HUMBERTO CASPA
Tonight our Costa Mesa political leaders have a last chance to hear
the Job Center issue.
Given the political implications, and because the issue carries
unpalatable ingredients, which could put Costa Mesa in the national
spotlight, the City Council will have a tough time deciding which way
to go.
However, settling on what road to take shouldn't be as difficult
as it appears. Our representatives must decide whether they want to
embrace our democratic institutions, freedom and a pluralistic
community, or surrender to the backward ideals of those who want to
close the center because it's used largely by minority groups.
From the outset, opponents of the Job Center have tacitly tried to
convince the community that the center's continued existence is bad
for Costa Mesa. They spent enormous resources, time and energy
diverting the real issues surrounding the Job Center.
In numerous letters to the Daily Pilot and other local newspapers,
those opponents mocked supporters of the Job Center as improvement
obstructionists, government zealots and anti-open market.
This is a clever way of doing politics, but the Costa Mesa
community is neither naive nor foolish enough to follow these
opponents' ill-conceived criticism without looking into their inner
circles and getting to know their agenda, goals and projects within
the community.
In order to understand the essence of these individuals, one must
not rely on what they write in the local newspapers or just listen to
what they say at the council meetings.
One of the proponents of closing the job center is M. H. Millard,
a local city hall activist.
What concerns me is that Millard doesn't just write letters to the
editor here in the Daily Pilot. He is a featured writer on a website
known as New Nation News, an online white supremacist site that
starts its front page with the quote: "For a white minority in a
colored world."
To say the least, the ideas of the individuals who write for
websites like these often coincide with views championed by former
presidential candidate and Ku Klux Klan member David Duke and other
radical iconoclasts promoting hate and racial intolerance.
Millard himself, in his writings, espouses a so-called
social-Darwinist evolutionary theory, which sustains social
stratification based on genetic differences.
No ethnic integration fits within this social structure, not only
socially but also biologically.
In our country, particularly in a pluralistic city as that of
