UF00083645_00015.pdf

UF00083645_00015.txt

UF00083645_00015_pdf.txt

"YOUR GOVERNMENT" -- 33 From: Governor's Office
by Farris Bryant Tallahassee, Florida
Governor of Florida

AGE OF COMPASSION

In spite of all our individual and collective aelf-oenteredneas,
we live in an age of compassion. For the first time in recorded
history, on a massive scale, compassion has become an effective,
national emotion, and has shaped our responses to many of the
problems of our time.

The peeple of Florida and America are finding ways to use
their government as effective tools for the expression of their
concern for the common good without sacrificing basic liberties.
Mental retardation -- and polio - and tuberculosis -- and Juvenile
delinquency -- and crippling diseases -- are all accepted as proper
areas of governmental concern.

Time was when the concern of the peeple and the state for
criminals ended with their conviction and incarceration. We
have come to recognize, through intelligent and developed compassion,
that imprisonment is not the end, but the beginning, and we have
learned to our delight that what serves the convicted also serves
the public.

Time was when our concern for education ended with its
provision on a limited and voluntary basis. We have now come to

recognize that the presence of the functional illiterate in our
midst is a drag upon the society as well as the individual. We
have come to recognize that when we let young peeple stop their
education short of their capacity, society loses even as Colonial
Spain lost when its gold-laden gallions sank to the bottom of the
sea.

I am more proud of the people of Florida for their action of
last November in taking a stand for advanced education on a maJor
scale than for any other event of the last several years.

we take it for granted that through the state-wide program
of the Florida Institute for Continuing University Studies (FICUS)'
the extensive off campus science education program of the

University of Florida, known as GENESYS: Educational Television

(ETV); and Operation Alphabet, the state can and should extend
educational Opportunity to all who will accept it.

The list is a long one:

1. Care for the mentally ill.

2. Programs of encouragement for physical fitness.

3. Concern for dependent children whose parents, because
of ignorance or misfortune, neglect them,

a. Care for old people who, in a world where families are
breaking down, cannot meet the medical needs common to age.

Fifty years ago .- even 30 o it was generally believed that
goals ouch as these could not have been achieved without an
intolerable loss of freedom. But they are being achieved, and
because Americans are voluntarily assuming the burdens of
citizenship, the blessings of freedom are becoming more manifest,
and more generally enjoyed.

We shall not win the war on poverty in one battle. he shall
not cure the diseases to which mankind is heir with one remedy.
We may never do so! But we have begun to try. We have set our
course. We have dared, as free men, to adopt these goals, and
if our reach exceeds our grasp, it were better so.

One of the great lessons contemporary history teaches us is
that there is no substitute for the voluntary determination of a

man or a people to perform a task. Whether it is raising wheat in
Russia, or raising a root in early America, or raising the
standards of citizenship in Florida today, no one can do it as

well as the volunteer.