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Thursday, October 23,1975
University Daily Kansan
Bavh joins ho-hums
Birch Bayh has joined the exalted list of Democratic nominees for the presidency. Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.
Bayh entered the contest knowing that his formidable competition included such luminaries as Marvin Sharp, Floyd Benson and Johnny Carter.
The Democrats are suffering from an apparently chronic, and possibly fatal, malady known as too-many-cooks-and-no-chef.
Gerald Ford has certainly not been outstanding since taking over from the deposed Richard Nixon. Neither Ford nor Vice President Nelson Rockefeller is an elected official.
Despite recent reports on the rise of the nation's Gross National Product, the United States is still mired in economic quicksand and is sinking rapidly. Our largest city, New York, is on the verge of bankruptcy; the country is suffering from unemployment, inflation and crime.
Into this quagmire come nine faceless wonders, the Democratic hopefuls.
Most of the Democratic candidates are decent men; they have been involved in government in one way or another and have clean records. Their experience is strong in service, ego and power, as is usual with presidential nominees. None of them is
an absolutely baleal influence, with the
an absolute exception of George Wailace.
tample exception of George W. Clinton. However, none of them seems to possess the broad talents that an American president must have. National politics hasn't been their forte; foreign relations are foreign to most of them.
The result of all this is likely to be the re-election of Gerald Ford, assuming that Ronald Reagan doesn't get his chance to make our lives a continuing saga of Death Valley Days.
Harold Stassen would probably have beaten any of these Democratic candidates, if he had had the chance.
The Republicans don't deserve the opportunity to impose on us four more years of insensitive ineptness. The Democrats haven't offered us an acceptable candidate; they act as though either can't or won't deliver one to us.
We shouldn't want a savior to lead us out of our troubles. Such thinking is dangerous for workers and sociistic society; that leads to fascism. Besides, it isn't unrealistic.
But, isn't there anyone out there who knows what to do? The last thing we need is an unknowled and unqualified individual to uncommitted and uninvolved electorate.
Ward Harkavy Contributing Writer
"FELL DOWN THE STAIRS, TWO ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS BUMPED HIS HEAD, AUTO MOBILE WRECK--THANK-
GOD NOTHING ELSE CAN HAPPEN."
Mary McGrory
'Nonpolitical' efforts questioned
federally financed "citizen hearings" are a nonpolitical undertaking.
WASHINGTON - It's going to take a heap of talking to convince some people that Gerald Ford's newly announced.
Sen. William Proxmire. D-
Wis., see it as just another example of the President's daring and skill in avoiding the spending limitations imposed
Victim relates frustrations
Epileptics face discrimination
"Have I ever been discriminated against because I'm an epileptic?" My friend threw back his head and laughed aloud. "Why? Have you got a ear to listen?"
I indicated that I did have time and that yes, I was interested. He fixed two tall glasses of iceed tea, commenting that we would need a lot of tea to get us through a long, long story. We settled into comfortable chairs in his living room, and then my friend proceeded to tell his tale.
"I was about 14 years old when the accident happened," he said as he swirled the ice around in his glass. "There was a rather serious auto accident that was consequential for some time from a blow to mw head.
HE LAUGHED A DRY, mirthless laugh and ran his fingers through his hair—hair that covered a scar running up the side of his head and over the top of his skull. The scar was from neurosurgery that had finally given him control over his epileptic seizures.
"I had been planning to go to law school. I had no intention of going into business, although that's where I finally found myself. But after I started having epileptic seizures at 20 of the accident, I was in no shape to go on to any kind of graduate school."
"The first three seizees I ever had were grand mal seizees—the really big ones," he said, "but after that I only had smaller ones that were like being on a hallucinogenic trip, only scary because I was afraid of hurting myself or of going into a grand mal seizee. I could hide them, and so I went to work part time for a large corporation." He continued, "and three weeks later they offered me a place in their management training program. I was a red hot candidate!"
"THEY TOOK ME to all of their largest stores in the nation and made me a department manager in training, but I look over the whole department. They don't tell me what they are afraid of, didn't tell them because I was afraid of discrimination. So it was the same for me as for any other trainee—the old same pat on-the-back."
He shook his head as he remembered that time in his life, for it was during that time that the teacher told him to "be careful."
"I was having as many as 12 seizures a day, about eight on the job, and yet making it through
the week with no one knowing. I could engage in conversation if I had to during seizures, and I could handle activities such as buying or planning food for a child under 6 months associated with the seizures, so I wrote down everything I had done during each day, right after work. I wore I'd never be caught without the facts
"It WAS A TIME OF despair for me because I bought it I was really deteriorating, I cried a lot during its use."
Paula Jolly Contributing Writer
The only other thing that was good for me was drinking as an escape."
After being on the job for several years and having proved himself, my friend finally told his employers he was an epileptic. Later, he told them that he was going to take a leave of absence for neurosurgery that possibly would control the seizures.
"Their mouths really dropped open when I told them about the surgery," he said. "Afterwards, they wouldn't respond to me during the time before the surgery. I don't know if they were afraid of my epilepsy or didn't know how to handle it, or if I was something that should not be touched.
"SO I WENT IN TO the surgery, and I told the surgeon that I didn't want to live unless the surgery was successful. It wasn't being an anguished man that I couldn't accomplish the epileptic that I could not."
My friend said he was awake during most of the surgery. He felt the surgeons working, and they somehow brought back to consciousness memories that he had experienced as a child. Then they put him under anesthesia and removed a tissue that was causing most of the trouble.
He awoke from surgery not knowing who he was, although within seconds he knew who he was but couldn't recall his name. His very next impu- lence. he said, was to have a cigarette.
"I REGAINED ALL the business skills I had possessed before surgery—in fact, when I went back to work I think I was a much more useful individual than before," he said.
Yet when he returned to work, my flier! encountered a deluge of negative feedback unrelated to the store's products. He always came from the store's assistant manager who was, my friend said, like an executioner who was trying to eliminate him. In spite of success with sales and profits, the criticism continued, he
Finally another large store chain offered him a job. My friend turned it down, but he felt the job offer too good to pass up.
"I felt I didn't have to take the shit I was getting,
"I immediately demanded a raise," he recalled.
"They said no and that it was the end of my position at that store.
"I CALLED THE other company back to take their job, and they agreed. We had a contract with the doctor, but we had physical and filled out the health form honestly, the company physician said no. My seizures were under total control with little medication, but I wouldn't accept me. I was a bad insurance risk."
My friend pressured the company, and finally they gave him a job in one of their smallest stores. But they didn't put him into their management team. They just made it happen. They didn't give as much money as they had promised.
My friend relation how he then took three departments in the store from lessons to gams. Yet my friend had to go back and buy the
"All of a sudden, after I had been there for two months, the assistant manager came up to me and said he'd recommend that I resign," my friend said with a sour smile. "I said no and asked him about the reasons for his request. He wouldn't respond."
"I asked them to define lack of communication, but they wouldn't do it," he said. "I left the store and tried to contact the regional headquarters, but to no avail."
ONE WEEK LATER my friend was summoned into the manager's office, and there he was fired.
"I knew I had skills, but I wasna enough to believe that skill was something I could sell. But
no, I realize now that because I was an epileptic, I had no value to those people."
With his naivete they still intact, my friend went on the road for six months and contacted companies in three states for a job. Must gave ambiguous answers about hiring him, he said. One of them asked him to work but then cancelled it. As soon as he told them he was an enilptic, they would back off.
"I FELT AT THE END of that six months' journey not only extremely sensitive, but somewhat paranoid," he said softly, studying the back of his hand. "I felt there was no place of dignity in the social or economic system for me. I remember one time that I was encouraged to go through vocational rehabilitation. I was treated as a maimed and incompetent person.
"About this time I started having frequent fantasies of destroying people and objects associated with the companies that had rejected me," he said roughly. "I never got the point of planning or plottting, but it was definitely a thing—you destroyed me, now I destroy you."
After his six-month odyssey on the road, my friend finally decided his only option for a decent life was to go back to school. He made it through college and graduated with a profession in which he could work independently.
"BUT NOW," HE SAID, "since I've gained my docterate on top of brain damage and epilepsy, things have opened up for me. It's ironic that the doctors have stopped treating us, we have the resp-t亡ability of an advanced degree."
would still like to form a power base with other epiletics," he said, "so that we could be more open about epilipsy. I approach some epiletics I know, but to no vault. I don't know if they are being used." I see epiletics are going to come out into the open, just like gay people, and demand their rights.
"When epileptics and others with physical disabilities that can be hidden do come into the open, I know we have to face a new new set of challenges. Then, when many of our old ones, just by the act of coming out."
by the Federal Election Commission.
The Republicans apparently get the idea for citizen seminars from the Democrats, who have been holding issues conferences around the country—two so far and three more to come. They have been attended by several of their candidates and have attracted some attention.
The difference is that the Democrats, aided by the Americans for Democratic Action and some union and individual contributions, are paying their way. Gerald Ford, a passionate believer in free enterprise, is having the Commerce Department pick up the bill for what the official in Congress calls "the call to let people know the government is listening to them."
"The choice of those two subjects shows that this is hyper, super-political," says Proxmire.
COMMERCE DEPUTY UNDERSECRETARY John W. Eden, who has also heard Ford's vows to cut federal spending, says that the new "lean" budget of between $50,000 and $100,000. Field offices of the Commerce Department will be used for the hearings, and appropriate under-secretaries will be flown in to discuss two topics to be discussed: Regulatory reform and creation of new jobs.
Ford is against unemployment, of employment, and also emphatically on the record against regulatory agencies, which he believes are harrassing businessmen, as he says in all his "non-political" speeches.
WHAT MAKES IT hardest for Democrats and others tc
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Editor
Dennis Ellsworth
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believe that the hearings are "absolutely non-political" is the choice of the moderator, Edward D. Failor, a man with a strong corpus and often controversial partisan political activity.
Failor, a former police court judge in Dubuque, Iowa, began as a regional coordinator for Barry Goldwater, and managed campaigns for a wealthy and ambitious lowan who made three expensive tries for state office. After the lowan was elected to the Interparty Department as "shadow director" of the Bureau of Coal Mine Health and Safety, Failor found his way to the Nixon Committee and became a big operator in CREEP.
HE WAS IN CHARGE of the Attack Group, the operation directed by Charles W. Colson, which programmed disruptions of Democratic meetings and embarrassing encounters for Democratic candidates, and Democratic leaders of the karate-style politics practiced in the Nixon White House.
One of Failor's memoranda,
"Confidential-Eyes Only"
memoranda, addressed to Jeb
Magruder, was published in the
Watergate Committee hearings
record.
A TYPICAL LINE: "In addition to the items in the attached, we have personally enlisted some officers between Shriver and a busing opposition on the businease for today in Las Vegas. Ant-busing people will be used in this enlistment. Republicans will be surface."
Ford expressed his total disapproval of such dirty tricks in his recent press conference.
"Fallor is a really heavy guey," said an Iowa Democrat. "I'm surprised they dured him off, but I surprised him out front at him."
THE FEDERAL ELECTIONS Commission hasn't got around to looking into the nature of the "citizens" in the "citizens' election," expected to play all 50 states and run through election year.
The commissioners are too busy trying to unangle Candidate Ford from Republican Michigan and around the country together, no expense to the President Ford Committee so far. The President insists that he is going out as the shepherd of his campaign, and the expense charged against his candidate's budget.
EDEN SAYS HE didn't know of Failor's past when he took him on as moderator. He says it wouldn't have made any difference if he had known. He is "thrilled," he declares, with the moderator's "enthusiasm and hard work."
Proxmire, who once called Failor "a political hack," and tried to block his appointment to Department agency that has been eliminated, is going to look at the whole thing.
(c) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate Inc.