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Tuesday, March 23, 1976
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN Comment
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
Black voting power
The March issue of Ebony magazine contains an article on "Why Blacks Don't Vote." The article places most of the blame on the fact that blacks are still discouraged and hindered from registering by whites. This disenfranchisement of blacks from the political process is a serious problem that should be answered in this election year.
THE PROBLEM of registration could be solved rather simply. Many states allow voter registration by mail, which makes the process more private and less imposing. An even better method is using a computer system that is automatic for all citizens. They can simply walk into the voting booth and mark their ballots.
If a person is a citizen of the United States he has the right to participate in the political process. Why should any more red tape be involved? Many people say that if a person isn't interested enough to register he probably won't vote. How many of those who vote in this year's election will actually be informed? If a person is interested enough to go to a polling place, he has the right to vote.
HOWEVER, THE problem goes much deeper than voter registration. Why was an amendment needed to give blacks the vote in the first place? After they were considered citizens of the United States the right should have automatically been theirs. Blacks have always been outside the mainstream of American political thought. If they are going to progress much further they're going to have to enter that stream headfirst.
After some short-lived political success immediately following the Civil War, radicals began to criticize political arenas until the era of activism began with sit-ins, freedom rides and
mass marches in the early '80s. This show of strength was important in making the plight of the blacks known, but it involved the politics of conflict. Blacks were considered adversaries and not political opponents. As the movement has matured the emphasis shifted to electing individual blacks to office. Many blacks are now heading to a more adversary approach and will never result in lasting change. Blacks must not work to elect only blacks, they must work to elect those who best represent their interests.
REGARDLESS OF how this change is accomplished, it must be on every level. Blacks must feel that they can achieve their goals by becoming a working part of society. They can't score many points when they're sitting on the bench.
The movement must be universal. Here at KU the situation may be even worse than on the national level. In the African Studies classes, which are supposed to bridge the gaps between the races, there is generally a gap between the area where blacks sit and where whites sit. This gap is evident at any University event, Seldom is a member of the student senate black. It's very rare that a black even runs for office. Black organizations flourish, but cloak themselves in secrecy when a white gets too close.
This is supposed to be a progressive University and a country that promises freedom to all. But when a large segment of the population feels that it can't pursue its objectives through the university, better re-examine itself. Here at KKU, the institution, the senate and the students should look for means by which the black student can become more a part of the University.
By John Johnston
Contributing Writer
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"There needs to be some type of law to protect the farmer," concluded McNeil, a man who twice voted for former Governor Dan Mulkey but who's decided that Republican forms of free enterprise are in danger of putting him to work on an urban assembly line.
AND UNLESS we start to have a care, it may be American agriculture that gets eliminated, or at least that segment of it represented by farmers in the men in the Peccos Valley. Since the end of the New Deal-type agricultural programs, they
McNeil and four other local farmers had gathered to talk about the situation in the offices of their cooperatively owned business, where the room, the price rise translated into an increase of $60 more an acre to grow cotton or bankruptcy for many of them, and an end of the mill, as its manager Bob Bickley pointed out.
PECOS, Tex.—There may be no law west of the river from which this little town derives its name, but the major operative
New gas prices blackmail
© 1976 NYT SPECIAL FEATURES
have been caught in a destructive bust-bust market wherein the government aggravates the situation by
By Nicholas von Hoffman
(C) Kim Foyures
fact is that there is no water west of the Pecos, or east of it or in it. Like the maue mountains of rock and cactus you have to drive through to get here, the Pecos Valley is flat, dry brush-covered heeweed country. Average annual rainfall 10 to 13 inches.
"IF THEY DEREGULATE gas, this sort of thing is gonna be everybody's problem," says Jimmy McNeil, one of the farmers affected. He's right, for what's happening here can have significant effects of abrupt deregulation (the Action by Delhi, however, results from the expiration of an old contract to sell gas at a fixed price. Natural gas for agricultural uses isn't regulated Texas has the economic effect Debt cuts make same as sudden deregulation.
YET 25 YEARS AGO, men came here and, amid the heat, the forsaken ecology and the Mexicans, put 100,000 acres into cultivation: cotton, barley, alfalfa, onions and cantaloupes. They were able to do it because there is a wet ocean of water 400 miles out to sea that irrigates the land you need only pump the water up to the surface, which the farmers did using natural gas as a fuel.
Until the end of last year they paid between 34 and 40 cents per thousand cubic feet of gas to get the water pumped up above ground. Then their contract with the Delhi Gas Pipeline Corp. ran out. The company told them that from now on the price would be $8.55 per cubic foot, a 450 per cent cubic feet, a 450 per cent increase. If an Arab did the same thing it would be called blackmail.
giving them no price floor but a de facto price ceiling.
way to know if you're going to sell cotton at 40 cents or one dollar."
"We probably made more in Nixon's first term," explains Jimmy McNeill, "but we probably lost more than we ever have in our lives in his second term. Under the Democrats we probably didn't make as much but it was stable. There now there's
IN THE PAST farmers have been known to call for help against imaginary wolves. They've also been able to catch predators, and couldn't pass along by unheard of increases in productivity—increases not duplicated by any other American industry—but there comes a limit to that. David Hess, who farms about 10,000 acres, said: "Yes, some of us do have Cadillacs; they're old models."
A law's about the only thing that will help McNeil. The farmers are contemplating a suit against the gas company, but they're not sanguine about their chances. Anyway, many of them will be foreclosed on and gone by the time the courts rule
in their favor if they ever do,
in the pumps of the dumps to another power source would run them eight or nine thousand dollars a well, a very large sum since the farms probably wells. Even so, other fuel sources. Even so, almost as costly and, besides, the bank isn't going to lend them the money.
"I don't see anything short of a miracle that can save the farmers," says Archie Scott, the chairman of the board of Pecos' Security State Bank, and he ought to know.
THE FARMERS are rather admirably ambivalent about the gas company. They know that under other long-term contracts, such as they had enjoyed until this year, Delhi is buying some gas at a more 16 cents per thousand cubic feet,
but they also say that the company is having to pay as much as two dollars for some new gas. They're reluctant to say that Delhi should be subject to price control. What they want is that the prices for their products so they could pay Delhi the new rate.
Unfortunately for the farmers, that's not possible because the prices they can get for their products are under a due facto government control. The farmers' barges and relaxation of import on foreign agriculture, the government has kept the prices of many commodities down, thereby putting the farmers in a more economic bind. Such is the perils of partial price decution. Some people profit and a lot of other people get wiped out.
Remember the hippies? No one knew for sure just what a hipple was, but it was abundantly clear to a good number of people that such a pejorative could never be applied to them.
TODAY THE vagueness of the term has finally forced it out of popular usage. No one is likely to be called a hippie who well defined category for which the term "hippie" refers.
Remember the hippies? They've been assimilated
If one lists the characteristics commonly assigned to hippies in, say, the mid-1960s, it becomes apparent that those groups are defined by diffused over diverse groups in vast segments of the populace.
SMOKING MARIJUANA,
wearing old clothes, thinking
the Vietnam War was a moral
and political disaster, being
concerned about ecology and
human rights, in casual sex are diverse
activities no longer linked to any
demographic group.
The impact of the hippies and what was called the counterculture has had a pervasive effect on society. Consider the changes that have taken place since the early 1960s. In those days, women were dressed, lipstick and hair were made so their hair on top of their heads and glued it in place with hair spray. Dress among men was uniform. There were few places that did not go without a coat and tie.
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION was in its heyday and planned obsolescence wasn't viewed with distaste. Consumerism was virtually unheard of. Pollution was virtually unchecked, and the best way to reduce pollution the day was how to increase the gross national product the fastest.
The hippies offered a radical critique of many of the presumptions of that society.
They wore functional clothes, experimented with altered states of consciousness, didn't care about making a great deal
disappeared, it didn't go away because its ideas and foundations had finally been dissolved and refuted. Rather,
By John Hickey Contributing Writer
THEY ALSO HAD some different political ideas. They didn't like big business or big government or defense spending or the war in Southeast Asia. They said the army, the military, spying on them. A lot of them, also they were ex-hippies by then, campaigned for George McGovern in 1972.
of money and learned how to make things with their hands.
When the counterculture
THE COUNTERCULTURE met the regular culture halfway on a lot of things, and when the two groups joined, there was considerable diversity in the resulting new group. Then too,
the main culture had absorbed so many of them that the hippies were no longer distinguishable from the rest of the citizenry. Of course, it wasn't a simple case of right vs. wrong as an absolute turnabout by the mainstream of American society.
the hippies weren't right about everything nor were they recalcitrant in resisting change. They had their share of non-friends, and they had '60s rock and fad slang, for example. Fortunately, most of us today don't really like dig and rock, but all of the dudes in Big Brother and the Holding Company. Nor do many people spend all their time wandering around with a friend who isn't sure "where we're at."
But the most beneficial changes the hippies caused are the least noticed ones. The *hippie* movement is a functional clothes, the phenomenon of groups of men and women going out together without pairing into 'couples' or 'groups', with larger degree of political and social dissidence are all important aspects of what has been enlightened society through its encounter with the hippies.
*PARSON ME, NEIGHBOR, I WAS JUST CELEBRATING THE SCREWING OF THE GUN CONTROL DLL.*