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University Daily Kansan, July 20, 1981
Opinion
Ramp is new handicap
*THE NEW TERM FOR handicapped individuals is "physically challenged," and certainly the library's new ramp for the handicapped will offer anyone in a wheelchair more challenge than they might want.
Without a motorized chair or someone to push them, it will be hard for physically challenged people to get their wheelchairs up that steep ramp or, for that matter, back down again.
Even with the black, iron railings, the trip down, with its steep incline and hairpin turn at the bottom, will be very difficult. This replica of a Worlds of Fun amusement ride is only wide enough to accommodate one wheelchair. Is it just assumed that there are so few students in wheelschairs that they will never meet each other coming and going to and from the library?
*JUST BECAUSE THE BLACK, metal sculpture at the intersection of Sunnyside Avenue and Sunflower Road looks like a hunk of old viaduct is no reason for people to start throwing trash around and under this objet d'art.
Of course, without any nameplate or plaque it is hard to be certain that the trash that is slowly accumulating around this eye-sore isn't part of the intended design.
Judith Galas Editor
*BICYCLISTS—EVEN your fancy, white, plastic helmets aren't going to protect you if you don't obey basic highway rules, such as staying in your lane or stopping at stop signs.
Very few bicyclists ever stop at the four-way campus stop signs. They just sort of coast through, ignoring the custom that drivers stop at four-way intersectiones and take turns crossing the street.
While on my moped, I stopped at a fourway intersection and proceeded to cross the street when a bicyclist, sans helmet, went zining through the intersection.
“It’s a stop, lady,” he yelled, as he whizzed past, obviously assuming that stop signs only apply to motorized vehicles.
They don't.
Racism, sexism still abound in U.S.
By ACHAL MEHRA Guest Editorialist
Sound ridiculous?
True is, civil rights in this country have become a prisoner of this structure.
The stereotypes of the 1960s have been replaced by the stereotypes of the 1980s.
The adage that a woman's place is in the home is replaced by a new cliche: A woman's place is in the home.
The "nigger" who stole through the back door
the "nigger" a new stenotype: the black who
steals my job
Take a walk into Watson Library and peer closely at the graffit on the bathroom walls and the ceiling.
the study tables
Amid the sexist remarks are racist epithets
"Someone stole my watch. Must have been a nigger," read one.
True is, civil rights were only achieved in statutes. never in attitudes.
In fact, there has actually been some backcelling.
Twenty-seven years after the historic desegregation judgment in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education was delivered by the Supreme Court, blacks and other minorities are still being recruited to ensure their proportionate rights. But they must through the back door, as detractors would say.
Yet, a vast chasm exists.
Take education, for instance. Minority enrollments in higher education still lags far behind the population of the people.
At the University of Kansas, minority enrollment is just 5.8 percent, against a national average of nearly 17 percent and a national minority population of 22 percent.
This despite special recruitment efforts. Back door entries, if you will.
Racism survives, not just in the bizarre environment of the United States; it surfaces every day among even suppressive左翼.
Subconciously, to most whites, notwithstanding their tempers to the contrary, they still prefer the difference but differ greatly.
Know how close that is to George Orwell's "Animal Farm?"
It is the same with women.
How else can a society that swears by the ERA also revel in sexist magazines that reduce women to a commodity, like those that feature nudity or even cleavage, in whose ads slosky moses are sandwiched?
I am not being prudish, but I do believe that the flesh magazines have contributed to the most glossed-over aspect of the new Hite report on male sexuality.
Asked what they admired most in a woman, almost all the mules replied in strictly archaic tones:
As Shere Hite, the author of the report, said,
"Men often sounded as if they owned women's
bodies, discussing their merits and demerits as
they might an auto's."
This month, one flesh magazine "for the
article," *On the Internet* and *The Best Fashion Benefit*
*For the Holiday Season*.
More bluntly, the article is a promotion of sexual harassment on the job—something that outraged women's groups are fighting to prevent.
But the smut peddlers no doubt endorse all that the women's rights movement stands for.
The unpalatable fact is that support for women's rights and for ERA by many men is support, not so much for the spirit of the act, but for sexual indulgence.
Hell, women have their sexual needs, too.
But there is something more disconcerting about the rights movement today.
In the '60s and '70s, many leaders of the movements were whites and males. Now minorities and women are pretty much waging their own battle.
The very fact that rights organizations exist, and are embraced largely by those who want those rights, shows that civil rights have a long way to go.
But true civil rights are not going to be achieved by having minority and women's organizations in every block and on every campus.
The new rights movements should challenge not the Senate or Congress, but the attitudes of people—not just of those who oppose, but those who support—for the wrong reasons.
Civil rights are not rights to have organizations, but of dispensing with them.
A day spent at local grain elevator gives chance for return to old haunt
The Pumpkin Center Farm's Union Grain Elevator is some place to spend one's day. My mom has spent most of her days there for the past 10 years. In an office surrounded by sacks of corn, she works in a Sail Spools and bottles of Range Cattle Spray, she patiently waits on her customers.
The other day she took me along to this place. I knew it well, having spent at least two hours
Judy Crawford
there every day after school while waiting for her to get off work. I didn't particularly treasure the experience of reading my high school chemistry book beside the pesticide rack. But if I got bored, I could always reach for a pamphlet on how to hworm hogs.
We pick up the mail at 7:30 a.m. at the Pumpkin Center Post Office and then head for the office in town, the grain elevator. After we walk in, the help begins to squeeze on the weather.
So, now I had the chance to return to my old haunt.
"I might rain." The ground is already too wet to farm, so today could be a slow day.
At the rest or the morning, Mom sorts out bills and I clean the bathroom, the floor and the counter. As I wipe the outside front windows, "Thud!" goes a piece of gravel on my ankle. I look up to see Uncle Dick poke his grinning face from behind his pickup truck. He doesn't know it yet but Aunt Helen's cat chow got put on his bill. Accidently, of course.
I am put to work marking $4.45 on all the Puramcin bottles. They begin to fall from the shelf while Mom Milah is waiting on a lady with poofed hair. Mom whimically says, "Can't believe it." Judy is Judy. The lady with poofed hair coolly glances back at me to say "I don't believe she does." Grrr.
Mom and I spend the afternoon sorting, preparing and mailing more than 200 bills to the elevator's customers. More than 200 times I see the motto on the back of the envelope: "Use COOP products—most farmers do." As I sit stamping and sealling beside the computer terminal, Mom comments, "One of the slowest days we've ever bad."
The elevator manager hurries in between trips on the feed truck to neighboring farms. He glances out the window, grumbles "My favorite personage and saunters out to wait on said personage."
The local pig farmer, a long-time buddy of mine, drops by. Mom gives him a run-down on what I'm doing now. "What I want to know is how she's doing with the boys!" Good grief.
An old man comes in and tells me of when he was a boy. The day after he decided to quit school, his dad set him to work chopping corn. He went to school when the school bus pulled up front. I was on "in."
One of the local farmers leans up against the counter to explain why a farmer is a farmer: "Somebody's got a do it. If a guy didn't like it, he would have something that gets in your blood—it's just there."
"You folks sell chicken feed?" questions a new customer. Mom writes down the order, lifts the window, and yells out to the help, "She wants a hundred鸡 chop!"
Maybe that's the way Mom feels about working at the grain elevator. Like a farmer, she probably prefers to do the job right by doing it alone. Especially if she has help like me.
Reagan's plans for Social Security changes carry potential for robbing future retirees
By DAVE LINDORFF New York Times Special Features
NEW YORK—I have to admit that I never was a Ronald Reagan fan. But after watching Jimmy Carter spend four years seeing if he could violate every campaign promise he made in 1976, I had to try to figure out a new example of veracity for an office that had been badly rocked for a decade and a half.
After all, I thought, it's not as if the campaigned promising us a land of milk-and-honey. He talked of everyone sacrificing a little now so that we could enjoy plenty later. But he also promised not to hurt people on Social Security—a believable pledge coming from a man of his age.
Now, at 32, I realize that I'm not supposed to be thinking about Social Security benefits, and in the age of "Me-ism", I know that politicians generally figure I shouldn't be overly concerned about old folks already receiving benefits. But they didn't count on one thing. I have just completed 40 quarters of work and had Social Security taxes deducted from 10 years of wages.
And for people my age, that is the minimum number of quarters required to guarantee eligibility for minimum benefits from the Social Security System. At least that's the way things stand right now
But President Reagan wants to change the way things stand. Although the first time around, his Social Security proposal was defeated, 9-6, in the Republican-controlled Senate, Reagan still intends to change the way things stand. He wants the benefits with which I have just been vested.
Specifically, he wants to reduce the amount of benefits available to me if I choose early retirement at age 62 from the current 85 percent of full benefits to only 55 percent. In effect, he's saying that I'll have to work an extra three years before I can consider retirement.
It's bad enough that he's asking Congress to change some minor aspects of current benefits. That's already going back on a campaign promise to the millions of elderly people who are unemployed, with no terms of the pension agreement under which he have surrendered thousands of dollars of badly
needed money since my first job as a stock boy in a rural grocery store when I was 16.
What kind of example is this new president setting for the people of this country?
If a private company tries to change the rules of a private pension plan to reduce benefits for vested workers, it would find the courts taking a hard line. It could be that the government really a kind of enforced long-term savings program. And the contributions of an employee and employer to such a plan, or to Social Security, are as much a part of an employee's contribution as the balance of his or her paycheck.
When the president reduces my income by raising my income taxes, he is requiring me to conform to the decision of a democratic majority. But when he changes the terms under which I have been contributing to my retirement program, he is plainly and simply robbing me.
That's something even President Carter didn't do, little as he cared for sticking to his word.
(Dave Lindorf is a writer who specializes in financial topics.)
Conservatives' commitment to freedom hollow
BY BURTON ZWIEBACH
New York Times Special Features
GLEN COVE, N.Y.—There is an unanticipated dividend for liberals in the conservatives' domestic program: further evidence, if more is provided, of the conservatives' commitment to freedom.
Clearly, we cannot pretend that conservatives are passionate protectors of the classical liberties of speech, conscience, expression and privacy. In nearly every battle fought over these issues in the last half century, conservatives have been on the other side. It is late in the day for those who attacked the Warren Court, supported Joseph R. McCarthy, unauthorized writings, mass arrests, coercion of the press and who now support the renewal of internal-security investigations, to pose as the hope of our constitution. This claim that conservatives has intruded into our lives, that we are being swallowed up in a sea of bureaucratic manipulation, reflects a concern not for freedom of the individual, but for something else."1
Consider the implications of the crusade for freedom markets and "family values." On the one hand, conservatives propose to grant corporations a substantial immunity from public control. We know that the policy will not result in the advancement of corporate virtue. But we are told that wealth and prosperity result from enlisting human greed, not human virtue.
The best explanation for this apparent
mismatch is that most showed we are
interested in order to guarantee our
satisfaction.
On the other hand, conservatives want to introduce serious controls on sexual and personal behavior by restricting abortions, requiring parental notification of teen-agers' abortions, eliminating sex education, etc. We know that this policy is particularly tragic ones and back-alley abortions. But here policy demands that we choose virtue and freedree.
Conservatives have not explained why the failure of public virtue is tolerable while the failure of private virtue is not. But no matter—the issue, remember, is freedom. The problem, therefore, is to understand the alchemy by which regulation of great quasi-public institutions is akin to despotism, while regulation of the most private and intimate aspects of a person's life is the stuff of liberty. We want to understand the arcure turn of mind that holds us wrong, namely that the public body of the corporation—whose decisions affect millions and who, for its own well-being, cheerfully sacrifices the millions' well-being—but right to enforce moral virtue on the private body of, say, a terrified teen-age girl, whose decisions affect no one more than herself.
Similarly, the conservative interest demands the regulation of morals, for social hierarchy thrives on the medicine of traditional morality. It is commitment to order and inequality; not a display of irrationality; and the apocalyptical visions of its moralists comprehensible.
not freedom, but social hierarchy and unequal power. The market economy appeals to conservatives not merely because it creates wealth for the rich, but because it reinforces the virtue that is, for conservatives, its own reward.
Conservatives' policies show that freedom is no more to them than a slogan. It is a useful slogan, although, characteristically, it has taken them some time to understand its utility. Nineteenth century conservatives feared liberty, as they abhorred democracy, because these institutions threatened to overturn the social apple cart. In this, they were only partly right: Without equality, democracy and liberty are tame affairs.
Twentieth century conservatives have seen this. They have learned that, because democracy is a public institution, democracy encased in an illiterary social system; because familiarity breeds indifference, the shock of witnessing poverty soon wears thin; because each man strives to be an island "entire of itself," providing a person with the opportunity to escape from social evil convinces him of the pointlessness of remedying it. To see in him a poignant philosophy, a melancholy apologetic and to make freedom a description of pretenses rather than of the activities of robust living souls.
But it is the robust character of our souls that matters, because it is that character that enables us to confront unjust power. The widespread development of that character is the rationale of both equality and freedom. Behind conservatives' criticism of "entitlements," the liberalism of deserving poor" lies a mentality that seeks to limit the spread of this character.
Why? Perhaps conservatives realize that its spread will entail a challenge to their hierarchical utopia. If that is the reason, it is least a recognition of a recognition of their fundamental moral roots.
(Burton Zwiebach, author of "Civility and Disobedience," teaches political theory at Queen's College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.)
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