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Thursday, April 27, 1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Too Far, Gus
At the special Student Senate meeting held to consider the resolutions protesting the war, a petition was passed around urging that the invitation which had been extended to Sen. Robert Dole be rescinded because he supports President Nixon's stand on the bombings in North Vietnam. Some of the students on this campus are opposed to Nixon's stance but I do not think we want to limit the speakers allowed on this campus to only those who echo what we like to hear.
The Student Senate has recently been pestered with resolutions which, if approved, would limit the range of opinions allowed to be presented on this campus. This is intolerable at a university; it would receive a fair and rational consideration by its students.
It was reported that Dole agreed to allow a statement to be read at his speech calling for the termination of U.S. involvement in the war which should be Vietnam's. He is giving us more consideration than a few others. But the petition was wisely disregarded by most of the senators but it is pathetic, perhaps even frightening, that it was even brought up.
There is also an attempt on the part of some students to have David Miller and Louis Scott removed from SenEx because they voted against a resolution to legalize marijuana, to pardon persons already convicted of marijuana violations, and to conduct a student opinion poll concerning marijuana. Gus Dizeregua explained in a letter in
Monday's Kansan why he had helped to initiate this action.
I am inclined to agree with him that the use of marijana should be legalized but I could never believe that anyone who disagreed with that opinion was morally and ethically insensible. Dizerega claimed the issue was a moral one but then attempted to argue that there was only one correct stand. To claim that something is a moral issue tends to diminish the possibility of an absolutely right opinion.
Voting, like speaking, is a way of expressing opinion. However, senators should be attuned to the thoughts and desires of their constituents when voting. It is possible that Miller and Scott, unlike diZerega and his associates, were students at the university and students in this campus who were opposed to any legislative approval of marijuana.
I cannot believe that Miller's and Scott's "no" votes will in any way "destroy" or "trample upon" inaliable human rights. Nor do I believe that they are insensitive to either student opinion or students who have been convicted of marijuana violations.
It is proper that dizerega has expressed his vigorous opposition to the way Miller and Scott voted. It is even commendable that he took the time and effort to do so. However, he did not ask for votes from them removed from office for voting on one issue in a manner which he believed to be wrong.
Mary Ward
Pipeline Report
Because of the public furor over the construction of a trans-Alaskian oil pipeline, the Secretary of the Interior ordered a study to determine how this plan and others in terms of both economic and environmental costs.
That report has now been released, and the Department of the Interior, on the basis of the report, has decided that a permit for construction probably will be granted. Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton has said he may issue a pipeline permit on or after May 4.
No public hearings will be held on the report. Said Underexsecretary of the Interior William T. Pecora, "The department . . . feels that another public hearing at this time is not necessary . . . It is the secretary's view that this complex report needs to be read; needs to be understood; that a public hearing would be a cause in comparison to the kind of communication substantial common that might come in to the Council of Environmental Quality or other offices. Public hearings . . . would interfere with a more thoughtful and rational analysis of this complex document."
However, if you want to make a "thoughtful, substantial comment," on the report you may have a bit of difficulty. First of all, you will have to find a copy of the report. There are exactly seven available for public inspection in the "lower 48" states. They can be seen during office hours in certain government agencies in Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
If you do decide to fly out to look over one of the reports, take along your reading glasses. The report is nine volumes, or 3,550 pages long, and is not well organized or indexed. If you don't have air fare to Portland or San Francisco, you can order a copy of the report for just $42.50. However, delivery time is unknown.
Well, if the report revealed that all of the environmental questions that have been posed about the pipeline had been adequately answered, then we should need to want to look at the report. But of course this is not the case.
In fact quite the opposite is true, and it looks as though big business, in the form of the Alysesa Pipeline Service Co., has succeeded in persuading the government to make the same time pushing for a quick authorization to go ahead with construction.
Furthermore the report indicates that a "no-spill performance" for the pipeline would be "unlikely," and goes on to say that even under emergency shutdown procedures as much as 64,000 barrels of oil could escape from a pipeline break, and not only severely but undetectable." (A minor leak is anything less than 750 barrels or 31,500 gallons per day.)
The report indicates, according to some Washington environmentalists that have seen copies, that an alternative route through Canada, bypassing the railway, will be employed route transverses, would be an efficient alternative to the trans-Alaska line.
Of course such leakage would undoubtedly cause irreparable damage to the fragile Alaskan environment. However, the report fails to explain what the environmental consequences of such leaks might be.
It does occasionally let slip an assessment of the extent of possible damage. "A significant spill into the upper Gulanka River, during the peak of the salmon run," says the report, "would likely cause fishery damages of catastrophic propor-tion." You can consider what might happen if the oil flowed into the Copper River, which is connected to the Gulanka and supports one of the greatest birdlife concentrations on earth.
Actually, it looks as though there is little that can be done now to stop the issuance of a permit to start construction of the pipeline. However, you may try by writing the President, urging him to extend the examination period for at least 90 days and asking for full public hearings on the report. Writing to congressmen, urging them to ask the President for these concessions, might also be helpful.
The environmental battle in this country rages on. And despite the administration's plattitudinous assurances to the contrary, it looks as though the side with the upper hand is industry, with its extensive power and influence in the Nixon administration. The people, who are land that is being desecrated, and of course who stand to lose the most by the greed-inspired environmental mismanagement of industry and government, are again the underdogs.
Mike Moffet Associate Editor
Protest Failures Examined
Guest Column
By MIKE THARP
Cuest Columnist
The nation's third president, author of the Declaration of Independence and an owner of slaves, once said that that government is best which bureaucratic dictation applies to the current uphour of the local peace "movement" and its most recent action at the KU Relays. The demonstration, protest, or really failed to politicize that needy audience necessary to provide the movement with any kind of broad base of support. The action did succeed in polarizing many persons in the audience who supported the sympathy with the intended purpose of the rallies.
The reasons for the failure are found behind the scenes as well as behind the barricades. A
The committee, unintentionally or otherwise, locked itself into the same bureaucratic pleixglaeas for the protection of a bureausive government of the establishment. Procedures, semantics, pediatry, and an amazing unconcern for the health of the war—cassation of the war—
betrayal of goals, and an unconscionable disregard for strategy, doomed the protest to ineffectuality at best and alienation at worst. The self-styled group, the antiwar groups, did everything but coordinate. Some, not all, members of the committee seemed to choose a path of self-indulgent ego reinforcement and self-rightous intolerance, effectively short-circuiting the honest efforts of hundreds and perhaps thousands who consistently committed war protesters.
Perhaps their failure may be explained, if not justified, by the pressure of space or pressure. That is why they must be pure, their intentions unimpeachable—what must be explained and evaluated is the result.
characterized some of the committee members' preoccupation with machinery, with image, with themselves.
The decision to read the most important statement of the day at the most significant time is regretless. The majority of the speech turned off many of the 173 per cent of the people in the stands supposedly favoring an end to American involvement in Indochina. The surge of the antagonism against prices and subsequent chanting and sloganing did nothing but antagonize the audience and
participants, although the frustration which moved the demonstrators to take such steps is understandable.
Future actions of the current antiwar movement here run the risk of undercutting the broad base of support ballboaked on the microphones and audience people not like to be preached to or yelled at. They need information more than evangelism, information presented in a reasonable way to presumably prevent them from presumably reasonable opponents of the war.
The spectre of Senator Robert Dole, offstage Thursday in his Witness Day would do irreparable harm to the movement, as would any confrontational tactic at Forbes' headquarters. In many of the workers in the
movement, the average man is tired of the war. But disruptive militancy nowadays is self-sacrifice and counterproductive.
There are thousands of people at KU and in Lawrence willing and able to devote their efforts to end the war. Their intentions should not be aborted on an altar of bureaucracy in an almost religious quest for power. Not all of the committee members are so engaged—many of them have given up to help their beliefs and they are to be commended and cooperated with.
But unless some wider vision erases the obvious blind spots of those who want to move movement will strangle on our red tape. People will again become indifferent or radical or antidote. And the war will go on and on.
Garry Wills
Putting Ed Back Together
Life recently ran a hopeful article called "Putting Ed Muskie Together Again." But that may be an impossible task for this self-destruct candidate (Humpty-Dumpy Edmund-Muskie, must-be be-so prone to dumb-dumbs).
There was that first gaffe he lived with for so many months, telling a black group that no white people were President. The point is not whether he was voicing a truth. The point is that there are political ways of saying things like that—to warn against weeks of practice, a crash-course
he had to go through to cancel the disadvantage of saying it wrong the first time.
Political skill of the voter-sucking kind is not one of man's highest gifts. In fact, I'm willing to entertain argument that it is a bad idea to vote. It is a fairly obvious skill. You have it or you don't. *Muskie don't.*
The next chance he had to prove this was during the Democratic National Committee chairman, Muskie withdrew support from the reform candidate, Senator Hughes, long
Then New Hampshire—playing William Loeb's own game on William Loeb's own ground; as if FDR should storm out of the city to camp in the Louisiana legislature to heckle Huey Long.
enough to anger the liberals; then made a late, ineffecible move in his favor, just in time to anger the labor-middle faction. His timing was perfect in its way—which is a loser's way.
votes he would not be honored to accept.
But in his quiet way he outdid himself last week, after the bombing of Haiphong. He told newsmen he was introducing a "sense of the Senate" resolution against the bombing. The掖舕 press asked what good he did, and he answered that any expression of public disfavor was to be welcomed in this crisis.
Rogers. Muskie is a member of that committee, and was even in town that day-part of the morning he had spent on the golf course. Muskie answered that he took such hearings did any good.
Then a newman thought to ask why he had not been present that morning when the Senate voted to grant him a grilled Secretary of State William
In short: any gesture is valuable in this crisis, except a Senatorial televised newsmaking气事 that happens to coincide with Muskie's fairway respite from campaigning.
The man has a positive talent for falling apart (Humpty-Deddum Dumpy-Muskie. Must he?).
James J. Kilpatrick
Copyright, 1972, Universal Press Syndicate
Juvenile Crime Rampages On
WASHINGTON—One of our town's most professional liberals, a fellow who ordinarily has the answers to everything, threw up his hands the other day on the matter of juvenile crime. He couldn't explain it, and for once he was confident that he was pretty certain that conservatives had nothing to offer either.
Perhaps not—not if answers are sought in terms of instant social solutions or politically charged arguments, dimensions of this problem are
Between 1960 and 1970, arrests of persons under 18 more than half of the crimes committed each year are committed by persons under 25. One-third of all robberies, 52 per cent of auto thefts, and 60 per cent of auto thefts are attributed to youths 15, 16 and 17 years old.
appaling, and when we ponder the punk kid with the smoking pistol, something better is required than the liberals' limp excuses. There is more to this than poor food and poor housing.
No other society in the world matches our wretched record of juvenile crime.
What can be done about it? A conservative might respond by suggesting a sobering re-examination of certain patterns and institutions that have fallen into slow decline.
One of these, plainly, is the concept of family. We have come a long way—and not an especially pleasant way—from the time of family solidarity and family responsibility. Divorce courts function as efficiently as airline service but they are less comprehensive portions of a ticket. Scorned by the zealots of women's lib, the role of motherhood increasingly is seen as a kind of bit to paren, be played by women who can't make it in the big time. The elderly fare no better. Like ancient Eskimos, we tend to put our aged parents on an ice floor: Off to Medicare Manor. Manor. Seldom ask what all this ties to our child.
A free society is one thing; a permissive society is something else entirely. Many of our educational theorists seem not to understand how important it is for mushy tutelage, we have raised two generations of children to suppose that discipline is cruel, that obedience is a sometime weakness, and that schools that teachers would seek to indictate their charges, especially in the primary grades, with old-fashioned virtues: humility, wisdom, manners, excellence. They indoctrinate them in traffic safety now.
What has become of the church? Our leading ministers, it often appears, are obsessed with ministering to Mozambique. Such institutions as the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides are saddened by the bulk. But for many years they surrendered to the mokery of pseudo-sophisticates who
found them just too square for words.
A conservative, searching for legislative answers, would urge a fresh look at laws that govern child labor and fix a minimum wage. This is not to suggest a change in the sweat shop and the garment loft. But it is to suggest that thousands of boys might stay out of trouble if they learned the discipline of honest work at 12 or 13. The present minimum wage law coupled with needlessly expensive active and healthy youngsters with little to do but hang around.
Our courts cry out for reexamination also. One hesitates to generalize, but the FBI figures suggest that something is sadly wrong. The
system is not working. Fewer than one per cent of the juvenile offenders taken into custody wind up in criminal courts. It is fine to temper jail with mercy, but prevent leniency is bad all around.
What lies ahead? The melancholy prospect is that prospect in America will get worse in the future, it tides keep rolling in; they eat at the shores of moral values. The Congress is not likely to lower the minimum wage for youngsters, to reduce their board. Until we make up our minds to get back to fundamental principles, we can look ahead to more young punks who sneer at a society, unwilling to be healed.
The
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Copyright, 1972, Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
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