Opinion
Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Ann Premer, Editor Jamie Holman, Business manager Gerry Doyle, Managing editor Sara Cropper, Retail sales manager Angie Kuhn, Managing editor Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser Tom Eblen, general manager, news advisor Justin Knupp, Technology coordinator
Tuesday, March 2, 1999.
Robert James Novak / KANSAN
Editorials
Closeness of campus blood drives hampers total number donating
A campus blood drive is a good thing, but scheduling two of them one week apart is foolish.
The Kansas University Athletics Corporation and the joint effort of the Association of University Residence Halls, All Scholarship Hall Council, the Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Association should not have scheduled their blood drives so close to each other. To qualify to donate blood, donors must wait eight weeks between donations. The rapid succession of the blood drives prevents students from being able to donate in both drives, reducing the amount of blood given.
Not only does the schedule prevent students from donating blood more than once a semester, it also causes competition between the two blood drives. Cindy
Eight-week waiting period should be observed by organizations sponsoring drives.
Schmiedler, recruitment and marketing specialist for Kansas Blood Services, said she did not see any competition between the two blood drives because she believes the campus was large enough to provide both drives with plenty of blood.
Erin Deusing, Panhellenic blood drive chairwoman, disagrees. The American Red Cross blood drive, which began yesterday and runs through Friday, is competing with Kansas State for total donations. Deusing said that the University would be able to beat Kansas
State if all efforts were combined.
KUAC and the four living-group associations should coordinate their schedules so that the blood drives are eight weeks apart. There are 16 weeks in a semester and two blood drives each semester. Lengthening the amount of time between blood drives is feasible and more reasonable than scheduling them back-to-back
Instead of making the same mistake next year, coordinators of the two drives should meet and discuss when their respective blood drives will take place and schedule them so that they do not conflict. The result of non-discordant blood drive schedules will increase the amount of blood donations and better the University's chances of defeating Kansas State.
Emily Hughey for the editorial board
College Assembly presence scarce
The fate of the debate concerning a diversity requirement in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences lies in the hands of members of the College Assembly, the governing body of the college. The more than 100 students and instructors who compose the assembly, however, have brought commitment into question.
After about 10 months of debate, members of the assembly who attended a Feb. 2 meeting agreed to resolve the issue by a mail ballot. Sally Frost-Mason, dean of the college, said all ballots should be returned by the end of March.
Overseeing the largest academic school at the University, the assembly's potential influence is great. Thousands of undergraduate and graduate students major in departments of the college.
CLAS should impose attendance policy for meetings.
Moreover, students who plan to enter the Schools of Journalism, Business and Social Welfare, among others, must first complete one to three years of study in the college.
Yet at the Feb. 2 meeting to debate the requirement — arguably the most controversial issue the assembly has handled recently — about 30 members of the assembly were absent.
such a vocal and publicized debate that is barely less than a year old. If all members of the assembly were responsible and dedicated enough to show up to that meeting, we would not be waiting.
Attendance at assembly meetings, Mason said, varies considerably. In November, for example, when the assembly approved a policy to grant minors in addition to majors, only 32 members were present.
Mason said voting by mail ballot would allow members to consider the vote thoroughly rather than rush to a vote at a meeting. But mailing ballots hardly makes a difference to the outcome of
Student senators, who have comparable obligations to work for a better University, are only allowed two unexcused and three excused absences each semester before they face suspension. A similar system should exist to keep the college's supposed representatives in check.
The generally poor record of participation by members of the assembly insults those whom they represent.
Kansan staff
Chris Borniger for the editorial board
Ryan Koerner ... Editorial
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Advertising managers
Broadon your mind: Today's quote
"Show me a person who has never made a mistake, and I'll show you somebody
who has never achieved much." —Joan Collins
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Jamie Patterson opinion@kansan.com
Perspective
Emotions, relationships, commitment and dare love - weddings
If you have general questions or comments,
e-mail the page staff (opinion@kansan.com)
or call 864-4924.
Wedding show advises anxious KU women
and dare I say weddings.
Some men truly are in the dark when it comes to certain things.
There are so many differences between men and women it would be ludicrous to name all of them in this column. So I will only name one. The Learning Channel's "A Wedding Story."
It's on at 2 p.m. everyday, two episodes of real couples, real lives, real weddings.
Thanks to this program I have had my wedding planned for as long as I can remember.
Sure, the grooms change depending on who I'm dating at the time. Which is fun,
Here's where I tell all the attached guys out there that your girl has somewhere, secretly done just this with your last name.
kinda like guess-your-last-name game. You know, Jamie Smith or Jamie Smith-Patterson, or Jamie Patterson-Smith, or Jamie Greene.
Scared, boys?
You will be after what I'm about to tell you.
Do not invite more than 700 people.
We're taking notes:
Do not have a Halloween theme and ask your guests to come in costume unless you have a family with a sense of humor.
If your new husband is telling all the guests he'll be "scoring" after they all leave, consider separate honeymoons.
■ Do not wear a strapless wedding gown. When you accidentally step on the front of your strapless dress, your you-know-whats may come tumbling out.
If your husband-to-be wants to hold a Civil War
re-enactment on your wedding day you should go ahead and shoot him and wave a flag.
If your husband-to-be gives you gardening gloves as a wedding present, run.
There are so many things we girls are learning from this show.
My sister will sometimes only watch the first few seconds of the show, when they flash the names of the couple on the screen. She has an amazing ability to tell by the names whether the show will be worth watching.
I have one friend who only watches to see what kind of bouquet the bride has. Another friend keeps track of how many sleeveless gowns vs. sleeved gowns there are.
We also now know, thanks to this show, what the grooms are really doing on the wedding day. While I'm in a salon agonizing about my hair and veil, I know that my groom will be out playing golf, or football with his buddies. Either that or he will be in bed recovering from his last night of freedom.
It may rain, the rings could get lost, possibly no guests will show, we may forget our vows, we may say the wrong name, but this show has prepared us. We've seen it all before.
My mom likes to predict which marriages will last and which couples are staying together long enough to keep the wedding gifts without any guilt.
Everyday at 2:00 I get a little lesson in life.
As I sit with my mom and sister, and girlfriends here at the University, we cry while we jot down that pea green isn't the most flattering color for attendants.
It's an addiction, really.
It's an addiction, really.
For as this addiction, fellas, don't worry
If it is any consolation, your girlfriend may have her wedding planned, but it doesn't necessarily include you.
As the attached men of the world struggle to accept marriage as inevitable, ladies, don't give up on them.
And guys, turn on the Learning Channel at 2:00 p.m., you could learn a little something.
Patterson is a Minneapolis junior in English.
Turkey's arrest of Ocalan shadowed by past wrongs
With the Feb. 16 capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, citizens of the world were faced once more with the bureaucracy of U.S. foreign policy and the Turkish
For those who are not familiar with the poor human rights record of Turkey, here is some information. Cyprus, the country I come from, is an island close to Turkey and an island suffering from the bullying of Turkey. They
Michael Hadjithomas
Guest columnist
hypocrisy of U.S. foreign pol government. The U.S. rushed to applaud Ocalan's capture, and the Turks celebrated the arrest of a "terrorist." First, an irony: Turkey calling Ocalan a "terrorist."
In 1974, Turkey, using American equipment and weapons, invaded Cyprus. Since then, Turkey has occupied 37 percent of Cyprus against all U.N. resolutions calling for the immediate withdrawal of all occupation forces.
Of course, Cyprus does not produce any petroleum — we produce potatoes. The United States was not as eager to enforce U.N. resolutions as it was to send thousands of troops to Kuwait in 1990.
Turkey's record has been the same throughout this century. In 1914, the Turks wiped out 300,000 Pontian Greeks. In 1915, 1.5 million out of a total of 2 million Armenians were killed by the Turks. This extermination was so "outstanding" that even Adolf Hitler referred to it when invading Poland in 1939.
The right of bullying is given to Turkey by the United States, which lets Turkey get away with these actions. The United States seems to consider Turkey to be its most important NATO ally after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
continually are invading Iraq to attack Iraqi-Kurds, claiming Greek islands and threatening neighboring countries, such as Syria, Greece and Cyprus.
Before sending thousands of Poles to their death, Hitler said, "Who today, remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" Hitler believed that no one would remember his crimes, and of course today everyone does. Today, however, no one remembers the extermination of the Armenians.
The Turkish government attempts to build a Turkey only for Turks. A statement made by the Turkish Minister of Justice — irony No. 2 — Mustafa Abdulhalik Bey in 1930 to the newspaper *Milayet* reflects this policy.
He said that "those who are not pure Turks have one right in this country: The right to be servants, the right to be slaves." This policy is still being carried out today, and this time the gun barrel is aiming at the Kurds. Today, Kurds are considered Turkish citizens, and their population is about 15 million. That is 20 percent of the Turkish population, yet they are not recognized as a minority. They are not allowed to have Kurdish schools, and they are not even called Kurds. They are called Mountain Turks. Not only that, but the Kurdish language is forbidden in Turkey.
The hypocrisy of the U.S. foreign policy comes into play in this situation. The United States rushes to provide safety for ethnic Albanians, ethnic Bosnians and Kuwaitis, and the only things they provide for the Kurdish issue are the equipment and weapons for Turkey.
I'll leave with another irony, published Feb. 18 by The Associated Press. It said that Turkish authorities "promised a fair trial, but refused to allow three of (Ocalan's) foreign attorneys into Turkey."
Getting back to Abdullah Ocalan, I feel sorry for him. I hope that, for his own sake, he will be sentenced to death so that he won't suffer. An indication of what Ocalan should expect can be found in photos that have been published in newspapers and on the Internet. Anyone can see Turkish soldiers proudly posing for photographs with the decapitated heads of Kurdish soldiers.
Turkish soldiers have posed for such photographs before, such as with the decapitated heads of Armenians at the start of the century. Well, at least the Turks are consistent, and they are finishing the century the way they started it.
These actions are the result of the United States being the only superpower in the world. The U.S. government interprets this as the right to violate international law and acts as it sees fit. This is why the United States is blind when it comes to Turkish atrocities and the violations of human rights.
And the show goes on.
Hadjithomas is Famagusta, Cyprus sophomore in genetics.
Turkey's record against free speech and other basic human rights speaks for itself. Anyone can go to a search engine on the World Wide Web, type "Turkey human rights" and find more than enough information about Turkey's "contribution" to civilization. They will find references to imprisonment, assassination and disappearances of politicians, intellectuals and journalists.
Feedback
CORRECTION
A letter on yesterday's Kansan Opinion Page by Wallace Johnson, professor of East Asian language and culture, was incorrectly edited.
the citation, "The claim that Heidegger's thinking is apolitical can not be taken seriously.
It tells us more about the limitations of those who make it than about Heildegger's views," by James Ward was omitted.
to the student body: "Whose side are you on?"
In his reply to the editorial board about the naming of the Heidegger Lecture Series, professor Johnson had intended to end his letter with a question
This final statement had been changed to read: "Whose side is the editorial board on?" The headline, "Professor questions board's loyalty," which was derived from this ending also was incorrect. The change in context was unintentional.