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Thursday, February 14, 1974
University Dally Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Bra-Burners Updated
It used to be that whenever a woman declared a preference for women's liberation, she was met with stares, glares and lots of laughter. She might as well have slicked her hair back into a butch and worn a sign saying, "Down with men!"
It wasn't that long ago that the typical women's liberationist was characterized as a bra-burning, sign-carrying, man-hating harridan. But the day of the radical women's liberationist, like the day of the political militant, is generally over.
There may still be a few picket lines here and there, but the real action is elsewhere. And fortunately the focus of publicity has switched from the extremists to their quieter sisters.
I am still little more than a fellow-traveler in the women's liberation movement, yet I think I can speak for today's typical young feminist. She is a woman unintimidated by society's outdated definition of woman solely as mother and sex mate. She admits to her ambitions and if they call for a college degree, she gets one. She is as willing to confront the challenges of the business and professional world as those of the kitchen.
Although she doesn't claim it as her own ideal, she doesn't disparage the still prevalent desire to remain exclusively at home.
She recognizes that ours is a two-sex society and it's going to stay that way, and that it's impossible desirable to eliminate sexuality.
She doesn't feel that competing in what is still very much a man's world will jeopardize her ability to enjoy herself, feel, enjoys considerably—being regarded and treated as a sex object, but not only as a sex object.
Most important, she is highly motivated toward accomplishment, meaningful activity and growing growth as a human being.
Although this "typical feminist" bears only faint resemblance to the sign-carriers and bra-burners who may call her Aunt Tom, she recognizes the importance of these women to the beginnings of the women's movement. Had it not been for the Susan B. Anthonys and the Gloria Steinems, there would perhaps be no spotlight at all to shine on the women's movement—a movement which involves more than half of the nation's human beings.
Bunny Miller
Burial Costs Resolved
The problem of high funeral expenses can be quickly and easily resolved. The problem, of course, is that in his hour of grief the mourner is obliged to tidy up his budget. The solution is that the financial yoke can be completely lifted—forever.
Burial around Lawrence is expensive but not out of hand. The county will pay the relatives of a once indigent, dead welfare recipient $500 toward funeral expenses. But from then on the money problem rares its grisly head.
The average person who dies in Kansas is just as lucky as the person who lives in Kansas. Life is not exorbitant here and death need no explanation. The average weeping and shivering relatives are charged only $732.
Someone in Baldwin recently died for $2,000, likely a rouged smash in a Johnny Carson outfit. A gathering of pink-cheeked local sophisticates must have relished the challenge. But as scarily camaraderie in his eye as musical fountains played the swan song of the local water company.
And Kansans are lucky because there is plenty of room for cemeteries throughout the state. If they are thin men, they are doubly
lucky, because fat women putrefy first. And consider this: in New York your relatives could pay as much as $5,000 for your funeral.
There, as on the West Coast—where cemetery space is also melting away—a little plot of at the end can cost a great deal.
Thus, cremation is the rage on both coasts. In new Orleans, there is also a vogue for the torch. Hardly has your grave-digger flung the first shoveful before gradual seepage becomes a problem. After two or three feet, the dead are absolutely at sea.
The local rates for cremation:
$550, give or take a few bucks.
Towing charge to the crematarium
1 Topeka $125; mandatory
minimum cash asset for the trip
$250; cremation itself=$100; urn
(bronze)=-$135.
The solution is obviously to bury the beloved on your own, and in Kansas this rash act is absolutely legal. You get a death certificate from a doctor. Then you get a burial permit from the city clerk. The bloody burrow out into the backyard, put him in a hole, and fill it in.
the paperwork and the labor is
very kickin' afterwards
you can
—Jerome Llovd
Biologist Foresees Age of Scarcity
World Must Balance Population and Resources
Irene L. Brown is a research fellow in population biology at Stanford University,
By IRENE L. BROWN
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Beverly Smith sits in a long line of cars at a gasoline station in California waiting to get her allotted five gallons. Half a way away in sub-Saharan Africa, Mr. and Mrs. Smith are about to leave waiting for their food allotment. The American woman and the African couple are equally frustrated, tired and afraid that they will not be before they get to the head of the line.
They and others in similar predicaments are getting a foretaste of what may be mankind's lot over the next 100 years—the death of the 900s. Elrich has called "the age of scarcity."
Of course, there have been localized shortages and famines throughout history. The present crisis, though, is worldwide. How it affects you personally depends on
what part of the world you live in. Mrs. Smith will survive if she doesn't get her five gallons of gas, but the Sulmins may not live if they don't get their food allotment.
The causes of both problems—the "energy crisis" in America and the failure of the monson rains in Africa for the fifth year—may seem transitory and in the case of the U.S. "Energy Crisis" even pheny. Not so. Both events were predictable. Finite sources of energy are needed, grown demand, and monosons, which shifted north in the 1920s, are quite likely to shift south in the 1970s. Examining events leading to the problems of Mrs. Smith and the Salman family discloses a mass of complications—rapidly expanding population with too many people using too much of the world's resources, and having an unfriendly environment. Attempts at solution usually are too little, too late, and often harmful.
The Smiths and the Sulmins are part of a
world population of approximately 3.9 billion. If you counted one person per second around the clock for the rest of your life, you could not count them all—and by that time their numbers would have tripled, on the basis of current projections. World population will double in 35 years at the 1973 growth rate. It took longer —45 years—for the world to double between 1927 and 1973, and in ancient times it took about 1,000 years.
Man long ago acquired the ability to increase (at least temporarily) the carrying capacity of his environment. Each new advance—stone tools, plows, railroads, medicine, public health—allowed an increase in population.
Increases in population were followed by new technologies, which allowed further increases, seemingly forgetting that there must come a time when carrying capacity cannot be increased anymore. The result: too many people.
^ OF COURSE, ON APRIL 30TH WELL HAVE TO TURN HIM LOOSE"
The Sulimans unfortunately live in an African area that is marginal for farming in its best years. In bad years they will always have to depend on food from elsewhere. Where? At present, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, worldwide wheat stocks are below 30 tons at the best level since 1952. In 1973 the United States sold much of its wheat crop to Russia, now it is considering buying some of it back. The Sulimans can no longer look to America for food in time of crisis.
For the year 2,000, the U.N. median estimate for world population is 6.5 billion. Since the earth cannot feed its present population, it seems unlikely that this population will ever be reached. The population growth will spread—perhaps even to the United States where food production will be greatly affected by the energy shortage.
If the Smith and the Sulimin children see the year 2,000, they probably will find themselves in a world of far fewer people. they will have witnessed nature's death and the population explosion—fammes probably accompany by plagues, ruts and wars.
Our problem today is not how to plan to feed twice the present population; it can't be done. The green revolution, now widely adopted in China, has taken time for 10 or 15 years while birth control programs were initiated. But of all the major countries that have attempted population control programs, only the United States and Canada are to be substantially reducing its birth rate.
Unprecedented problems require unprecedented solutions. Before, there always was a place to move on to, a confidence that the environment could withstand new technologies. Now there is no place to go and a fair certainty that conventional technologies are reaching their limits both in energy use and environmental disruption.
The alternative to vigorous worldwide action to balance population and resources may well be increasing hardships and suffering that will pave the way for authoritarian measures to allocate materials and energy, or make more attention to schemes for genetic engineering and education in the context of a less fitted. In such a climate, dictatorships—whether governmental or technological—could thrust. The years ahead are perilous for individuals, for human freedom, and for mankind itself.
Terminology Crisis Confronts U.S.
By LARRY PRIOR
The Los Angeles Times
In the 1850s, when the British began to worry about running out of coal, they talked about "the coal question."
In recent months, they have talked about the energy: challenge, condition, crisis, crunch, dilemma, emergency, foul-up, pinch, problem and shortage.
As Americans begin to worry about running out of energy, they find it difficult to be so reserved.
The common term is energy crisis, but it is often found with quotation marks around it, so that it can be avoided and disclaimed simultaneously.
The term crisis is usually preferred by those who see the necessity of some form of immediate action, such as striking environmental laws from the books or nationalizing the oil industry.
In this sense, they use the words as it comes from the ancient Greek crisis, meaning a sifting or judgment. The medical profession, starting with Hippocrates, borrowed the word and it was used to designate the change in a disease that spelled either recovery or death.
In layman's terms, crisis became the time when a decision had to be made whether to continue a course of action, modify it or stop it altogether.
The problem with attaching crisis to energy is that reputable analysts are unwilling to say that the country has reached the point where they can tell if it will recover or die.
To further confuse the picture, crisis is
often used in the context of short-term and long-term crisis, or even a succession of crises, such as in this appraisal by President Nixon last Nov. 7;
"While a resolution of the immediate crisis is our highest priority, we must also act now to prevent a recurrence of such a crisis in the future."
Some economists reserve the term crisis only for the type of economic chaos that brings a nation to its knees, which they see as a possibility in the United States by the 1980s unless things are done differently.
But some fundamental changes will have to be made now, according to these analysts, if we are to avoid the crisis of the 1980s, which means the long-term crisis is also an immediate crisis, although not to be confused with the "immediate" crisis of the Arab oil boycott.
The waters become further muddied by those who see the energy crisis as a fiction, because various elements of society have written their own scenarios.
Environmentalists see the crisis as an oil company fabrication, and conservatives see it as a result of incept government intervention into the market place.
People in the energy business see the crisis as a failure of nerve. A Continental Oil Co. executive recently gave a speech about how the country's coal reserves—of which his company holds a large hunk—are "readily mineable."
President Nixon used the same theme recently, still leaving doubt whether we are in a crisis: "We have an energy crisis," he said, "but there is no crisis of the American spirit."
Readers Respond
Mysterious Markings, Solicitation Discussed
To the Editor:
In the passage outside Wesco Room 3140 is a door behind which lie roofs about which I, being of the wrong gender, must profess to know nothing. This door has a considerable history. At the beginning of this semester it was marked "Women." Some of the women who deemed themselves such were, notably, many must have complained at his discrimination, for in the second week of the semester, this door bore the legend
"Women" and below this "Ladies."
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
At the other end of the passage is a door that appears to be undergoing a similar label-mutation. This second door was labeled "Men" at the beginning of the semester. It has now arrived at the "Men" and "Gentlemen" stage.
I assume that the ladies must have subsequently objected to whatever the women were doing in that room, for in the third week of the semester, the door now bears the sign "Ladies." Where now, I ask, are they? They were used them to be expelled from this room?
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4. C. Mo. Freshman
bursting from such action are too odious to contemplate. Friedrich Limbhoff
In order to maintain the status quo I strongly suggest that the “Men” among us, myself included, take great care to be on our best behavior whenever we do whatever we do in the room beyond this door, lest we have to make a fuss about prefer to be called “gentlemen,” and who probably possess the necessary influence to have our label removed. The consequences
Exaggerated Caper To the Editor
Apparently the law officials have become as bored as the freshmen in Oliver Hall. I'm referencing the incidents of alleged extortion at Olver in which a fat lady-finger and a face of an extortion note were found, and the police have had to have made it to the front desk in Olver alone the Kansas City Times, Wichita Eagle, and Douglas County Court.
Don't we all miss the days when student apathy was overwhelmed by demonstrations and marches? Excitement was everywhere, boredom was at its lowest and K.U. was on national television. So followed the calm attitude on campuses that still exists.
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Dan Reynolds
Dal Reynolds
Williamsport, Md. junior
Member Associated Collegiate Press
What's happened to the American language since the great simple prose of Jefferson or Lincoln? And how can it be restored? The National Conference of English Teachers has now appointed a "committee on double-spoken" to alert teachers and combat semantic distortions and corrupt language, and to combat "semantic distortions." One of its members is bringing out a book called "Llars in Public Places."
The Watergate hearings helped to draw attention to how mechanical and mendacious government language had become: Zigler with his "inspiratory" statements; Hill with his "humble" zero defect system; and the whole range of euphimms, from surreptitious entry (for burglary) to "currency increments" (for money). They all showed how words were used to evade moral responsibility, and they told everyone a dog in a machine.
It can't all be blamed on Nixon and the "Germans" in the White House. The worst culprit, from years back, has been the Pentagon, with its love of dehumanized
Officially Double-Speaking
At a recent lunch, I recorded not only such familiar Pentagonean as "targeting doctrine," "single-shot kill-probabilities" and the ubiquitous "capability," but also two other qualifications, "hypothetical" and "sizing"—which even the Pentagonean people complained of.
multiple nouns and indigestible prose. The present Secretary for Defense, James Schlesinger, although he is a sophisticated diplomat, amature theologian, one of the worst.
stifies campaigning, which in turn, stifles controversy, which often allows candidates to ride into office on waves of personal rather than on waves of issue consensus.
WASHINGTON—On top of the State of the Union message there ought really to be a report on the state of the language for, at a time when no one's sure what's really happening to America, the use of words gives some kind of clue.
Also, the rule is inconsistent and vague. You can solicit votes in the student's rooms if you either call and get permission, or if you are introduced by a common friend. The law may make a hair-splitter of a distinction, but it seems to me that these indirect means are no less solicitus than the direct means.
To the Editor:
Because the solicitation prohibition on student candidates has a detrimental effect on the vitality of the University and is outrageously vague, future residence hall contracts should allow direct solicitation for student elections.
University residence hall contracts prohibit soliciting of any kind in the upstairs halls. I believe that the solicitation prohibition is well warranted in many instances. Otherwise, we would all be overrun by Fuller Brush men.
Solicitation Needed
The Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor, but asks that letters be typewritten, double-spaced and no superscript. The letters are subject to editing and commentary according to space limitations and the editor's judgment, and must be signed. KU students must provide their name, year in school and hometown; faculty member's name and position; others must provide their names and address.
Steven Polard
I don't feel, however, that the solicitation rule should be applied to student election candidates.
First, we must realize that the Student Senate contributes a great deal to K.U. Then too, the better the senators the better the Senate.
Curtailment of senatorial solicitation
Prairie Village, sophomore
letters policy
Bv ANTHONY SAMPSON
The London Observer
Griff and the Unicorn
by Sokoloff