Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, April 15, 1981
And in come the taxes
The wording was simple enough: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
Simple, but obviously effective. Those words—collectively the 16th Amendment to the Constitution—are what make today so unpleasant for many Americans. A modern-day soothsayer might well lament, "Beware the idees of April."
Income taxes have become such an integral part of America that disgruntled taxpayers, licking the flap on the envelope at 11:58 tonight, might want the 16th Amendment updated slightly:
"The IRS shall have the power to humiliate you annually, to subject you to incomprehensible gibberish called 1040, to put you up against highway robbery and to remind you that you are subservient to
your government, without regard to your senses or hardship."
But then, maybe it's not quite as bad as all that. Uncle Sam takes a big bite out of the American wage, but those who wait until the last minute can't really complain about taxation without representation, not in the most representative government in the world. Still, it's painful to write checks to the IRS.
The 16th Amendment was an important step in American history toward the dissolution of absolute economic class barriers. The next step, which the nation apparently isn't yet prepared to take, would be a system of truly progressive income taxes, with the revenue raised to be used to create better job opportunities for the low-paid and unemployed—as well as solving numerous other problems.
There's the perennial cry today for the abolition of income taxes. But income taxes don't need to be abolished; they just need to be fine-tuned.
One short, sweet flight
Braking from orbit over the Indian Ocean and hitting the atmosphere somewhere above the Pacific, Columbia
Like the first plucky swallow returning to Capistrano, the space shuttle Columbia swooped down out of the blue California sky yesterday and made a flawless pinpoint landing at Edwards Air Force Base. The welcome Columbia and her two astronaut pilots received was a flashback to the fanfare accorded the Spirit of St. Louis upon its landing in Paris so many years ago.
Launched like a rocket on Sunday and acting as a spacecraft for over two days, Columbia flew in like a glider to mark the re-entry of America into manned space flight. Columbia's 54-hour adventure was a tale of two men with the right stuff flying a spaceship with the right stuff and capturing the fancy of a nation, also with the right stuff.
dispelled concerns about its heat-shield tiles when a voice radioed from the cockpit to the ground exclaimed: "What a way to come to California!"
With the shuttle's return came the close of the era of one-mission spacecraft; reusable space vehicles are now practical fact, not far-off science fiction. Why, replace a few tiles, clean up a bit here and there and Columbia will be ready for her next flight, probably in September.
Ironically, despite the nation's jubilation surrounding the flight, the whole purpose of the shuttle program is not to capture national headlines; a couple of years from now, shuttle landings probably will be so routine that they won't even make the back pages of the papers, any more than do freighters that come steaming into harbors. When the day comes that it's unusual not to have Americans in space, the shuttle will have its goal: the true opening of man's future in space.
It's little things, not the big, that make life difficult at KU
It was not prepared for the realities of college life and we good study habits and I advice about drugs and sex.
No one warned me about the little things that really count. No one told me I was going to spend my life dealing with senseless rules and petty laziness in the interest of getting a higher education
There's enough idyess at the University to choke a chancellor. A few days ago, for example, people from the state came to Sellards Hall, where I live, and started labeling all the items in our hall that they had marked on some mysterious list of theirs.
Our headphones now have little white piece of paper taped on them that identifies them as audio devices.
Our orange beanbag chair has a piece of tape informing us that it is an orange beanbag chair. Our pots and pans, most of them battered and carrying unremovable charred remnants of long-forgotten casseroles, are labeled as pots and pans.
I am puzzled. I know I shouldn't be. After all, this is the same logical state that bans drinking on Sunday as sacrilege. But try as I may, I still can find no reason for the labels.
Does someone out there think we are all stockplilling stolen orange beanbags and 50-year-old pots and pans? Anyone who would steal those things deserves to own them. In any case, how would a piece of tape deter a thief who was determined to own her own hot beanbag?
God knows, the puzzlement never stops at this University. There are questions I have that no one has ever been able to answer, such as who put the tiers in front of Fraser Hall?
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The tites are dangerous enough in summer, but in winter when they have a little snow on them they turn into shiny deranged killers who try to unsuspecting people down and break their arms.
My roommate swears Fraser tried to kill her once by dropping a huge blob of snow on her from
JANE NEUFELD
its roof, and I have seen the building try to decapitate victims by snapping its doors shut on them when they weren't looking. I suspect that these people are in any case be approached with extreme caution.
Extreme caution is also a good way to approach college fun and games. Administrators, I have concluded, don't like the thought of their students doing anything that smacks of levity.
These administrators turned off our fountain after the scholarship halls threw particularly hard on them, and many participants had to leave.
I am convinced that a ceramic person long ago instituted a policy at Sellards that prevents us from smoking and drinking at the same time in any public area in the hall. You see, the only public place to smoke is the entryway, and beer is prohibited in the entryway.
It was true that Martin Luther King Sr. was in the guest house near the fountain, and the armed security guards outside seemed somewhat tense for a few moments, but eventually they relaxed.
Occasionally I suspect that among the human administrators a few androids are scattered, who are not programmed to deal with water or mud. What lists that aren't where they're supposed to be?
We were obviously engaged in an atavistic fertility ritual and had no intention of harming anyone. Nonetheless, the fountain was off for a long time.
Perhaps the rule is intended to save the carpet, but then again ice tea and orange juice and Pepsi and Clorox are permitted. No, I have concluded the policy was invented by an android didn’t want visitors, parents and alumn to ever brilliant idea that the women of Selkirls would build a house.
Three years of this kind of logic has taken me from my first innocent questions, "Why is there August and Mount Oread?" to a more simple but all-encompassing, "What?"
Some lucky person could make a fortune by publishing a book that answered the questions about senseless rules, dangerous campus grounds, treacherous fun and games and especially android administrators. I'd do it myself, but I'm going to be busy for a while ripping tags off items in Sellards and altering the numbers on them.
Senior apprehensions overblown
Of course, he had been partying all evening. So when this young man, who happened to be a college senior, converted his plaid overnight bag into baggies at 5 a.m. one Saturday, it somehow seemed acceptable, and it sent his girlfriend on a hike. He mentioned his follow-up telephone call some 30 minutes later, featuring his hairstyle, but accuracy, rendition of "Oh Danny Boy."
It likewise seemed high acceptable when one roommate told the other, both on the verge of ending four college years, that she was going to abandon a respectable offer from a respectable Chicago firm, opting instead for an indefinite stay on a deserted campus. "I don't know," sheUnknown, but surely where clothing, money, books and parents would have no business.
Again, they laughed. They laughed long and hard, and they couldn't stop. They mustn't stop--stopping would give way to anxiety, to the dread senior anguish.
The anguish, that is, of one month and counting.
Actually, it started to creep around quite some time ago, probably about early ten years, when it was only in preliminary stages of irritation, still nothing to get worked up about.
queasy way. Thus the application of laughter as antidote for severe senior anxiety.
There were, of course, people doing the job interview thing and others pulling all-nighters over graduate school applications, but the offers and replies were still far enough away to remain merely presumption. It was just presumed that's what would happen somewhere down the line in the obscure fog that hovered between now and May 18.
However, much to the senior's chagrin, this fog began to lift just after spring break. Then it all started to seem rather humorous, in a squirrity way, and rather harrifying in a
And now it has entered advanced stages. The triumphs of the day after Commencement ceremonies have taken hold.
AMY HOLLOWELL
calendar continuing past mid-May is for some devastating, for others, absolutely incomprehensible.
In fact, this is perhaps the greatest horror on the soon-to-be graduate's mind: the realization that soon time will no longer be academic time. No more 50-minute blocks on alternate days, with convenient in-between slots for spontaneous coffee and conversation. No more three-day weekends, three-week Christmas breaks, not three-month summer vacations. No more autumn beginnings and spring endings; time will just go on and on.
Or so many unfortunate think this. On and on syndrome tends to paint life after college as a static and determined existence, beginning the day after graduation and ending some 60 monotonous years later in the life of an adult. We endure turning-back mentality, which contends that what one is at age 22 is what one will be until age 82, today and forever.
consequence, of course, but it simply does not have the finite, black and white quality that so many seniors try to render it.
Hence the overriding compulsion to fret about "what I'm gonna do" as if "what I'm gonna do" were the final decision of a lifetime. Not that this decision is not of some
Herein lies the very muck of pre-graduation anguish: gotta find something, gotta love it, gotta do it forever; gotta grow up, gotta stop learning, gotta be what's supposed to be. Gotta face the end, the end of the collegiate donnybrook.
When really it's not an end at all, any more than college is some sort of donbybrook (or a riotous occasion in great disarray). Whence the word commencement, after all? We could all heed the wise words of Walter Cronkite on this page and anchor, and follow his example as a man who merely went through a "transition" in his life, rather than a "retirement" from it.
Such is the nature of college graduation. We should hardly be finished, much less prepared to plunge into something permanent with no hope of surfacing. We are, after all, in the pursuit of our youth, what Thomas Wolfe referred to as the "strange and bitter miracle of life."
Misconstrued interpretations of life following May 18 spawn misconstrued, uncomfortable and highly undesirable anxiety. And for what purpose this anguish? Some may recall the soothing words of a wonderfully sane KU journalism professor, words often offered to so many anguished young reporters, "Hey, it's gonna be awright."
So we go. Because we are in the midst of this "strange and bitter miracle," the quirks and shenanigans of desert islands and imaginary bag pipes are all the more acceptable.
This is the very necessary comic relief that is so welcome in the anguish of one mouth and another.
Irish 'war zone' fails to frighten populace
Bv KATE POUND
Special to the Kansan
DUNGANNON, Northern Ireland—I had time to kill before my meeting and decided to take a look around the town of Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. But there was no place to leave my overnight bag and backpack; they had no lockers, because they are targets for bombs in Northern Ireland. This right mind in Northern Ireland will allow a stranger to leave bags unattended, not even in hotels.
I got tired of lugging my stuff and decided to take advantage of the one truly springlike day I'd seen in a year. I found a public bench on a wide side street, sat down and pulled out my book, minutes later, I was staring at a loaded British-made automatic rifle—from the dangerous end.
"Please point that thing away from me," I said, trying to speak calmly. Having grown up an army "breat," I have the rule of "Never point a gun at anyone or let anyone point a gun at you" engraved on my brain. Having a British corporal, who looked to be about 17, pointing a loaded gun at my head was, therefore, a tad unsettling.
"Is it a good book?" the soldier asked as he crouched near me--against the wall of the building behind us, and hidden by the bench and my body from the street.
I showed him the book, which I later realized, could have been a mistake. "The Great Shark Hunt" by Hunter S. Thompson is filled with lunatic ravings about the use of illegal drugs, mean weapons and uncontrolled violence. Had older realist just what I was reading, I might have been more prepared to phone to the nearest U.S. embassy, screaming for someone to get me out of a Northern Ijssel lake.
The story ends quietly, however, if not pleasantly. The soldier just wanted to know who I was, what I was doing in town, how long I planned to stay and why I was carrying luggage.
I was a stranger in a small town, my accent was different and I was reading on a public bench. It was his job to make sure I wasn't smuggling in explosives for the Irish Republican Army.
And, as far as he was concerned, I probably was smuggling explosives. I was as likely a threat to him and to the town as a protest march led by IRA supporters. His cropped position was taken deliberately, so that anyone shooting at him would hit me first.
The soldier finally decided I was harmless. He and his buddies moved off. I watched them as they continued their patrol of the town. I watched people, the civilians the British Army are surrounded by soldiers, the soldiers soldiers, walking calmly past them. Parents strolled with small children just a few yards from the heavily armed soldiers. Not one noticed the armored troops roaming the town. The northern Irish live in a war zone so old now that we remember a time when there were no soldiers.
Three of his buddies took positions within 20 yards of my bench; one man aimed his gun to the front, another pointed his to the rear. The third kept his point at me. Four more soldiers kept their rifles pointed at every one of them to keep their rifles pointed at the ground, not at my chest, as they moved by.
The fighting between Protestant and Catholic has gone on for 11 years in the six northeastern counties of Ireland. Rarely does a day go by without some incident of sectarian violence—a bombing, a shooting, a fight, a march grown into a riot.
An army sputter plane sweeped low over her home several times that morning, and she ignored the rattling windows as she told me about the daffodils in the garden.
It is a war zone. Police stations, post offices and government buildings are barricaded and entrance to them is limited. One woman, who lives near a local government building, calmly said, "We've had quite a few things broken when the Council building has been bombed."
At a time when discussions between the British government (which rules the North) and the Irish government seem to hold the most promise for peace, the potential for violence grows.
Led by the Rev. Ian Paisley, members of the Democratic Unionist Party, dedicated to the Northern Irish union with the United Kingdom and virulently anti-Catholic, are threatening to disrupt the Anglo-Ingleian talks. Paisley and his followers have sworn, quite literally, to destroy with violence any attempt to join the North with the Republic of Ireland in the south. Meanwhile, anti-British supporters of the IRA have promised violence until the island is united.
Between the two factions are the people of Northern Ireland, who live in a violent state which they accept as more or less permanent. They accept the checkpoints where cars are frequently searched for smuggled weapons. They accept the closed-off downtown areas of more than half the communities in six counties. A closed city means that car bombs can't be parked in front of shops. They don't seem to worry much when an explosion is heard nearby. The children schoolyard and troops rush out of it. The children of Northern Ireland accept as part of life the presence of armed soldiers; the troops are like the sheep in the farm fields—part of the scenery.
I wasn't hurt by my encounter with the British Army, only frightened. Northern Irish friends would ask why the incident had upset me; guns, soldiers and streetcar interrogations are normal here.
And maybe that's why I was upset. The idea that troops are needed to protect the citizens of a country from themselves is foreign to me. The worst part of all is that the citizens don't seem to be bothered by any of it; they are willing to let things continue as they are.
Only strangers are frightened by the guns and;
I suppose, that is why few strangers are willing
to attack.
Life in a war zone is hardly relaxing, even on fine spring day.