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Wednesdav, February 27, 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN commer Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
No Eulogy in Burial
"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their hones."
—Antony in "Julius Caesar"
Act III, Scene n William Shakespeare
The 1973-74 Student Senate met last week to bury itself and turn the reins of student government over to the newly-elected senators.
It is good that the senate met to bury itself and not to pat itself on the back. Had the senate praised its past actions instead of letting its noble deeds be entombed, it would have been embarrassed.
The only praiseworthy action the outgoing senate could rightfully claim was its silence and approval of the deeds of student body officers Mert Buckley and Nancy Archer.
Buckley can be credited with a $2 reduction of the student activity fee that each student must pay; a nearly self-sufficient campus bus system; and a reduction in the price of a single game student football ticket. Archer can be credited for not kowtowing to the threats of pressure groups during last spring's budget hearings and the organization of Higher Education Week in November.
During their administration, the malfunctioning Emporium
Bookstore died; the ill-conceived Associated Students of Kansas (ASK) proposal was defeated; and the inmates in the Senate Code were effected.
At first glance, these accomplishments don't appear to merit a grand eulogy. But when compared to the accomplishments of previous officers, taken in the context of a military opponent's and considering a silent senate, Buckley and Archer are indeed worthy of praise.
Previous student body officers turned deaf ears to student's complaints and suggestions, but Buckley listened to them by the hour. The uniform answer in the past to criticism or talk with the legislators about it the next time I'm in Topeka."
Buckley and Archer ran unopposed for their offices. As many student politicos will candidly admit, they seek office only because it looks good on their shirts. But the bench for Buckley and Archer to have done nothing, but instead they earned their salaries.
An oligarchy such as Caesar's or Buckley and Archer's is undesirable in a democratic form of government. But they did rise from the midst of fat, sleek-headed men to earn a decent burial.
Jeffrey Stinson
States Suffer Gas Pains
Motorists in Kansas and elsewhere in the nation may soon be confronted with another adverse effect of the energy crisis. This new phenomenon too little consumption of gasoline is due to too much consumption.
As gasoline sales have declined in response to rising fuel prices and consumer restraint, state revenues from gasoline taxes have also declined. The Missouri Highway Department has reported that gasoline sales are down 17 per cent compared to sales for Jan. 1973. This decline has depleted highway department funds used for the construction and maintenance of state roads.
Caught between rising costs and declining revenues, highway departments may not be able to provide adequate service for motorists.
The situation in Kansas isn't as bad, so far. Kansas officials reported that fuel tax receipts were up slightly over last year, but it is not clear whether the worsens in the coming months Kansas fuel tax receipts will drop.
The Missouri Highway Department is planning to ask for a one or two cent increase in the gasoline sales tax to cover increased costs. At first glance, this appears to be a good solution because an increase
in the gasoline tax would tax those who benefit most from highway maintenance and would discourage consumption by increasing prices.
In the long run, increasing the gasoline tax may not provide the solution. As the price of gasoline increases, consumption will be further discouraged and tax receipts will continue to decline. Although this might help the fuel shortage somewhat, the nation's highway system would suffer. The result would be a diminution of highway safety and comfort. In spite of the rising interest in railroads and other means of transportation, cars, trucks and buses, and the highways that carry them are of primary importance for the nation's transportation system.
An alternative source of financing highway maintenance and construction should be found. The Kansas Highway Department had requested that $27 million from automobile sales taxes be diverted to the highway fund. This proposal was defeated by the Kansas House. If fuel supplies increase, the highway department will depleted. At present, however, the legislature's failure to develop some alternative form of highway financing appears to be a major mistake. —John Bender
Heroin Hysteria Recalls '50s Scare
By PATRICK OWENS
NEW YORK—Is the current hysteria behind her as盗贼 and self-defeating the anticommunity hysteria of the 1990s? I've suspected as much for a while. Now comes a writer named Steve Kissel, who has criticized of American drug control policies.
Writing in the Progressive magazine, Slade does an excellent, if necessarily brief, job of supporting the following unorthodoxy:
1. Heroin is no kind of killer. A heroin addict left alone to peacefully to attend his addiction can lead a productive life as a useful member of society.
2. The outlawing of heroin and the scourging of those who use it have resulted in the vast social pathology which is seen as the heroin problem in the United States.
For example: "In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court characterized the adict as 'one of the walking dead.' The court's listing of the fearful symptoms which plague the addict is a piteous, contemptuous and unsupported view of addiction.
3. Opiates, including heroin, do not prompt criminal behavior. Their effect is, instead, soothing. it is the need to acquire an obsession of ostracism of addicts that leads to crime.
These are large claims. They are strongly supported.
"The recent, much-praised consumers' union report carefully traces the laborious efforts of a 1966 study in British Columbia which tried but failed to turn up scientific proof of assumed dangers of heroin. The researchers surveyed drug literature, contacted government agencies and queried addiction experts without success. This year's report, in part, helps confirm the 'amazing bland' effects of heroin on the mind and body.
"In an article a year ago in the Public interest magazine, James Q. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard and head of the President's National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse Prevention, admitted that no specific pathologies—serious illness or psychological breakdown known to benefit her use per se. Fifty years of scientific evidence support these myth-shattering conclusions."
What this all means is, of course, that junksies don't rob because they are crazy by nature.
Further: "The truth is that most addicts don't use heroin to obtain the superhigh we imagine, but to avoid withdrawal. Alfred Lindsemhus has identified the relief needs of withdrawal patients in a significant amount of incarcerated users." is the beginning user, who experiences the euphoria we hear so much about."
Does all this mean we can ship heroin into the cigar stores to compete with tobacco as a substitute? Yes, if you can.
that somon would, as a matter of fact, probably be preferable to the present harsh policy. It would also mean addiction for millions not now afflicted. No responsible student of the problem seems to have concluded that a heroin habit is a good thing to have. The point, instead, is that most people are almost everyone assumes, and represent American approaches to the problem have created a worse situation than imorning it would have.
My personal view, something of a departure from views expressed here in the book, is that I enjoy reading.
decriminalize heroin addition while seeking to limit heroin's availability.
The best approach might well be the one the British have long followed. They permit any physician to prescribe heroin to meet the needs of an addict.
So august an organ as the Journal of the American Medical Association has proclaimed the British system a failure, reported a big increase in addiction and reported the British on their way to a U.S. style repressive approach.
Slade quotes the British Medical Journal in a rebuttal demolishing such claims. Essentially, the British seem to have suffered an increase from a jure indictment that were 1,619 addicts known to the British government in 1972, down from 1,746 in 1968. (The figure for 1982 had been 112 but much fewer.) The British report from more stringent reporting requirements.
"LET THERE BE A LITTLE LIGHT"
Slade doesn't know precisely what program the United States should adopt. But, he says, "We cannot begin to consider carefully such details until we rid ourselves of the suffocating superstitions and fears that warp our thinking."
This is surely the central point and the urgent need. No one, at least no one responsible, is suggesting heroin be welcomed with open arms. But we must understand the problem if we are to deal with it intelligently.
The analogy to the anticommunism of the '50s is instructive here. The Soviet Union, like heirin, is hardly a blessing to the world community. It is at least as aggressive, as aggressive, and as blindly egocentric as the United States. It is also a lot more tyrannical.
Ignorance of the nature of the Soviet Union, and especially over-estimates of its potential for doing harm, prompted anticommunist responses that were both successful and counterproductive. Much the same pattern is visible in American responses to drug addiction.
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By STEPHEN S. ROSENFELD The Wexbiltion Post
Ethics' Role Hazy in Detente
WASHINGTON—Alexander Solzbentzyn's expulsion has brought to a head the diplomatically, politically and intellectually difficult issue of what role the promotion of moral or human values in the Soviet Union should play in U.S. foreign policy.
While many Americans expressed shock and outrage, President Nixon passed up making any statement of his own, and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger went on record only in response to reporters' questions.
Avoiding any specific comment on the writer, Kissinger said: "The only problem that we have seen here is the extent to which our human, moral and critical concern for Mr. Solzhenitsyn and people of similar convictions should affect the day-to-day
conduct of our foreign policy." The danger of nuclear war makes detente unavailable.
Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., whose intellectual vigor and presidential candidacy have made him Nigeron's chief interlocutor in foreign policy, fired back at Senator Sherrod Brown, who waffled. "Claiming that the administration had "narrowed its conception of detente to exclude issues of human rights," he said Kissinger had "posed a false choice betwixt faith with traditional values and keeping faith with traditional values, human decency and individual liberty."
In fact, the Nixon administration has cultivated a style of Rhetorical non-intervention in Soviet internal affairs. The Nixon administration's "domination" for the Baltic states, for instance, disappeared in 1973. The administration has urged and practiced "quiet diplomacy" to help Soviet Jews emigrate. The Soviets' enmity was calculated and characteristic.
Demos Exploit Nixon Issue
By LOU C'ANNON The Washington Post
“It’s Watergate but it’s more than Watergate,” says Terry Straub, field director for the Democratic National Committee. “You have Watergate but you also have the economy and the energy industry. It’s an oppressive national situation.”
WASHINGTON—The Democrats, acting more from a statistical perception than from a grand design, have devised a new strategy to combat the Republican districts. Put in its simplest form, this strategy is to run against Richard Nixon the way Democrats of another era ran against Herbert Hoover and to make his leadership of the nation the issue of every day.
The Democrats did not come easily to this conclusion, contrary to White House assertions about "lynch parties" forming up on Capitol Hill. During most of the 2016 presidential campaign congress resisted excessive partisanship less out of any spirit of generosity than out of the political conviction that it was better to allow Republicans to stew in the juice of their own national leadership, and Virginia, the Democratic candidate rejected advice to discuss the Watergate issue and won narrowly after a campaign largely confined to local issues. In Michigan, the democratic candidate was losing by a 2-1 margin when his polls in Ohio and Indiana had a heavily negative rating in most of the Watergate. He decided to make the President the issue and won the election.
Even carrying a county that had never before voted Republican.
Publicly, the Republican incumbents in the House admitted to deep concern over the Michigan result; privately, some of them were shattered. "We've got an impossible situation," said one veteran congressman, "because most of the hard-core loyalists are in our party and they're the people who do the preincinct work and pay We're going to lose them if we desert the President and lose everyone else if we don't."
"The key word in the Michigan election was not Watergate but Nixon," says John Martilla, architect of the Michigan upset. "Had we just relied on Watergate we would have lost. But the poll shows a genuine dissatisfaction with the way things are going. The people want to know who's in control of the economy and the energy shortage and we portrayed the Republican as a company man."
In the meantime, Republicans who are competing in special elections are pretty much on their own, and they are running them. But in other special election campaign in Michigan.
Should progress on human rights become, as Jackson insists, an explicit objective of detente? The administration warns that to go down the path is to risk undermining the basis for Soviet-American political ties and in a broad sense, its fears are legitimate.
It is indispensable, as Jackson himself concedes, that there is a limit to the amount of American intervention that Soviet leaders can afford. In contrast, the Russians probably believe they did Nixon a favor by just expelling Solzbentyn, rather than trying and imprisoning them. Were Nixon to read sorry, could well feel their 'good faith' had been abused.
"We're going to try to run independently without turning off the Nixon loyalists," says a Michigan Republican. "It won't be easy."
One administration rationale for this discreet approach is that—at least in respect to Soviet Jews, a special group with a powerful political ally in the American Jewish community—it has worked: about 80,000 Russian Jews have left since 1970.
Griff and the Unicorn
by Sokoloff
What neither the Nixons nor Jacksons among us can know, of course, is what if anything will bring about meaningful change inside Russia.
The trouble is that a sequence taken and evidified in a certain official Soviet-American context looks very different in the light of American public opinion and even hoped that detente would produce more Soviet political cooperation and more internal Soviet mellowing than have been so far. If those Americans had set their hopes too high, then their disappoint in business now are nonetheless very real.
This is why Jackson's full-throated protest on Solzhenitsyn suited the current mood so much better than the Nixon-Kissinger cough. Indeed, a strong case can be made that the Kremlin would have put down an uncluttered administration protest to the exigencies of American politics, and that such a statement would have given the administration more political criticism in activist settings with Moscow. As it is, Jackson now has a campaign issue. Support for detente is not so broad and assured as to relieve the President of concern for this admittedly nice political calculus.
Plucking a relatively few Jews out of the country is simple next to the problem of making the society the emigrants leave behind more open, more humane and more like our own. This is a fundamental problem which goes beyond the matter of whether we want to accept us or to our mutual feelings when the Russian government nues up its citizen's lives.
Russians themselves have been urging for centuries, usually in despair, over whether and how their country can be peacefully changed. The argument has been responded to with astonishment by Solzenitin who believes in head-on confrontation with the Kremlin, and the Medvedev brothers, who, being no less brave than Solzenitin, hold that those who would change Russia must proceed in a courageous and decisive fashion. The question does not lend itself to a neat answer and I think we have all got to go at it with care.
There are some skills that facilitate such awareness and help to establish the proper atmosphere for productive, open discussions. One skill is paraphrasing, restating what another person has said in one's own words. Paraphrasing implies a caring for what the other person has said and a mirroring of his thoughts. A useful lead-in to paraphrasing is, "I understand you said. . ."
Phil McKnight and Jerry Hutchison
Instructor's Response Can Help Discussion
If classroom discussions are to be useful, students must feel free to ask questions and to deliberate, and the instructor must provide appropriate feedback to students' responses and of his own reactions.
Another skill is behavior description, in which the instructor notes expressions and actions of his students. For example, a teacher can ask her students' student feelings by scanning the room for visual cues to such feelings. Video tape recordings made of student expressions support the notion that such expressions provide good reflections of a teacher's efficiencies.
Instructors also should tell students how they feel. Expressing feelings directly places one in a vulnerable position, but it also improves feelings of trust. Verbal expressions are less likely to be misunderstood; "I am angry," or "I feel unhappy," may be preferable to
saying nothing. "I feel that many of you are not prepared or interested; I had hoped for a more enthusiastic participation in this project; I have the feeling that some of you might be on your mind," are better than saying or implying, "This is an inferior class."
A final skill is perception checking. The teacher states his perceptions about the feelings of others. He interprets the students' feelings and internal processes rather than allows the student behavior. It is better to allow the student behavior after the teacher's perceptions. It softens criticism. For instance, "I get the impression that you are confused. Are you?" is preferable to "Why isn't this discussion getting anywhere?" The instructor's response is helpful and his attempt to react to them in a helpful way has been called responsiveness.
The ultimate hope is that increased involvement in dialogue may increase students' opportunities to understand and respond to learning problems.
Responsiveness should also generate complementary student behavior. As students perceive a teacher's willingness to listen and to respond appropriately to their needs, students should be more receptive and responsive to the teacher's contributions.