AS I WRITE THIS, my husband, the official BIggest Lakers Fan on Earth, is wearing a 2009 Lakers championship T-shirt and protesting noisily behind my head.

But I just have to say it. I don't care if media moguls finally bailed Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa out of his misguided promise to use $1 million in taxpayer dollars for the grand Lakers championship parade today. I don't care if the Lakers are paying for the other half of it.

I'm just in no mood right now for a $2 million parade to honor guys with $135-million contracts for five years of work. Not while we're poised to cut the heart out of our state. Not while Los Angeles Unified is laying off thousands of teachers. Not while we're proposing to dump health insurance for poor children, cut Medi-Cal, close adult day care centers, state parks and cut off college grants.

IT WAS JUST A WEEK AGO, that I was watching a very different kind of parade organized in Oxnard by the dynamic Roberto Juarez of Clinicas Camino del Real. The health care clinics, started in the very poorest part of Santa Paula in 1971, have grown in numbers to nine and serve as the primary medical provider for those who have nowhere else to turn.

"More than 3 million people will be losing their health care benefits," Juarez told the well-organized group of marchers as they walked through the streets of Oxnard behind a truck blaring music. "In just a few days, we will start to see a great deal of pain."

I have often wondered about how we find ourselves so happy to part with our money for entertainment purposes but not to help out those who have so little. Do we value what makes us forget our troubles more highly than rectifying the wrongs which cause them?

If anyone deserves a parade, it's the impassioned inner-city teachers in Los Angeles who just lost their jobs.

That's something I'd pay to see.