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Opinion
Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Ann Premer, Editor
Gerry Doyle, Managing editor
Angie Kuhn, Managing editor
Tom Eblen, General manager, news adviser
Jamie Holman, Business manager
Sara Cropper, Retail sales manager
Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser
Justin Knupp, Technology coordinator
Wednesday, February 17, 1999
4A
The Chicago Tribune
Editorials
Lottery yields fair, creative way to distribute spaces in new garage
The parking garage that will be built next to the Kansas Union will add more than 800 spaces of indoor parking for faculty, staff and students. The decision about who will be allowed to park in the coveted spaces should be made now.
The distribution of these new spaces should be different from other KU parking lots. Everyone should have an equal chance to use the new garage. Equality in parking needs to be the theme when it is time to sell the permits. This can be achieved through a parking-garage lottery.
The parking department has no plans now for distributing the new spaces. A lottery would allow faculty, staff and students who want to
Faculty, staff and students deserve an equal opportunity to use the 800 new spaces.
park in the garage an equal chance to win a spot.
Students could choose to be included in the lottery when filling out their options form at enrollment. Winners of the garage permits also would be able to park in other lots in their respective sections.
A few considerations must be taken before initiating a lottery. First, the parking department must determine the ratio of faculty and staff to students who park on campus so that a proportionate number of spaces fairly can be distributed.
Next, overflow from the parking garage must be limited so that those who win actually will enjoy their award. Because visitors have many parking options, the number of metered spaces should be limited.
Finally, those with student housing permits should not be allowed into the lottery, because they already have access to on- or near-campus parking.
A parking-garage lottery would be a fair and creative way to distribute the new, more convenient parking spaces. KU parking should consider implementing such a lottery and bringing equality to the daily parking struggle.
Katrina Hull for the editorial board
Local elections require student votes
Before voting for the city commission primary election culminates on March 2, all students registered to vote in Douglas County need to get out and vote.
Feb. 10 was the first day of advanced voting in this year's Lawrence City Commission elections. In past elections, especially city commission elections, student-voter turnout has been horrible. Only 12 percent of registered voters showed up last November to vote at the Allen Fieldhouse polling site. Turnout was so poor that the site will be closed by the county.
Students comprise the economic and social backbone of the Lawrence community. According to Tom Moore, Student Legislative Awareness Board campus director, students
Young voters can use advance voting option when voting for city commission candidates.
also are the most under-represented group in Lawrence. Student opinion carries less weight because elected officials know that students do not vote.
Many issues raised by the city commission this year have generated student interest. Early closing times for The Wheel Cafe and The Hawk, public transportation, bike lanes, Saferide funding and the citywide alcohol task force recommendations all directly affect the lives of students and are decided on by the Lawrence
city commission. If students want the commission to take their concerns about these issues seriously, then students need to vote in city commission elections.
It is easy to vote in Lawrence. There is no excuse for not voting. People who cannot make it to the polls March 2 should take advantage of the mail ballot or the advance voting option.
Students need to inform themselves about the candidates and vote. There are three ways for students to cast a ballot. Advanced voting is available weekdays at the county commissioners office in the courthouse. Absentee, or mail, ballots may be obtained by requesting them from the county commissioner. And polls will be open for the primary election on March 2.
Kansan staff
Timothy Burger for the editorial board
Ryan Koerner . . . . .
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Broaden your mind: Today's quote
"It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear." ---Francis Bacon
Letters: Should be double-spaced typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and hometown if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
How to submit letters and guest columns
All letters and guest columns should be submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Staufer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject all submissions.
For any questions, call Ryan Koerner or Jerome Doherty at 864-4924.
Guest columns: Should be double-
spaced typed with fewer than 700 words. The writer must be willing to be photographed for the column to run.
If you have general questions or comments,
e-mail the page staff (opinion@kansan.com)
or call 864-4924.
Perspective
Teen drinking demands discussion of penalties
America's attitude toward kids and alcohol is dead wrong. Most parents throw a fit if they smell booze in their kid's breath, and school boards consistently enforce zero-tolerance policies with regard to alcohol.
Robert K.
Funk
opinion @ kansan.com
Thanks to this "ostrich approach," we have serious problems with kids and alcohol in our society. It's time to reassess the situation.
Even when kids leave home, the mentality stays with them. You can sp them at the bar. They're the ones who drift way too much way too fast, then jump in their cars. There are reasons they turn out that way.
The legislatures contribute to the ostrh approach. Until youths turn 21, alcoh absolutely is forbidden to kids.
Even when they turn 18 and are consi ered adults for most purposes, they st can't have a beer. They go to college ar face all the trials and tribulations that with it, but they can't have a beer. They can get married and have children, but the can't have a beer. They can smoke cig rettes until their lungs turn black, but the can't have a beer. They can join the military and die in battle, but they can't have beer. They can be tried as adults and give the death sentence, but they can't have beer.
When you're a teenager, anytime a figure of authority tells you unconditionally that you can't do something, your first impulse often is to rush out and do it.
If really is ridiculous, and I like to thin that we're smarter than that. Whether parents drink, they have to talk with their kid about alcohol. Talking more the just saying, "Alcohol is bad — don't drink
When parents take an unyielding stance toward alcohol in the home, many kids turn their cars into taverns on wheels. It goes hand in hand with "dragging Main," that strange social ritual where kids drive up and down a certain street in town for hours at a time. If no one is around or the cops are being too vigilant, there are always the country roads. While there is less traffic in the country, many kids take this as a license to play Dukes of Hazzard, often with tragic results.
When consumed appropriately, alcohol can be a nice way to relax and a valuable social lubricant. Talk to children about dangers that they can relate to such doing stupid things that you later regret hangovers, weight gain, etc. Save the our right prohibition for drinking and driving. Make the kids pay for their own insurance and stipulate that if they get a DUI, the have to pay for it themselves. That's $500 front, plus a quadrupling of insurance for three years. Have people that the kid respect, people who have lost friends or family, relate their experiences to them.
The challenge is to make the risk see real to kids at an age when they think the are invincible.
It's time for parents to pull their heads or of the sand and start doing the tough, practical things that will save their kids' lives
The obvious, short-term costs of this approach are countless wrecks, kids in wheelchairs and kids in graves. The really sad thing is how quickly the lessons of our peers are forgotten.
A friend of mine was a pallbearer at the funeral of a mutual friend who had just died in an alcohol-related accident. Not long after, the pallbearer was involved in an alcohol-related accident and ended up in a halo brace. Not long after his accident, I went to see how he was doing. Still in the halo, he was drinking beer, and he asked if I wanted to go ride beer — true story. This wasn't a bad person. He was just a reflection of his environment.
There also are lingering problems for those who don't fall prey to the early hazards. When parents prohibit alcohol unconditionally, kids learn to see drinking as something of a rebellious challenge. They learn to find the strongest stuff available
and they learn to drink it quickly. Drinkin and driving is a part of this beginning a is later accepted as routine.
Funk is a Scott City graduate student in law and business.
Starving writers blame mothers for misfortune
I can't totally explain how I pulled this off, but I think my entire family doesn't want to speak with me on the phone anymore.
My sister's problem is kind of understandable. Through a simple accident of fate, I ended up getting to know her roommate pretty well during LeaderShape. Now I'm calling the room to talk to people other than my sister, and she doesn't really care for that. It's especially touchy when I call for her roommate, and my sister answers the phone. I try my best to make
NICK
Bartkoski
opinion@ kansan.com
conversation. It's not that hard because she is my sister, but when I finally ask to speak with her roommate, she says, in her most bile-laden voice, "I KNEW that was coming."
I take total responsibility for my mom's reluctance to talk to me. For one thing, I haven't been the most dutiful son in the world when it comes to calling home.
As a freshman, I'd call home sometimes hourly. Usually, without a good reason. I just was homeschied and petrified that this finally was the level at which my B.S. would help me no more. Right now, the level when that happens probably will be about 40 years after being a tenured professor.
Now, I call home bimonthly, if that. That, in and of itself, isn't the most heinous thing, but each and every conversation begins the exact same way — "Why didn't you do what you were supposed to do as a parent and crush my spirits?"
As I get ever closer to my graduation from college and therefore the end of my childhood, I get progressively more and more panicky. I'll have degrees in journalism and English. These are two of the most useless degrees from the University of Kansas, but I'm afraid that by saying that people will infer that there are degrees more useless.
So, rushing headlong toward begging in the streets and hanging my diplomas on the wall of my cardboard box, I try to figure out where it went wrong. Now, as any good American would, I refuse to take responsibility for my own actions, so instead I blame my mother. My reasoning isn't as
A
Mom's mostly right. Only the one thing want to do more than write and entertain not starve. The most effective way to not starve as a writer of my caliber is to total forgo writing and enter some facet of the sex industry.
totally off as you'd think.
So essentially our conversations go lil that. After blaming my life on her, I the ask for an update on the family member I'm most concerned about: Sparky the Wonder Cat. When we're done with that, we're fiished for the month. It's just a waitin' game for the next month's anxiety attar before calling home again.
See, if my mom had crushed my creative spirit when I was younger, like she should have, I wouldn't have this need to write a perform or do whatever other wack things. With no sense of art in my life, I easily could have moved into some field where they actually pay you for working, such as engineering. However, because my mo, encouraged my imagination and allows me to be creative, now I'm a journalism an English major who wants to be a writer he more likely will end up selling blood to bu dog food.
This system works out pretty well although I'd assume that Mom would rather hear about what a lovely time I'm having, the University, then tell me about som non-feline member of the family and the talk to me again in another week.
Now every time I talk to my mom, we an up getting into this argument. Mom takes in stride. Let's face it, she's dealt with m for 21 years, so by now she understands m patterns. She calmly listens to my ram and then says, "Well, Nicholas, if you real wanted to be an engineer, that's what you would have done, but instead you're learning more about what you enjoy."
Because of this, I assumed that Mom would prefer to go without the monthly argument. I didn't feel like complaining; so I didn't call. When Mom didn't get the call she actually e-mailed my sister to ask if had totally dropped off the face of the planet.
My sister took it in stride. She told Mo she couldn't prove I still was going to classes, but I was at least still living in m scholarship hall room. After all, I still was leaving the same phone number for her roommate to call me back.
Bartkoski is a Basehor senior in journalism and English.