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Tuesday, March 5. 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Vacations Burn Gas
The best way Americans can serve their country, aside from insisting upon accountability among politicians, will be to eliminate their car-powered vacations this summer.
Mr. and Mrs. America won't easily be convinced that it would be unpatriotic to load up Grandma and the kids in the family station wagon for the annual excursion to Yellowstone.
But migrant vacationers, no matter how harmless their overflowing Joad-like jalopies might appear, have been using precious fossil fuels at the rate of 130 million barrels a year.
Vacationing is by far the nation's biggest fuel-burning leisure activity. Next in line is general aviation, which burns 19 million barrels a year. A motion picture theaters are third with 17 million barrels.
If the energy shortage continues, fuel-consuming leisure activities will be the first to be curtailed. But deciding which activities to restrict and by how much is a complex and superficially deceiving dilemma.
One would think that auto racing, with all its gasoline-gulping monsters traveling in circles, would be the most wasteful activity and the most logical one to be cut back.
But auto racing uses less fuel than football games or horse racing. Although the players and horses don't use any fuel in him, they are always burnt until the people in the stands burn plenty of fuel getting there.
Promoters, participants and fans of auto racing are concerned that the visibility of its fuel burning will make it an easy scapegoat for politicians who want to pacify energy-conscious continuities
All the promoters of leisure activity are vulnerable to legislative restrictions if the fuel shortage continues. But if any activities are restricted, it should be limited in their consumption of energy. This would especially restrict car-powered vacations.
The fuel shortage has stimulated intense experimentation with hydrogen as an alternative source of fuel. Hydrogen is a clean-burning, virtually zero-potential to cause air pollution. It is vastly abundant and can be derived by separating oxygen and hydrogen in water.
One development that could eliminate all worries about fuel shortages and related government policies is the hydrogen as the fuel of the future.
A hydrogen-powered car has been built at UCLA. The car reflects some of the problems still to be corrected on hydrogen engines but nevertheless demonstrates that such an engine is feasible.
Development of an alternative fuel source like hydrogen is the only hope for continuation of American luxury and mobility. Our future vacations to Yellowstone depend on it.
Bill Gibson
A Capital Dilemma
It isn't too late to move the state capital.
Yes, the 113-year-old decision to center state government in Topeka can still be rectified. It seems a鞍山 capital has never been designated.
Designating a capital is the object of a concurrent resolution recently sent to the Kansas House by the Senate. If approved by two thirds of the House, the resolution will submit to the voters the question of whether to designate Topeka the permanent capital.
What city, then, should become the permanent capital? Wichita, which has always wanted to be a city with a mind, would be sure to put in a bid.
Such a vote would be an excellent opportunity for Kansans to take state government out of the hands of lobbyists and legislators in Topeka and give it back to the nation with bestasting documents of some city, with an atmosphere more healthy for enlightened government.
Kansas City is definitely out because, as everyone knows, Kansas City is ours. (Never miss the part that happens on the Kansas side of the river.)
Wichita first called itself the Cowboy Capital, then the Air Capital. When Boeing diminished and the aircraft industry fell on hard times, Wichita started billing itself the Clean Air Capital.
So how about Lawrence? What better place could there be for a state government than a university where the enlightenment would be blinding.
But then again, it might not be. After all, Lawrence seems to govern itself with slightly less ability than Topeka governs the state with. And University governance is, well, worse.
There are, of course, appealing places like Cawker City, Iola, Dodge City and Abilene—all solid Kansas towns. Their common drawback is that each is already known for something else and would be unlikely to want its image tarnished.
People already know Cawker City for its ball of twine, Iola for its emblem to Gen. Funston, Dodge city for Bendon, Abilene for the Eisenhower home.
That leaves equally qualified but lesser known places like Burdett. Burdett doesn't even have the distinction of having a feedlot (like Sturgeon), an alfalfa plant (west) or an alfalfa plant (like Rozei), down the road to the east).
But putting the state capital in a place like Burdett would doom KU. but there in the West, college towns in State or Fort Hays State. Period.
Anyway, Topeka might not be so bad. It is a bit more readily identified with Kansas than, say Pierce is with South Dakota. And we're already used to blaming Topeka for whatever goes wrong.
Choosing a state capital wouldn't be such an easy task after all. There would be serious drawbacks to almost any place. The founding of the city realized this when they failed to designate a permanent capital.
Still, why make the light permanent? We've had only 113 years to think it over, and it might come in handy some day to be able to point out that Topeka is only a temporary capital.
Bob Simison
Meditation:
Every Day, Every Way It's Getting Better
By MICHAEL KERNAN The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—Before breakfast and again before dinner, you sit down close, your eyes and let the mantra drift into your mind. Repeating this musical, meaningless melody, you walk away, come and go, like the sounds of traffic outside, while your head nods and your body relaxes. Sometimes during the 20 minutes, perhaps before you are even aware of it, your mind detaches itself from its work, a state of pure consciousness.
This is transcendental meditation, or TM, a life-enhancing practice as old as India which is becoming virtually a housekeeping tradition of the West by the Beatles' celebrate visit to its originator, Maharishi Maitesh Yogi, it should not be confused or even compared with the current national movement the hip and youth for Eastern religions.
Americans, hurling themselves at TM with their usual abandon, have helped organize it into a system that in eight years would be the new national meditating in the United States alone, with 16,000 newcomers each month. In 1966 there was one TM instructor in America; last year there were 3,400. Naught in 35 years had ever gained momentum like a chain reaction.
Just as Americans have attributed an incredible variety of benefits to a succession of fads embraced with desperate enthusiasm since Emile ('every day in every way . . .') Cone, so TM is credited with increasing intelligence, lowering body tensions and conquering addiction to liquor, tobacco and drums.
THERE IS A difference. Spread almost entirely by word of mouth and not by media ballyhoo, TM doesn't act like a fad, not at all. It's not the same as their claims with laboratory research.
So far, despite friendly articles in Scientific American, Science, the Lancet and the American Journal of Physiology among others, the scientific community has conducted more than 100 different tests of TM's various effects, from insomnia treatment and psychotherapy to criminal rehabilitation and alleviation of ulcers. Furthermore, already have reported on research in progress.
For example, Harvard cardiologist, Dr. Herbert Benson ran tests in 1971 on 36 meditative volunteers. During TM, he found the subjects' blood pressure went down, their heart rate, breathing and oxygen consumption dropped and their alpha
It was also noted that blood lactate levels, which are thought to be related to emotional stress, are higher in children.
brainwave patterns (indicative of a restful state) increased
IN ANOTHER PROJECT, Benson and physiologist Robert K. Wallace checked more than 1,800 mediators about their use in patients with cancer. TM, marijuana use dropped from 80 to 12 per cent while LSD use dropped from 40 to 3 per cent. New mediators are requested to abstain from pleasure drugs (though not all). We are beginning the four-day training course.
Benson now is attempting a more closely controlled study of the drug habits of some 10,000 high school students. He also has proposed further research in hearings before the House Select Committee on Crime. On record with the committee is Benson's paper, noting that not only did he injure juju and LSD use a focus interest in drugs but also a trafitting in hard drugs such as heroin, opium, morphine and cocaine decreased.
"Similar decreases were noted in the use of hard alcohol beverages and cigarette smoking," Benson added. "A high percentage of the individuals who did change their drinking habits after meditation was very, or extremely important in influencing them to change."
Top business magazines have been reporting in recent issues that executives are becoming more anxious and anxiety. Maj. Gen. Franklin Davis, the Army's personnel policy director, not only has been a mediator for three years but also is now on pioneer a TM program for its soldiers.
That's nothing. These days the conversation of every TM teacher is studded with the real-life experiences respectively the Students International Meditation Society, Maharishi International University and the Science of Creative Intelligence. Meditation has gone on for over a century.
BASED IN Santa Barbara, MU1 is a bona fide university with an MA program and a regular curriculum. What makes it different is the required course in creative intelligence, an examination of the very skills required for creative work; how they apparently are enhanced by TM
MIU appears to be one of the rare colleges that is attempting to deal with the educational revolution going on under our noses; its courses are being videotaped for showing in the 30 field offices MIU has in partnership with the Los Angeles area is being negotiated for, the first in what is planned as a global television system for education.
TM requires a flat fee ($35 for high school
students, $45 for college students, $75 for adults, $125 for couples) which entitles one to come back for monthly rechecking as long as one wants. The money supports the teachers, many of whom are full-time. Each mentor gets a mantra which he is asked about how they pick a mantra for an individual.
"if anything," commented Ian Brown, an "MU director," the movement gets stronger time. At first TM was mostly a college effort; then in 1970 Stanford University in 1970. But now adults in all walks of life are getting into it. The age of mediators is now 29 and rising.
Only about one meditator in four drops out, he added. While most people still compete
to TM because it has been recommended by friends, unsolicited publicity and group programs by business firms, among others, are spreading the word more rapidly.
"No special type of person works better with TM," Brown said. "You don't have to be an adept or anything, and you don't have to wait to get results. You notice the effects right away. The longer you do it, the more its effect accumulates."
The profound rest conferred by TM- greater than sleep or hypnosis—gives meditators new energy. "I used to get home earlier than now," I say, how if I meditate I'm good for the evening.
Another executive gave TM the greatest American赦al of aid: "It is becoming apparent that business cannot afford not to pay taxes." The cost of installing costing millions of dollars not to use it."
Readers Respond
To the Editor:
Liberal Education Needs Foreign Languages
Congratulations to Hal Ritter for his Feb. 25 editorial defending the foreign language requirement still in effect for B.A. candidates at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
It was particularly gratifying that he defended the requirement chiefly on the basis that learning a second language is considered part of a truly liberal education.
It was also heartening to realize that only 1,200 students voted for John Beisner to be student body president despite his campaign promise to take money away from the foreign language departments and give it to "more popular" departments.
Apparently this suggestion wasn't the vote-getter it might have been two or three years ago when immediate relevance be the only reason for studying anything.
Richard Paxson, Beisner's campaign manager, said in the Feb. 20 Kanan that other departments would favor abolition of the military, which they might benefit from higher enrollments.
I HOPE SUCH tactics would be abberated by others in the Student Senate and by faculty members. I also trust that the vast majority of faculty members in the College would also depore any further watering down of traditional degrees.
On the most practical level, Passon's choice of the history and political science departments as examples of those which might be persuaded to vote against the language requirement seems particularly unfortunate.
To be able to look at history only through the medium of one's native language can only contribute to the myopic nationalism that has been a leading cause of war.
Griff and the Unicorn
by Sokoloff
As for political science majors, those interested in international politics understand the value of studying a second, third or fourth language.
Students intending to enter the business world shouldn't scout at the advantages of learning another language. While in Germany several years ago, I met several U.S. businessmen living there. They were quick and efficient, much they wished they knew German better.
In these days of expanding international trade, job applicants with knowledge of a major foreign language have saleable skills.
BUT THE BEST REASON for acquiring such knowledge is that it can't help but build a strong base.
In the Feb. 18 issue of Time, Melvin Maddocks said that "each speech community expresses its sense of what its image is right and wrong" through its language."
What can be more important in creating a world of harmony (or detente) than to know what others consider ethical or acceptable behavior?
Instead they should try to hasten the day when Americans could use a unique German, French or Spanish expressions as easily as most Europeans—and no doubt some Asians—now use "teenager," "jeans" and "jazz."
If Beissner and Paxson really want to help their fellow students and their university prepare for the future, they should abandon it by trying to pit one department against another.
The attitude that others should learn English is the kind of cultural arrogance we often encounter.
As we have discovered during the fuel crisis, this is a more complicated and interdependent world than even the most knowledgeable of us realized.
More than ever before we need to "speak their language" if we expect to acquire the respect of those whom we want as friends and trading partners.
Assistant Instructor of German
Un Homme Cultive
To the Editor:
That Wes Barfoot (letter to the Editor, Feb. 28 Kansas) could reach the level of junior in a liberal arts school with such immature views about language requirements is as great a shame as the fact that the Student Body President was elected partly because he promised to abolish the requirement.
Learning a foreign language is one of the most practical tools that a liberal arts student uses to learn English.
Even if a student does not come out speaking fluently after a certain number of semesters, he has been using his brain to be able to read and write. He is trained his mind as a mathematician does.
With a foreign language as a tool, he can do more extensive research, which is very important to him. With his skills as a rule, very poor, be they in scientific or literary works, or in movies. Mistakes are likely to occur; besides, all the finer points of this book are often not possible to render into English.
forced to think, and to think logically, to express himself properly, to make grammatical and syntactical contrasts and comparisons, and to use his memory.
Also, when learning a foreign language, one is exposed to a foreign culture, literature, different values, lifestyles, ideas. This is the best way to broaden one's
Let's conclude our 'emotional appeal' call Barfot most likely would call it) by quoting Goethe: "He who is ignorant of foreign languages knows not his own."
horizon, especially if one combines it with traveling.
Agnes Strasser
New York graduate student
The primary goal of a liberal arts education is to produce "un homme cultive"—a cultured man, and learning foreign languages is definitely part of the process. That Barfot does not want to be required to learn something is his right; but be, Beissner and the like seem to use the term "human culture" in popularity among those who are not able or willing to live up to the standards of a humanities program.
Patrick Bruneau
Montamise, France graduate student
The Washington Post
By ANDY PORT
Talking Trash Can Is A Real Crock of Gonzo
GREENVALE, N.Y. - Arthur didn't mean to astonish the little coed when she poked him with her coffee cup. But at the moment of contact, a cascade of bellowing voices delivered a message that went something like this:
`THANK YOU . thank you . THANK
YOU . thank you . THANK YOU
habahabahabah . heheheheh . thank
you again . thank you again . COME
BACK REAL SOON.
The coed, slightly dumbstruck, whispered, "You're welcome," as she motioned for friends nearby to come over. So a crowd of students were poking Arthur and each time they poked, the same recital took place. More students arrived. Each took a turn poking the gracious garbage can.
"The ultimate in decadence"
Arthur is a prime example of the latest branch of environmental psychology after psychology and biology.
The ultimate in decadence.
"This is really sick."
Arthur endured the wiscreech stoicly. His battery-operated cassette tape player, concealed under the lid of a psychedelically decorated $18 trash can, could only say, " thank you," which is all that his inventors—Charles Hamad and Jeff Corey, who college him on the ground floor of C. W. Post College's student center —wanted him to say.
"Outrageous."
gonzo psychology—gonzo being
“anthing goes” way of viewing the world
anything good" way of viewing the world.
At 24, Harad, a candidate for a master's degree,
spent time in school just pretending the gonzo fold. His thesis, entitled "Thank You for Disposing of Your Trash," includes Arthur—"a device to positively motivate and reward" tidiness.
Together, the two behaviorists watched as an art student marveled over Arthur as “a wonderful piece of conceptual sculpture,” as a frightened junior lost his keys in Arthur's mouth and as a maintenance man swept up cigarette butts around Arthur.
"It's the kind of psychology that people can really use," said Corey.
"Yeah, it's a crock of gonzo," Hamad said.
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