, a page highlighting George Bush, another homing in on Peter Ueberroth and three pages which, in Newsweek's own words, offer a "close-up look at life and death on one city block."

Ending the piece, on the final page, is a list of the names and the races of the 54 men, women and children killed in the riots. At the top right corner there's a color photo of DeAndre Harrison, 17, dressed in a white suit, his hands folded in front of him, lying in his coffin.

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TV violence becomes the norm in '92

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It has been a long time since I awakened to the sounds of cartoons in my house. Years ago there was always a child up before me, roosting in front of the TV when I came downstairs, watching the "Smurfs" or "Gummy Bears" or some other early morning show.

These days my children sleep as late as they can and the TV remains silent. I haven't seen a cartoon in years.

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This division can't continue

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For a moment last Wednesday, possibility hung in the air - the possibility for change, for understanding.

You could feel it, like ozone before a storm.

America gasped - black, white America - and while the country held its breath, we were one nation, unified in our horror and outrage and despair.

Virtually no one who had seen the tape of Rodney King could understand how a jury could acquit the police officers who'd kept beating him when he was down. All of America was stunned. If reason had triumphed over rage, if marches had been opted for instead of mayhem, America might have stayed unified. A bridge might have been spanned.

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Cable offers new adventures in slime

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The station is WWOR, Channel 9, from New York, now delivered to us through our cable system.

It's not an x-rated station. We don't subscribe to it. It comes free with our basic package, and like most every other TV station, it's packed full of news and talk shows and re-runs.

Last Thursday at 7 a.m. the station showed "James Bond Jr.," followed by "Widget," "Head of the Class," "It's a Living," "Jenny Jones" and "Nine Broadcast Live."

Nine Broadcast Live is the subject of this column.

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Life full of `little' adjustments

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Let's see if I have this straight. This is how we must live our lives: We must never talk to strangers, must in fact, walk with our eyes down as if we are deep in thought, while we stride purposefully on our way. Purposefully is the key. We want our body to give out the message: don't mess with us. That's what the experts say.

We must walk on brightly lighted streets in groups, never alone in the dark. We must constantly be on guard. Is there someone behind us? Is that someone too close? Quick, cross the street and walk more purposefully. We must walk alone through parks or alleys or even sparse woods.

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It's time we all got involved

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The contrast is everywhere. It's in the newspapers, in the ads for designer clothes and expensive skin creams laid out right next to reports of American children who go to school hungry.

It's in the landscape, in the sagging tenements that line the edge of American highways, where shiny new cars with deluxe audio systems and cruise control speed indifferently past.

It's in our cities and our towns, people in dress coats walking next to people in rags; the privileged hurrying to the theater and to symphony, the underprivileged going nowhere that isn't free.

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Sexual Preference is not the issue

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The most gentle people I know are gay. A woman who lives with her mother, and takes care of her and anyone else who needs her. A man who lives alone but is never alone because he is always helping someone out. Two men who have been with each other for 17 years. Another man, who is 49, and still hasn't told his parents, because they're old and wouldn't understand and he doesn't want to break their hearts.

The most disgusting people I've seen are gay. Two men having sex with each other in front of a crowd at Mardi Gras last year. Gays throwing condoms at priests' mothers at the priest's ordinations a year before that. Gays defiling the Eucharist at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

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Divorce, Sesame Street style

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The saddest story in the news last Friday had nothing to do with crime or politics or the economy. It had to do with the way we live our lives, and the way we treat our children. It was a heartbreaker, yet relegated to the back pages, as if it meant nothing at all.

Sesame Street announced that it was putting its new episode about divorce on hold because the preschool children who had previewed it had become upset and had found it too painful to watch. The Snuffleupaguses were splitting up and the kids didn't like it a bit.

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