"The mentality of despair, apathy, passivity and the vulnerability to exploitation, harassment and manipulation will not automatically disappear because a vocational skill has been acquired. Indeed, reinforcement of those patterns may be the price which the customary donor-donee relationship exacts for the service or goods imparted. And this is perhaps the most serious cost of a service orientation: it neglects the poverty of the spirit in ministering to the needs of the flesh."

If we are to eliminate the sense of hopelessness, apathy and despair, which the poor must tolerate, we need to help them achieve a sense of dignity and a sense that they can control their destinies rather than being victims of circumstance. As the late Sen. Robert Kennedy stated:

"We have to begin asserting rights which the poor have always had in theory — but which they have never been able to assert in their own behalf. Unasserted, unknown, unavailable rights are no rights at all.

"I am not talking about persons who injure others out of selfish or evil motives. I am talking about the injuries which result simply from administrative convenience, injuries which may be done inadvertently by those endeavoring to help — teachers and social workers and urban planners."

We all have the right to challenge the decision of a government agency, but how many of us actually do?

The above are excerpts from "Bureaucracies and the Poor," a paper I gave to the American Civil Liberties Union at the Guadalupe Center in 1968.

As I reflected on those observations 36 years later, my first thought was that things don't change. And then, on second thought, maybe they do — and now affect all of us.

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Utah native John Florez has founded several Hispanic civil rights organizations, served on the staff of Sen. Orrin Hatch and on more than 45 state, local and volunteer boards. He also has been deputy assistant secretary of labor. E-mail: jdflorez@comcast.net