This month, as a new season begins at the Colorado Rockies ballpark in downtown Denver, junkies and winos on Larimer Street two blocks away are also celebrating the coming of spring. They have somehow survived the winter and will now once a month be able to celebrate "Christmas Day"-the day government checks arrive-by going on drinking or injecting sprees without concern about freezing to death.

Now that the major party presidential candidates are essentially picked, the question of minor parties is at the speculative forefront. The Republican Party cannot win without Christian conservatives, but Bob Dole excites little enthusiasm. It won't take much-a slight here, a typical Dole misstatement there-to send a crucial 10 percent of the electorate to a St. Patrick who promises to drive the snakes out of Washington.

His month the new york times and pat Buchanan-strange bedfellows-have shone spotlights on the dilemmas of workers displaced by economic change; this week's WORLD article (pages 18 and 19) illuminates another side of the story. But there's another war for jobs being waged not far from the Capitol in Washington, a war fought one soul at a time, and so far it has received little publicity.

The modern pro-life movement of the United States emerged in 1973 following the shock of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. The movement's political emphasis brought about quick success as concern about abortion contributed to formation of a Republican/"Reagan Democrat" coalition that captured the White House and the Senate in 1980.