Scapegoats

TWENTY-FIVE welfare mothers and 15 sympathetic students--including nine from Harvard and Radcliffe--will be tried today in Boston Municipal Court on charges of trespassing and conspiracy arising out of last week's sit-in at the State House. If convicted, each defendant could be sentenced to one year in prison.

The trial comes two days after the remarkable report of the Cohen committee, which revealed the state's welfare system to be in far worse shape than even the protesting mothers had claimed. No sooner had the report been released when Governor Volpe, during a visit to Boston, tried to defend himself by laying the blame for Massachusetts' welfare mess on "a nationwide conspiracy to disrupt the public welfare system and to force us to bend to whatever they have in mind."

Such demagogic nonsense, like the unusually serious charges brought against the welfare protesters, seems designed to obscure the facts of the welfare situation by transferring the blame from the Volpe administration to a group of welfare recipients and students. Lost in the shuffle is the fact that the welfare mothers are suffering more than anyone from the massive irregularities in welfare administration. In the specific case of the State House sit-in, the protesting mothers were informed by state officials that their demands for winter clothing for their children would have to wait until the state could reorganize the Medicaid program--in which shocking profiteering by dentists and others was uncovered by the Cohen committee.

The message of the Cohen report is that Massachusetts' welfare money is not reaching the people who need it. By helping to dramatize that fact, the welfare mothers and their supporters were trying to do something which needed to be done. They are not criminals or conspirators as Governor Volpe would like us to believe. A charge of conspiracy for such a protest as this one is absurd and unjust.