Los Angeles Herald Examiner, on April 13, 1987 Tricia Crane interviewed Assemblyman JohnVasconcellos. This was the same day the first, premier issue of Perspectives was picked up from our printer.
Excerpt from the interview fit the theme of Perspectives:
T.C.: You have had a Jesuit education and spent many years in therapy, committed to what you would call personal growth. Yours has been a lifetime spent in personal examination.
J.V.: It's important that people have begun to search for themselves. I've been for 20 years in various intensive forms (of therapy) and my own forms. I think it takes awhile and it takes a lot of attention. It has to become a practice, something you do all the time. You need to get past the techniques and become genuinely open.
T.C.: Why is it that self-esteem advocates seem to me to be rather aggressive and sort of "on"?
J.V.: There is a certain cheeriness or fervor that is a little, to me, exaggerated, a kind of overcompensation. A person who is thoroughly self-esteeming is immediately natural with nothing
exaggerated, not falsely modest or caught up with himself but just present.
T.C.: The positive thinking movement has a tendency by some to blame the victim. There are those who insist that you are responsible for everything that happens in your life. If you develop cancer it's the result of some sort of wrong thinking on your part.
V.C.: I think a person who really has self-Esteem, who is really in touch with who he or she is, doesn't blame, doesn't judge, doesn't put others at a distance.
V.C.: Carl Rogers taught me to be less afraid of myself, more immediate and more radical, radical in the Latin sense of the word, which means to go to the root of things. |
|
Self Esteem Task Force
Interview By Allan Hartley
Sacramento - Rita Aldredge, in the Office of the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility said, "The task force will now introduce to the State Assembly a concurrent resolution to establish justification for local self-esteem councils. This
comes just after the task force itself had its first meeting on Wednesday, March 25th.
Assemblyman John Vasconcellos worked for three years getting this bill through the legislature. He was at times ridiculed, and even spoofed by the Doonsbury comic strip for trying to involve the government in a project that is the result of some aspects of the human potential and metaphysical movements. In the end, he was able to get the bill through the legislature, have the governor endorse it as co-host and be given a grant of $245,000 over a period of three years. It goes beyond bi-partisan. It transcends all past barriers to people cooperating together for the good of all. Its 25 members have a background in holistic health, performance training, metaphysical, New Thought, as well as those with a more mainstream orientation.
The bill, AB 2659, states that, "A body of research studies now exits which begins to document the causal relationship between self esteem, which is a developed sense of one's inherent worth as a person, and the growth and development of healthy responsible individuals, and the mature exercise of responsible,
productive citizenship."
In its first session on March 25 th, the task force explored ways to promote self esteem to enhance both personal and social responsibility. They also dealt with promoting environments that nurture individuals into successful people. The task force is obligated to compile research. They will focus on child abuse, drug and alcohol dependence, teen pregnancy, crime and violence, prostitution, chronic welfare dependence and failure in children.
At the Commission's first meeting, Assemblyman John Vasconcellos said, "California is the leading state. It is the human frontier."
Andrea Mecca, panel member said, "Eight Other states and Britain are considering similar panels." |
