KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WE ALL HAVE DREAMS, BUT WE MUST CONFRONT LIFE'S REALITIES

Upon taking office the first time in January 1993, I was reading one of the splendid, free monthly publications of Hillsdale College, the famously independent, tiny liberal arts college in the Michigan town of the same name. That month's issue of Imprimis ("In the first place") dealt with an academic's study of legislative bodies and the witnesses who appear before them. The gist of the research was this fascinating nugget: In a study of thousands of legislative hearings, federal and state, witnesses urging higher expenditures of taxpayer money outnumbered witnesses urging economy in government spending by the astounding margin of 129-1. The other portion of this story is that, by a lopsided margin, most of these witnesses are, in one form or another, already on the government payroll, appearing to testify on behalf of still more programs, still more spending, still more employees, more, more, more. Many are meritorious. Nearly all are hard to resist. The pressures, always to spend more, are OVERWHELMING.

Behold the beleaguered taxpayer, confronting the exponential growth of government. Four years in office has confirmed for me the truth of that academic's work. As with so much else worthwhile, that work was made available, free, to all readers of Imprimis, courtesy of a courageous little college that refuses to take federal money and has for decades fought a lonely battle to pursue truth while maintaining rigorous standards and its own freedom within a context of the Judeo-Christian heritage of ordered liberty under God. Looking for an unfashionable, politically incorrect, stand-against-the-grain liberal arts college for your youngster? You could do far, far worse than distinguished, little Hillsdale, one of the first colleges in America to accept women -- and blacks -- more than 135 years ago.

I thought of that issue of Imprimis last weekend as I picked up the Sunday edition of this newspaper to read of a local professor's proposal to spend the paltry sum of a mere $40-50 million on a performing arts center. How many readers must have choked on their morning coffee as they read Mark Bliss' fine and fact-filled job of reporting?

Would a performing arts center be a fine addition to Cape Girardeau? Would a professional baseball team? A planetarium? A zoo? How about a coast-to-coast, east-west superhighway passing through here and coming in at -- pick a number! -- $40 billion, $50 billion? Sure. All would be nice. Mark them down in the category of what the social-service advocates delicately call "unmet needs." My own list of unmet needs includes a house in Aspen, three weeks in Hawaii, a month-long grand tour of Europe and a Lamborghini. Dream on.

A performing arts center would assuredly be nice. Before advocates get much further, though, they might want to consider addressing the empty seats for most existing community musical and cultural events -- a lamentable condition, to be sure, but a fact nonetheless. (I grew up in a family of regular Community Concert-goers and vividly recall sitting in Academic Auditorium back in the 1960s, thrilling to a Brazilian-born conductor as he led the St. Louis Symphony.) And even if they do that, they will need to get in line behind worthy projects entirely shut out of the governor's fiscal year 1998 capital improvements budget, such as several million for a new, state-of-the-art polytech institute, or $12 million -- nearly what we got for the new Dempster Hall of Business -- for renovation of Academic Hall. We'll be literally years working on those two.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.