ustxtxb_obs_1979_12_28_50_00068-00000_000.pdf

I’m not sure what the future should look like. To sum up, I haven’t the foggiest what will be happening over the next 25. I’m glad I don’tit might be too depressing, or too radical, even for me. I do, however, expect to live the next 25 with zest, curiosity, lots of humor, righteous anger, energy, and goodness. EVE MCARTHUR, Assistant Director, Center for Battered Women, P.O. Box 5631, Austin 78763. DEAR CO-EDITORS, We in the UAW, including myself and the members of my family, have watched The Texas Observer with hope for 25 years. We have watched the contributions you have made for our society and your efforts to change our lives for the better. And being chicanos, we can now stay in hotels, attend theaters, eat in restaurants, drink water from water fountains, fit a dress or try on shoes or travel in public transportation without insults. The Observer is important because it’s about our hopes, aspirations, and dreams .. . and about what our United States should be! It has been struggling to build these dreams into a better tomorrow for a much better world. We must extend the frontiers of economic and social justice and learn greater compassion and to put human rights above property rights, people ahead of profits. Our cities and our schools are in deep crisis with the increase of crime and drug abuse. Our health care is reaching a state of collapse, and the costs are skyrocketing. We are poisoning our air, polluting our water, contaminating our soil. Have we lost our way? Have we forgotten what is important? We have the capacity . . . We have the resources. All we need is the will to commit these resources! It is for that reason that we should reject extremismwhether it be black, brown, or white. No separate answerslet’s all join together and help The Texas Observer for the next 25 years; and I am sure we can have a better Texas for our children to enjoy after we are gone! PANCHO MEDRANO, International Representative, International Union, UAW, and the MEDRANO FAMILY; 5244 East Grand Avenue, Dallas 75223. To THE CO-EDITORS: Because life is unfair, I’ve been in Texas only once, even though I’m nearly -58. But I assuage my sense of loss by faithfully reading The Texas Observer. The question for this non-Texan is, I suppose, why? Well, who says there are no easy answers? Mine is very easy. I admire and value what The Texas Observer tells me about Texas and Texans so much that it doesn’t make any difference that I al most never go to the place. You ask why I so admire and value it? Another very easy answer. Because it’s a living, breathing example of the kind of journalism I lovehere, there, anywhere; because I know of no better example of such jourbecause it prolongs my love affair with the First Amendment. MORTON MINTZ, 3022 Macomb, N.W., Washington 20008. DEAR RONNIE, If The Texas Observer didn’t already exist, it would have to be invented to exert its positive influence on an otherwise negative presidential election campaign of 1980. How many times, I wonder, must Texans and other Americans be reminded that John Connally has two loves and two loves only, the Siamese twins of power and money? Twenty-five years ago we were in the middle of President Eisenhower’s first term, snug in the security of John Foster Dulles’s massive retaliation. Ironically, the farther the years stretch, the better Ike looks though I can’t say the same for his secretary of state. How soaked in turmoil and tragedy has that quarter of a century been! I haven’t completely given up on the next 25 years but, though I am no astrologer, I think I can safely but uneasily predict the span will be no picnic. So keep Observing, not just Texas but the rest of our valuable but troubled land. EDWARD P. MORGAN, 4507 Crest Lane, McLean, Virginia 22101. GENTLEPERSONS: Two ancient liberals met on the street the other day and the first one said: “Why do you look so glum? Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” The second responded that he was definitely an optimist. The first then inquired again why he looked so glum, to which the latter answered: “These are hard times for optimists.” Humorous, but nonsense! Of course 1979 represents a low point in the long history of peaks and valleys of progress, but temporary lulls in national achievement there have always been. The “wehave-done-enough” syndrome is more an expression of fatigue from the hardwon social progress in the years since 1933 than any general feeling the country has been on the wrong road in moving toward a truly welfare state. History has made heroes of those who have brought about social change for the benefit of the many, not those who have resisted it President Roosevelt, not Presidents Nixon/Ford; civil rights fighter Hubert Humphrey, not segregationist Richard Russell; economic activist Paul Douglas, not “can’t do” Bob Taft. My optimism sees the next 25 years building a fairer and more egalitarian so ciety in which the welfare state flourishes as never before. I look forward to the time in the next quarter century when everybody who wants to work will have a job, when the health of each person will be properly cared for, when each child will have an opportunity for a decent education and no child will go to bed at night hungry, when every vestige of discrimination on grounds of race, creed, color, sex, sexual preference, national origin, age, or handicap will be eliminated. That’s what I believe the next upsurge of liberalism will bring for the coming 25 years and I don’t think that upsurge is as far off as the “hard-times-for-optimists” fellows would have you believe. JOSEPH L. RAUH JR., Rauh, Silard and Lichtman, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Washington 20036. To THE CO-EDITORS: My own political phase began with the presidential run of Bobby Kennedy and ended the day Nixon quit. That time of heightened interest came too late to acquaint me, as an Observer reader, with the early work of Willie Morris and Bill Brammer. The emotional gamut of those years left me weary, as a reporter, of politics as subject matterI can approach other areas with some pretense of balance and dignity. . . . Personally, I’d rather be jerky of knee and quick on the trigger, free to respond to whatever candidate \(most recently, Bob Krueger; no, wait, I just signed a Jim Hightower petiMaybe the great lumbering bow can be shoved a few inches to port, but at such great laborlet somebody else do the work. The Observer stories that come first to my mind have little connection with politics: Larry McMurtry’s assessment of the Houston Astrodome, Larry King’s visit to his son’s junior high football game, Greg Olds’s expose of the college president who plagiarized his dissertation, Bill Helmer’s updates of the armadillo subculture. The Observers of Kaye Northcott and Molly Ivins contained the first local reporting of feminist bent that I recall. I first encountered the poetry of Si Dunn and the photography of Roy Hamric in The Texas Observer. Goaded by the necessities of making a living, Observer contributors tend to move on, but that wellspring of fresh ideas and talent is its true legacy. Political influence notwithstanding. JAN REID, Route 1, Box 257-C, Kingsbury 78638. To THE COEDITORS: I am a member of a working class. I don’t have anything I didn’t earn myself. I do not like rich conservatives, but I don’t like rich liberals either, because there’s basically no difference. Both are exploiters of working people, and their NNW 68 DECEMBER 28, 1979