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Mr. Ridley-Thomas with his host, Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh, West L.A. College president. Photos, Michelle Long-Coffee.
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Lulu Washington Theatre dancers entertain.
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Fine Arts Auditorium was packed.
On a grand Sunday afternoon, surrounded by an almost equal number of beaming family and thrilled friends in a crowded auditorium on the campus of West Los Angeles College, state Assembyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas (D-Culver City), in an elaborate community swearing-in ceremony, was launched into the political heavens almost two months after becoming the youngest member elected to the state Legislature.
Without equivocation, greatness, not mere success, was predicted.
Compared to JFK
Trailing echoes of the same supra-human New Generation promise that rocketed Jack Kennedy through Congress and into the White House a half century ago, Mr. Ridley-Thomas was hailed by at least 10 speakers as the leader of The New Political Generation, not merely a soldier in the millennial army. They cited two muscular reasons:
• His 28-year-old youthfulness, and
• His 28-year-old maturation level.
Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s verbal admirers – almost unanimously from his parents’ generation of persons in their 50s and 60s – wanted it two ways.
Because of his uncommonly early age, Los Angeles City Councilman Curren Price, his old Sacramento boss, Alan Rothenberg, ex-chair of the L. A. Chamber of Commerce, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, Maria Elena Durazo, CEO of the County Federation of Labor, and state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, who administered the oath, felt comfortable enough to singularly refer to the plainly marked Assemblyman by the cozy “Sebastian” instead of the more dignified “Mr. Ridley-Thomas.” No need to be stiff, formal, traditional and identify him as Mr. Ridley-Thomas, they reasoned.
The microphone never was allowed to cool. Everybody had a swing at the podium, it seemed, except God. He easily could have replaced possibly the worst mistress of ceremonies, one Carol Biondi, a children’s advocate. She was more unprepared for her duties than the chief driver of West L.A. College’s main snow plough. Besides resembling a raw recruit from a farming community, she butchered so many names she sounded like a member of the meatpackers’ local. Her radical mispronunciations were so hilarious people sitting next to each other turned and inquired, idly, “Are you here?”
Mr. Ridley-Thomas could have been pardoned for walking out of the Fine Arts building in stooped condition. So much political luggage (as in, “we are expecting you to do this for us”) was almost mindlessly loaded onto his substantive shoulders that he nearly resembled the letter “u.”
Labor Day
No one made the sui generis significance of Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s elevation in a special election last month plainer, or perhaps a heavier responsibility, than Ms. Durazo, who never has minced a syllable. Without blinking, she delivered the most overtly political partisan oration of the afternoon.
She placed Mr. Ridley-Thomas in an outer political galaxy, at the precise nexus of a generation change. She anointed him as the ordained leader of the New Generation who has achieved so much in the last five years, there is no doubt he will don the mantle of responsibility like a graying veteran.
“The old assumptions are no longer valid,” said the ordinary looking Ms. Durazo, arguably the most powerful member of her gender in Los Angeles, whereupon she leaped into the fire of her trademark Workers Are Victims shpiel. “That too many workers are destined to live in poverty because they never will make more than poverty pay even though they work hard at vital fulltime jobs in critical sections of our economy.
“Today we welcome Sebastian, a new generation of young leaders who are dedicated to creating decent jobs that pay a livable wage that honor the value of work and the dignity of all who labor,” which drew rousing applause, a fitting crown to the day.
