WGBH Journal; Schecker Interview

It should serve an unprecedented fourth 2 year term. Hugh Gallen, his Democratic opponent is waging a vigorous opposition primarily focusing on the issue of an electricity rate levied by the utility company constructing the Seabrook nuclear power plant. Thompson approved the construction work in progress rates Gallen is- he, he approves of that. Gallen is radically opposed to them as are a majority of New Hampshire residents. Citizen opposition to the extension of the MBTA's red line in Cambridge picked up some powerful support last night. The Cambridge City Council voted 6 to 3 to join a community group known as Red Line Alert in its legal case against the extension. The group has asked for a court order to halt construction while a thorough environmental impact statement is being prepared. Newt Walker has this report. [Walker]Red Line Alert and the city believe that the MBTA inadequately informed the public about numerous changes in project plans such as the shift in location of the line's final destination. They also contend that there have been so many changes that a

total review of the project is in order. They cite for instance the fact that the original T study indicated the use of tunnel boring methods when in fact the T plans to blast. The group also wants a more detailed study on the effects that construction traffic will have on North Cambridge businesses. The council made it clear last night that they were not against the extension in concept and that they did not wish to link it in any way with the red line improvements program now underway. They did however instruct the city solicitor to co-operate with legal council for Red Line Alert and to report to the city on the legal options available. In the meantime the MBTA had no comment on the matter although they had stated previously that for every delay of one month the cost of the project will rise 3 million dollars. It is unclear however how that figure was arrived at. One thing is clear though the timing of the city' s red line stand will undoubtedly influence Cambridge voters to favor a non-binding referendum on today's ballot

which calls for a moratorium on red line construction. For GBH Journal, this is Newt Walker. [Anchor] And that's the news. The rights of gay people have not figured prominently in today's Massachusetts elections, but in California gays and civil libertarians have their eyes peeled for the results of a ballot question that may prove more controversial than the Proposition 13 tax cut. It's the so-called Briggs Initiative whose passage could pose the most serious danger yet to gays and others. Reporter Amy Sands has more. [Sands] The Briggs initiative in its own words provides for filing charges against school teachers, teachers aides, school administrators, or counselors for advocating,

soliciting, imposing, encouraging, or promoting private or public homosexual acts. The initiative has occasioned so much concern among U.S. lesbian and gay activists that even here in Boston an ad hoc group called Lesbians and Gay Men Against the Right has formed in response. Madge Kaplan and Robbie Rosenberg of that group say Briggs invites witch hunts against school employees. [Rosenberg] Basically it doesn't demand gay teachers be fired, but it does demand that in the case that somebody has been advocating gay rights or has been out front as a gay person that they have a hearing- that there be a board set up and there be a public hearing on the person's competency to teach and then leaves it up to the local community to decide that. But the potential is that any young person in the school could accuse another- a teacher that they don't like for whatever reasons of being gay and automatically set up a hearing. It's much the same way as in the Salem Witch Trials what happened there. [Kaplan] And who knows I feel like it could be an issue of whether, as Robbie said earlier, there is some

antagonistic feelings towards a teacher, or a student goes home and says something to a parent about something that was talked about that day in class, or if a teacher is gay baited and doesn't respond to that. So I think just even the kinds of subtle things that happen in a school situation could become very very explosive material. I think that's the way witch hunts have functioned in the past certainly, and in terms of the kind of strong anti-communist hysteria, people had to know very little in some ways to hang, you know, communist on somebody. And that always the burden was on that person to somehow prove, you know, their worth as as a human being, and in this case, you know, their worth as a teacher. [Sands] The Briggs Amendment is only the latest in a series of anti-gay campaigns in the country. Besides Dade County Florida anti-gay groups have successfully removed gay rights ordinances from the law books in Wichita, Kansas; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Eugene, Oregon. Voters in Seattle are deciding a similar issue today. The Briggs initiative is a little different

than these others though. Rather than seeking to defeat already existing gay rights laws and simply discourage gay expression, it is an attempt to create a new law which actively forbids public gay expression. As to Briggs possible effect on day to day classroom life, Kaplan, who has herself been a teacher, had this to say. [Kaplan] In my teaching experience, I feel like kids are always bringing up stuff about gay rights about homosexuality, whether it's a negative comment or not. And as a teacher I feel that the obligation of any teacher is to take up a lot of things that kids say. And if you disagree or not or feel like there's real merit in and having some discussion about that. Once again I feel that a teacher would be placed in a very hard situation of deciding whether or not they would basically fulfill in some ways their function as some kind of a teacher to take up the kinds of things that even kids raise let alone deciding that you want to build that into the curriculum or that you want to talk about something that's happening in the news. So that those- those rights or those goals even in the

teaching learning situation I think would be severely infringed upon. [sands] Robbie Rosenberg sees Briggs as an attempt to divert California voters attention away from issues of quality education, and specifically away from the damage Proposition 13 cuts will do to California schools. [Rosenberg] The issue for parents is quality education for their kids. And the same, the same people who are behind Briggs have also been behind Proposition 13 in terms of the right leaders. Proposition 13 is going to cause cutbacks in the schools or really decrease the quality of education in the schools. And focusing on gay teachers, in the way that Briggs does, is diverting people's attention from the real issues of why kids aren't being educated today in the way that parents want them to be. And diverting them from struggling for getting quality education for their kids, I think the same way in Boston. The way all the attention has been focused on bussing, when for both black and white parents in the city, the problem is the

failure of the educational system in the city of Boston, and not so much whether black students or white students are going to be in black or white community schools. [Sands] Polls give the Briggs initiative a 50/50 chance of passing. Kaplan and Rosenberg however say it has a good chance of passing. Lesbians and Gay Men Against the Right are planning a demonstration for tomorrow afternoon at 5 p.m. at City Hall to either protest Briggs passage or celebrate its defeat. For the Journal, I'm Amy Sands. [Anchor] In New Hampshire voters are selecting a governor on this Election Day, following a hotly contested race. It has blended two issues: the anti-tax fever in a state proud that it has no sales or income tax, and the question of nuclear power. The arch conservative incumbent Meldrum Thompson has pledged to resist further taxes, but many citizens resent his support for a state surcharge on utility bills. The surcharge forces customers to pay for construction of that controversial Seabrook nuclear plant.

Here in Massachusetts nuclear power appears as a local ballot question in only one legislative district: in Cambridge. Voters are advising their representative there whether to ban further construction of nuclear plants until the issue of how to dispose of nuclear waste is resolved. For some perspective on the effect today's balloting will have on nuclear power, I spoke with Steve Hilgartner of the energy policy information center. [Hilgartner] This referendum question is getting carriage voters an opportunity to do what the people of California have already done, what the people in Maine and Wisconsin have already done, and that's to say that the problem of radioactive waste is such a dangerous problem and it's so difficult to solve that we can't trust people to come up with solutions later. We want them now. And until we have a solution, we don't want more nuclear power plants constructed. The campaign has been conducted largely through the efforts of the committee for a nuclear moratorium which put the referendum

question on the ballot. And they've gone door to door in Cambridge leafleting the district and talking with people. And there's also been some exchanges between Boston Edison and the committee in the Cambridge Chronicle. There's been relatively little advertising on the part of Boston Edison, which is different from most of these campaigns where they, the electric utilities, come in and pour in millions and millions of dollars. In this case, because it's in one district in one city, it's sort of difficult for them to use the big media guns. It's too small of a target to focus television advertising on, for example. And so it's been a campaign that the people have had an opportunity to really go out and use grassroots organizing techniques on. [Anchor] The balloting in New Hampshire is also of interest to anti-nuclear activists. One of their longtime foes Governor Meldrum Thompson is up for re-election in a hotly contested race. One of the issues there is a charge called construction work in progress which is a surcharge, a

kind of tax slapped on the electric bill of consumers in New Hampshire to help finance the controversial Seabrook nuclear plant. How will the results of that election, whether Thompson prevails or not, affect the fate of the Seabrooke plan? [Hilgartner] Well Galland Thompson of Thompson's opponent opposes CWIP charges, he's against the idea that people should have to pay for a product which they aren't receiving any benefits from yet. And this would have a serious impact on Seabrook because the power company is having a difficult time already meeting the financial qualifications that they have to have in order to build it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants to make sure that all companies which are building nuclear plants aren't encouraged to cut corners on safety and that they have enough money to go ahead and do that. So that the CWIP, whether CWIP gets continued in New Hampshire will have a real impact on Public Service Company's financial

condition. If Public Service Company is unable to raise CWIP charges and if Gallen were to stop that, that could conceivably bring about a halt to construction in Seabrook. [Anchore] Here in Massachusetts our electric utility Boston Edison has been sounding out legislators recently about a possible CWIP charge to finance the construction of its Pilgrim 2 nuclear plant in Plymouth. How closely have anti-nuclear activists been following those developments? [Hilgartner] Well we've known all along that in the end Boston Edison company was going to have to ask for CWIP or some similar kind of charge in order to build Pilgrim 2. The cost overruns in Pilgrim 2 our outrageous. Originally they estimated the cost of the plan a 250 million dollars. That was in 1972. And now, 6 years later, the cost is up to 1.9 billion dollars, which is what, 8 times as much. So that with that

type of an increase over just 6 years, it's become absolutely evident that they don't have the capital to build the thing. And the only way they're going to be able to build it is if they go ahead with Construction-Work-In- Progress charges, and start billing us now for their construction, using our money to build the plant, which they'll later put in their rate base and used to increase our bills. Activists throughout Massachusetts have been watching this, and one of the important issues in the campaign that hasn't been out in the open all along, but- but that has been important is the fact that Ed King supports Construction-Work-In- Progress charges, whereas Frank Hatch opposes CWIP, so that there's another difference in the candidates. And the outcome of that election will have an impact on whether we get CWIP charges in our electric bills for Pilgrim 2. [Anchor] Thank you very much. Talking with Steve Hilgartner of the Energy Policy Information Center. [Music]

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[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [More music, another song] [Music] [Anchor] Yes this is election day nationwide but not all eligible

citizens are registered to vote and many of those who are won't show up at the polls. In fact the number of Americans who do vote has been shrinking steadily for almost 2 decades. The reasons for a low turnout are complex, ranging from voter apathy, to bad weather, to principled anarchist. A man who has studied and written about voter patterns is William Schneider, assistant professor of Government at Harvard. He spoke with WGBH TV reporter Danny Schecker. [Schneider] The high point in recent years in terms of voter participation was in 1960, and in every presidential election since 1960 voter participation has declined. And in Massachusetts, like the rest of the nation, voter participation has steadily declined since the 1960 election. [Schecker] What accounts for the fall off in voting? [Schneider] First, the decline of partisanship. The fact is that people simply

identify less and increasingly less with either the Republican or Democratic Party. And it's the strong partisans, strong Democrats and Republicans, who vote in the largest numbers. And second of all there's been an increase in the sense of alienation and cynicism on the part of most Americans with fewer and fewer recognizing that they have a civic duty to vote. Measurable trends exist on both of these things, and they seem to be associated with non-voting. But I would add to that the fact that 18 to 20 year olds were given the right to vote in 1970, and it's always been true that young people vote in smaller numbers than older people. [Schecker] There's been a trend away from participation, you talked about alienation. What does some of the research or study show? What it what are non-voters saying about why they don't vote? And who are they? [Schneider] Well the standard kinds of indicators are that public officials don't care what

people like me think. That it doesn't make any difference who wins, the same policies will be pursued. They're all a bunch of crooks. Those are the kinds of attitudes that one hears frequently expressed. And they're frequently expressed by non-voters. If one had to describe what particular groups make up non-voters, I'd say they have two characteristics. One is that they do tend to be poorer and less well-educated, and the others they tend to be younger and more mobile. They move from place to place. And one of the strongest relationships is that people who haven't lived in a place for very long are much less likely to vote than those people have a strong tie to their local community. [Schecker] What does it say abut democracy in America? [Schneider] Well it says that we're at a time when a lot of people find no meanings in our pol- no meaning in our politics. They don't think the parties stand for a great deal. They're dissatisfied with the way things are. And much more to the point, they don't see any viable choices, any realistic alternatives for changing things. For the moment, people aren't terribly desperate, and so they express this through apathy, through not caring.

It could become dangerous. [Anchor] That's Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard William Schneider. He spoke with Danny Schecker. You may remember an ambitious project of the Boston Women's Health Collective that blossomed into the national bestsiller called Our Bodies Ourselves. That's a bestseller not a bestsiller. They've recently put out a kind of sequel. This time on the complexities of parenting under the title Ourselves and Our Children. The author's interviewed over 200 fathers, mothers, and non-parents on such topics as raising children of various ages, what it's like to be parents of grownups, why to have children, and why not to. Reporter

Becky Rorr recently talked to two members of the collective Wendy Sanford and Jean Speiser. [Rorr] In your preface I think you say that the book is about being parents. And this seems to me to provide a different emphasis from other child rearing manuals. And I wanted to ask you what you think is different about your book. [Sanford or Speiser] Well you write it it's different from child rearing manuals. When we got together and started talking about being parents, we realized that there was a lot of information around or advice even about how to raise children, what to do with kids. But that what we needed to do was to talk about ourselves as parents, our lives as adults who work or or don't work, who have love relationships, friendships, interests, hobbies, a whole sphere, you know, of life that includes having children, but that isn't- our kids aren't the only things in our lives and we needed to talk with

each other about balancing the different aspects of our lives. [Sanford or Speiser] Jean. Then we began to look at the broader things about parenting to see what the impact of society is on the family and on us as we try to parent. And of course the first thing that came forward was a sense of isolation which parents tend to have because our society tends not to help us. They assume that we all live within our doors and need nothing that we can do it alone and we can do everything alone. As parents we can help each other if we just know how to do it. And we did a lot of talking about how they do help. How do they reach out to each other? How do they get out of the isolation and what it feels like to talk about the issues which are important to them? [Rorr] How has the feminist viewpoint of the collective and the idea also of working mothers, working women, how has that been treated in your book? [Sanford or Speiser] It's been important to us in our family life to explore ways that the father can move out of the traditional

role, which I think limits him, of just being the breadwinner. And that mothers can move, if they want to, out of the traditional role of just staying at home with children. And some of the kind of difficult negotiations around that are in our book, but also some of the excitement of fathers discovering new parts of themselves and spending you know a whole morning several days a week or something like that with their kids. And not just us helping out their wives, but as taking responsibility, a full share of the responsibility for their kids daily lives and ways that opened up parts of them that they really learned to appreciate. So that certainly is one of the areas that are what you would call of feminist interest. [Rorr] One of the problems that with many parents and kids, in my conversations with parents is that they're just going to drive you crazy some of the time, and and you're going to you're going to just feel like you're at

your wit's. And that can result in all sorts of behavior. One of the more depressing kinds of behavior that's been highlighted lately in the news has been the incidences of child abuse. What would you have to offer to parents who feel- that this is a problem for? [Sanford or Speiser] It's interesting. I think that that something of what's come out from child abuse probably comes out- is a result in our society of what I felt when I- when I originally became a parent. And that was that you were only allowed to talk about how wonderful everything was. You had to be the perfect parent and you had to have the perfect child. I can remember it from day one. If the child cried in a public place, you were immediately embarrassed that that you had a bad child and that and that. And every book that you ever talked- or ever- or that you ever read or anyone that ever talked to you stressed how you could be the perfect parent or how you were the parent were

totally responsible for all the failures that that happened to your child. And I think that our book has begun to say that in fact we're bad parents and we're good parents. We have bad children and good children and it really depends on the time of day that you talk to us. Do you know what the other part of that is? The problem for us, and I think it's perhaps more for women, but maybe not, is that our image is so tied up with them. And then when the child's crying that means we've been bad. And when the child is being bad, we are bad. And what we're trying to say is that it's crucial that we look at ourselves as adults, that we have things which build up our image, that makes us separate from our children. [Sanford or Speiser] We also interviewed a number of women who have chosen to stay home and see that as a piece of work that they're doing for a certain number of years that's very very important and needs to be more highly valued. Child care workers are some of the most underpaid people in the workforce. And undervalued. So that again reflects an

under valuing of the real important enterprise of of raising children. [Anchor] Wendy Sanford and Jean Speiser, 2 authors of Ourselves and Our Children, recently published by The Boston Women's Health Book collective. They spoke with Becky Rorr. And that's GBH Journal for tonight. We are a listener supported public radio in Boston, which means not only that we depend on your sponsorship financially at the times of the year when we need money, such as the November harvest coming up, but also we need your ideas and thoughts and feelings and your criticisms, and we ask that you send those along. Our address is GBH Journal, WGBH Radio. 125 Western Avenue. Boston, MA 0 2 1 3 4. I'll be

along with election results later in the evening, immediately following our Boston Symphony concert, and with updates until midnight. Our producer for this program is Greg Fitzgerald, with production assistance from Chris Alton and Diane Slane. Thanks to our warm and witty engineer Marco Garrison. And I'm David Ford.