ustxtxb_obs_1986_05_16_50_00023-00000_000.pdf

city state zip city state zip price includes $1.12 sales tax The Texas Observer, 600 W. 28th #105, Austin, Texas 78705 Friends in faraway places need the Texas Observer this subscription if for myself gift subscription; send card in my name address $23 enclosed for a one-year subscription bill me for $23 Send the Observer to policy, economic development and diversification were largely the elements of transition. But not outside. Had the cardboard been removed from the windows and the doors removed from their jambs, then Texas in flux might have been better understood. The forum participants were given a glimpse of that real world by economist Wilbur Cohen, who, from the audience, said that in ten years the state’s population would be older and more diverse, its needs greater and the necessity to answer those needs more urgent. Earl Lewis of Trinity University and the Select Committee on Higher Education said the real transition would be toward a “quality of life available to the generality of the people.” We must, he said, “abandon our faithfulness to a tradition that provides inadequate human and health-care services. Those currently and historically underserved by our institutions will be more than 50 percent of the Texans under 15 in the year 2000.” Lewis urged a new understanding of the fact that public welfare serves the wealthy and middle class and not the poor, that government is not the problem, and that “we must lose some respect for the sancity and purity of market forces.” Did the cardboard come unglued to allow this light in? Not many ‘noticed: There is movement in this state. Bill Messer and conservative columnist Scott Bennett sense it, as they uncharacteristically called for gummint to take a larger role in managing economic affairs. Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby, of all the legislative officials, probably best understands it, as he marshalls the forces of change to the extent that his sense “Those currently and historically underserved by our institutions will be more than 50 percent of the Texans under 15 in the year 2000.” of noblesse oblige will allow. The last ten years of oil boom and bust, the last forty years of oil prosperity, the last 150 years of statehood are points too small to be isolated and, in that way, measured. In order to understand the changes in the life of this state, they must be understood in the context of the larger world. Mass migration from Mexico may still be part of the process equalizing the resources stolen from that republic one-and-a-half centuries ago. The migration from Central America is certainly the equal and opposite reaction to the actions of our country’s foreign and economic policy in that region. The economy of Fort Worth depends on the weapons sold to fortify the Middle East. Until the world at large and the Texans of the next fifty years enter the conversation, as they inevitably will, our public policy-makers will flounder, and the economy of the state will be blown back and forth by winds we will not be able to forecast or understand. COME STAY & CELEBRATE OUR 100th YEAR 749-5555 P.O. Box 8 Port Aransas, TX 78373 THE TEXAS OBSERVER