ARCHIVE 12/31/93: A voice for those whose feelings are rarely heard

Editors' note: Longtime Boston Globe columnist died Monday at age 70. Here was one of his columns:

By Alan Lupo, Globe Columnist

In the neighborhood of my youth, we did not enjoy much political or private-sector clout. We didn't know any really important people. We didn't ''fit," as the pols use to say. We got two messages back then.

One, from the Horatio Alger school of success, was that we were to work and study hard and rewards would come to us. The other, from the hard-knock school of bitter experience, was, "It's who ya know."

Given that we didn't know too many folks, we worked hard. But we did know an eye doctor who in turn called on an old classmate, who in turn knew an editor at The Boston Sunday Advertiser. That editor agreed to hire me, a teen- ager, for one Satuday night shift a week during one summer.

The Advertiser was the Sunday extension of the Boston Record and the American, a Hearst outfit in Winthrop Square downtown. It took me only one night, one night in a hot, humid newsroom, the air filled with the clacking of manual typewriters and Teletype machines, the room's windows open to the grumbling of both the engines of delivery trucks and their drivers' tart observations at the loading dock below, one night to convince me of what I had long suspected.

I would be a newspaperman and maybe, someday, a columnist. I became a newspaperman full-time in January of 1961. I began writing columns regularly in the mid-1970s and foolishly thought, contrary to the cynicism attendant upon my upbringing, that once dreams became real, they lasted forever.

"Nothing lasts forever," an editor reminded me fairly recently. And sure enough, these semiweekly op-ed page offerings end today. A new editor is taking over the editorial and op-ed pages, and that means change for a number of us. I'll continue to write a column for the City Weekly edition, which covers Boston, Brookline, Cambridge and Somerville, and I'll be roaming all over the urban landscape for the Metro section.

Because I grew up in a family and in a neighborhood that had no voice, I have tried in some small way to be a voice for those whose feelings are too rarely heard, or even expressed. I hope this was not presumptuous, and I hope that I can continue to do that, for in today's neighborhoods there are also large numbers who do not "fit."

I am still -- foolishly, perhaps -- enough of an idealist to believe that the media are too often the only ones in town to help redress the grievances of those who have nobody to lobby for them in the corridors of public and private power.

I still believe that it is our job to raise hell responsibly and comfort the afflicted, to focus public attention on issues and events that people in power would just as soon see disappear from public discourse.

For example, sporadically over the years I have written about the violence that afflicts the American landscape and about the attempts to curb it, about social workers and teachers who try to prevent it and law enforcement officers who try to protect the rest of us from it.

For too long the debate in America has been not over how best to deal with crime, but rather, who is tougher. Criminals fight over who is tough enough to perform criminal acts, and the rest of us argue over who is toughest in fighting crime.

It is a foolish debate, for there are no liberals or conservatives in the war on crime, only real and potential victims. One can easily violate constitutional rights in the pursuit of criminals, and, most certainly, those threatened by even the fear of crime have few civil rights they can exercise.

With the slow demise of the Mob and the increase in both the drug trade and the gun supply, America today resembles Hollywood's depiction of Prohibition or the Wild West. That's part of the landscape I hope to look at more regularly than I have been.

As for now, it is time to thank every reader who called, stopped to talk, or wrote, and to apologize to those who never heard from me, because I simply can't get to every note.

Happy New Year, peace and good health to you all.

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