Page 4 University Daily Kansan, February 24, 1981
Opinion
For bettor, for horse
There's a lot of horsing around in Nebraska. And if a proposed constitutional amendment ever works its way to the ballots of Kansas voters, there just might be horsing around the Sunflower State, too.
Currently, the Kansas Legislature is trying to decide whether to submit to the voters an amendment to the state constitution that would legalize pari-mutuel betting on horse races.
Aside from the bettors, who now have to go to Nebraska or Arkansas to practice their sport, pari-mutu betting in Kansas would benefit the state as a whole. Just look at Nebraska, which raked in $8 million last year from its racing operations. That's $$ million that otherwise would probably have come out of the taxpayers' pockets.
Sure, there are those who classify gambling as a sin, and therefore want to
keep it out of the state. But the state manages to raise revenue from the "sins" of smoking and drinking, so if vices can be legalized, this is the way to do it. Kansans are going to gamble, just like they're going to drink and smoke, so the state might as well earn some revenue off the "darker" side of human nature.
And sure, betting has its problems. The horses don't always smell so good, and there's the persistent vision of a race track corrupting itself like Las Vegas. But few would accuse Nebraska as being a state run by mobsters, so it's not so hard to imagine Kansas keeping its operations clean, too.
Best of all, the state could lower some tax now considered an unfair burden to taxpayers if betting were legalized. Hence, horse racing in Kansas would benefit both those who bet and those who don't.
When walking along Massachusetts Street on a quiet afternoon, most of us find it hard to believe that 180 blacks had once marched on those same streets, or been slaves, or that snipers had crouched in its rutters.
Lawrence blacks' progress shouldn't end with the '70s
Tension between black and white Lawrence residents has existed for the past 100 years. The opposing sides have argued and compromised, and sometimes they fought.
Now, Lawrence is a peaceful town. The tension is gone and the violence is gone. However,
somewhere along the way, many of us seem to have mistaken *compilacency* for peace and *mismatch*.
Many blacks, especially black students, still see white as the superior race, just as the earliest White colleges did.
VANESSA HERRON
The only problem is that, historically, this
country and has sometimes forgotten to keep
its promises.
After the Civil War, many former slaves heard that eastern Kansas was against slavery, and they headed straight for Lawrence—sometimes a dozen arrived an hour.
He was right, and by 1880, 25 percent of the Lawrence population was black.
"There is not an intelligent slave in Mississippi but knows where Lawrence is," a black journalist wrote, "and we shall have them here by the thousands."
In 1880, the Lawrence Journal World printed
"their most revered cones" - worthless coons
and "dark-claimed invaders."
However, even in Lawrence, the famous
band's commitment against the black newcomers slowly grew.
In the same year, a disillusioned black columnist wrote these words:
"Democracy is like a cheap cigar—it has a good wrapping, but a mighty bad filling."
Technically, racial discrimination has been forbidden in many countries but that law is not strictly enforced, and technology until the mid-20th century.
Until then, blacks in Lawrence and in most other midwestern cities were constantly reminded that they were different and constantly told that they were inferior.
Until the '60s, black children were not allowed in Lawrence's public swimming pool, then called the Jayhawk Plunge. And when the children were out of school, they ate them in the streets or took them home.
At the University of Kansas, among the educated, discriminant was not an exception, but a
In 1984, only two of Lawrence's 35 restaurants served blacks at their tables. And in Lawrence Memorial Hospital, a black woman gave birth to her child in the hallway. All the rooms in the black section of the hospital were full, she was told.
Until 1962, most black students lived in boarding houses or with black families or with the white families whose houses they were paid to clean. The students could study with white students, but they were not allowed to live in KU residence halls.
In a 1925 Kansan editorial, one black student described the curious relationship he had with white students.
Students who seemed to be his friends in the classrooms, he wrote, were strangers on the streets. At KU libraries, he was always served last, and mysteriously, whenever he went to the fine arts department ticket booth, all the best seats had just been sold out.
By the early '60s, black students and many white students were finally tired of the current administration's schizophrenic student rights policies. A committee wrote a human rights amendment, then staged a sit-in in Chancellor Hewlett office when he tried to ignore their demands.
During the hot summer of 1970, two students were killed—one black and one white. Snipers roamed the streets after dark and Lawrence was placed under martial law.
They did not want to be ignored anymore.
Finally, in the late '60s, KU students' and others from the U.S. with the Vietnam War, exploited into violence.
By the time cool weather had returned, the conflict was over and the city of Lawrence returned to normal. The Vietnam War limped to an end and Lawrence blacks were granted some
But in some ways everything and nothing has changed.
In the '70s, KU established an Affirmative Action program and increased its support of the African studies department. A few black students became KU cheerleaders and Lawrence High School students chose a black senior as their homecoming queen.
Even though Lawrence has drafted fair housing ordinances, the black population is still concentrated in north and east Lawrence. Downtown, there are more black clerks, but many white clerks still great suspicious looking (i.e., black) customers with effusive smiles and watch them closely until they make purchases, or until they leave.
When I was a freshman, a classmate offered to walk me the dark half-mile home after a play. He lived in a white fraternity and was taking an astronomy course, and I was going to be a
No black person has ever served on the Lawrence City Commission.
He glanced at me, but when I waved he turned away sharply with his head held high.
Editor David Lewis
The next morning on the way to class, I saw him walking in the center of a knot of friends.
I looked away too and instead of waving, I patted my hair into place.
KANSAN
I learned.
contor...Ellen Iwamoto
Business Manager
In the city of Lawrence, laws have changed, and at the University, policies have changed. And in the past 100 years, the attitudes of many people, both black and white, have changed for
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However, in the 11 years since that hot summer, the desire for change seems to have been replaced by a desire for peace—even if peace spoils the end of real progress.
During the height of the 1970 tensions, a black K-1 employee accurately predicted the imminent attack.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is after the first letter of the title, he/she should include the writer's class and home town or faculty or staff position.
The Kansan reserves the right to edit letters for publication.
Computer Manager Larry Lebelbaum
General Manager and News Advisor Rick Huntner
Kennan Advice Chuck Dinski
Letters Policy
Business Manage Terri Frv
"You might say the fever will recede," he said,
"but the disease remains."
Let Three Mile Island be precedent
When the news of a radioactive gas leakage at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant reached KU, many concerned students began shaking in their jogging shoes. They had seen the movie "China Syndrome," and the nuclear threat had suddenly be frighteningly real.
Those brave souls who had faced arrest while protesting the construction of the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas pointed acutely at President Obama's reduction of Burlington and said, "We told you so."
Nationwide, anti-nukes were sure that the TMI accident would instill enough fear in people to bolster the no-nuke cause. They were sure that the near-tragic events at TMI would hang like a black cloud over the nuclear power industry for many years to come.
It did not take long, however, for the black cloud to get swept away. All official health bodies agreed that the accident did not involve releases of significantly increased radioactivity to the environment. Even the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization normally sensitive to the changes in nuclear power, the University of Edison and TMI's twin reactors for its parent company, General Public Utilities, said with unwarranted pride, "No one was hurt in the slightest."
But now, as the Nuclear Overnight Committee, which is overseeing the cleanup, makes its recommendations to President Reagan, it becomes increasingly clear that the public has been hurt—right in the pocket. In a letter to the White House on Wednesday, it recommended that taxpayers pay most of the estimated $1 billion cost of decontaminating the highly radioactive Unit 2 reactor.
The cleanup is a task of enormous proportions. If all goes as planned, the decontamination of the reactor, the containment building and other facilities, will take 10 to 20 years and will require more than 2,500 workers.
The committee reasons that if GPU is made to pay for all this, it would be forced into
JUDY
WOODBURN
bankruptcy. And if the company is forced into bankruptcy, it would, according to some experts, "cloud the future of the whole industry with a precedent."
And as if to add insult to injury, Ivan Smith, chairman of the Federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, has asked that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission bar any discussion of GPU's financial health during its hearings on whether the undamaged TMI reactor may be restaked. Both units were shut down shortly after the accident until a hearing could determine whether the undamaged unit was safe to operate. Smith said the NRC should rule that the issue of the company's financial health could be resolved after the restart.
In doing so, Smith effectively quashed the plans of the anti-nuke groups who oppose the restraint and who had intended to make an issue of their precarious's precarious finances at board hearings.
Of course, the question of who will pay is most. As a child, I was taught unconditionally that if I made a mess, it was my responsibility to clean it up, but the nuclear power utilities are financially unable to provide the same courtesy. Taxpayers end up paying to mop up the mess caused by something many of them did not want in the first place.
And the government is bound and determined to protect the industry from learning the hard
The Nuclear Oversight Committee believes that allowing the bankruptcy of Metropolitan Edison would set a dangerous precedent for the nuclear power industry. But the fact is that the nuclear industry has been clued since the 1950s, and it continues to age. Even if taxpayers are not required to fool the bill for the cleanup, and the utility does go broke, the general public in the Harrisburg area will still end up losing—in the form of higher utility rates. These rates have already been lowered over the cost of replacement power GPU has been forced to buy to supply its customers.
Nuclear power is not necessarily a rabid dog to be run from pell-mell. Perhaps soon they will be a safe, clean energy alternative. But the Three Mile Island accident showed that too many questions remain unanswered, too many possibilities unplanned for. TMI should be allowed to set a precedent, and the government should not be in such a hurry to absolve it.
It's too bad that GPU and the rest of the nuclear power industry aren't crying hard as hard as they do for a company that's working on it.
Letters to the Editor
To the editor:
Why is the William Allen White award regularly conferred on compliant hacks whose unwavering devotion to special privilege and the conventional wisdom runs counter to everything William Alien White stood for? When you consider the carousel of White awards conferred to William Alien Klipseck, it only goes to show that White's words of 1938 still hold true:
"the owners of newspaper investments, whether they be bankers, stockholders of a corporation or individuals, feel a rather keen sense of financial responsibility, and they pass their anxiety along to newspaper operatives. The sense of property goes thrilling down the chain, as the paper becomes—unconsciously and probably in all honesty—a prejudice against any man or any thing or any cause that seriously affects the right, title or interest of all other capital, however invested. . . . In the end, newspapers cannot be free, absolutely free in the highest and best sense, unjustly social and economic disposable wealth for the free interplay of democratic pressures."
We can only hope that in the future this estimable award will be bestowed on journalists who do justice to the ideals of White, rather than on those who make a mockery of them.
Recipients don't mix with White's words
Laird Okie Lawrence graduate student
Snow Hall problems
To the editor:
Sometimes later this spring the Kansas Legislature will decide whether to allocate $3.8 million for an addition to Haworth Hall. This addition would bridge Haworth and Maliot, and house a life sciences facility. All indications seem to be that this year's tight budget makes the planned project unfeasible now. So biology research and instruction will continue at a substandard level in the beautifully antique, yet inadequate, Snow Hall.
In Snow Hall, students are at one with nature; as a matter of fact, last week a biology lab was performed amid blowing snow and 50 degree temperatures—inside the building.
One emphasis of the new life sciences addition would be on research. Laboratory research is integral to the study of biology, and a biology graduate who lacks it will have trouble finding a job. Until Feb. 13 of this semester, biology 104 students had not had even one laboratory session. There was no space available. These students are getting an incomplete education despite the high caliber of instructors in KU's biology department.
Robert Bruce Scott Great Bend senior
Where quality of education is concerned, the state of Kansas should not skimp. State schools are the only option for some students, because of the lower tuition charged to Kansas students. Students should be paid at the expense of a quality education. The immediate result of not allocating the money for a Haworth addition will be increased dissatisfaction among KU biology students. This will lead to lower enrollment in biology programs and in attending KU by future biology majors.
When asked if the building passed fire code standards, one professor chucked in response. It is physically impossible to conduct classes, labs and student research projects in Snow Hall, while at the same time maintaining a serious attitude toward fire safety codes. Students must wear reflective clothing; hallways; culture studies and lab mice share closets in the limited laboratory space.
It is sadly ironic that, if the state of Kansas does not allocate the funds for this addition, the study of life sciences at KU will be slowly choked to a virtual standstill within the conference of old Snow Hall. When the study of biology shows down, life itself might soon follow
To the editor:
I can verify the article on Feb. 16 about the changing of letters to the editor of the Journal-World. Recently I wrote one, published on Feb. 18, citing some reason why the journal's ordinance requiring that property owners remove such snow. Examples were the firm of Nelson's Team, at the Malls,
Letter was changed
which cleared snow from the driveway, causing pedestrians to climb a snowrift, and Kroger and the Ford dealer along 23rd Street, where sidewalks were completely buried.
For reasons unknown to me (fear of creating problems with advertisers?), these specific commercial firms' names were omitted. I meant, by example, to call this problem to all commercial firms in the city; how else could it be except through the local newspaper?
J. Bunker Clark Professor of music history
English requirements
To the editor:
Although I belong to those "privileged" foreign students who don't have to attend the Applied English Center because of a high-enough TOEFL score, I'd like to comment on the article "Groups want AEC investigated" (Feb. 12).
I was especially outraged by Elizabeth Sopelma's statement that "our test is pass, and many 3-year-olds." This statement is simply an insolence in a time when it is possible to leave an American high school without being able to read and write, when an enormous number of American soldiers are basically educated and when it is necessary to teach composition and grammar in universities.
The Test of English as a Foreign Language (which is similar to the AEC test) by no means tests the ability to get along in a daily conversation with American friends or to talk about subject matters with your professor. Some foreign students already have a degree in English and are held in English. They would be able to follow an American lecture in their field of study, especially science majors, even if they are not perfect in the English language.
I agree that a certain competency in English has to be achieved, but fewer foreign students would have to worry if it were enough to enter KU with the knowledge of a 3 or 5-year-old.
Frankfurt, West Germany, graduate student