ELECTIONS

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Although I intend to take exception with one part of your supplement on the Cambridge elections. I must first give credit where it is due. Mr. Day and Ms. Heard have done an outstanding and pre-eminently fair job at covering all of the candidates and issues in the upcoming elections.

On one point, Mr. Day may be right but is. I feel, selling out his fellow students and young people. Rossi and Graham may well be the strongest of the "Radical Five" as Mr. Day believes. The implication that they are strong because each of them has a solid base in a geographical area of Cambridge which the other three lack is misleading. "Contact with the neighborhoods" must include contact with Mr. Day's own community of students and young people. One may doubt that students and the young will vote in the Nov. 2 elections--but why doubt that they are people who have as much right to be listened to as the order residents of this city? It is strange that young people like Mr. Day cannot think of themselves as real individuals with the same rights as their elders. And yet 54 per cent of the voting age population in Cambridge are between 18 and 34. Approximately 80 per cent of the 18-34 year olds do not live with relatives in Cambridge isee Census publication PC(V2)-23 (Revised)). Compare these figures with the 7 per cent of the voting age population that are black. Why shouldn't the 40 per cent that are the young who have not lived here all their lives also be a strong neighborhood? does it really matter that they live all over the central part of the city? Are you really closer to the person next door than to the people in your work and leisure affinity groups?

In a relative way. Phil Shaw may be remote from the ethnic neighborhoods but he is virtually the only candidate who is close to the wide-spread and numerically large neighborhood of the young. While Shaw has gone to North and East Cambridge, while he has walked up and down the streets of the Model Cities area, what contact have Sullivan. Danehy, Clinton, et al, had with the 40 per cent of the electorate who are young and newly arrived in this city? It is sad that Mr. Day feels that the politics of Cambridge belongs only to the life-long residents and the elderly. The young and the old, the newly arrived and the life-long resident all have a right to participate in the life of this city. John Brode (HBS)