4
Friday, February 11, 1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Sgt. Pepper's Past
A friend of mine tells me that on this day in 1964 the Beatles made their first appearance in America. She has a lock of hair from Ringo's wrist, and she sits on the front row at that debut performance in Washington Coliseum.
Hair styles have changed a lot since then. But so have the Beatles, and so has America. That group of four fellows that started clean-shaven in page boys and ended up as hip-hop stars doubt helped to pace those changes that have been sweeping our land for the last eight years.
They came singing simple songs about dancing and holding hands. They moved on to consider in their music those things that their peers were becoming so aware of: the emptiness of a materialistic society, the immorality of war. And they finished up tired, confused and disgruntled, asking us to simply let it be. Let it be.
The Beatles provided a voice for young people. A voice at times naive:
You know what I mean
"Well, she was just seventeen
you know what I mean
And the way she looked was way
behind compare", at times.
At times.
You say you want a revolution?"
Attitudes silly;
"I'd like to be
Under the sea
In an octopus's garden
In the rain.'
And so it was that they reflected, at times anticipated, our loves, our hopes and our frivolities. They translated our feelings in an easy, carefree way. You just switched on the radio as you were dragging Main, and there it was, just the way we dragged it. You were dragging on other things, the music probably was coming through a stereo, but it was still just right.
Well, they're gone now, and when we hear them on the golden oldie shows, or get out the old albums we're touched with nostalgia. That's the word my folks use when they listen to Guy Lombardo.
But there are kids growing up now that don't know what the Beatles were, and probably won't have seen 80 or more of them now how their parents could stand them.
Maybe not though. Maybe this time we latched on to something that will really stick. Maybe the Beatles' music won't be quickly rejected as trite and old-fashioned by our progeny.
But if their music is to last, it must come true. Their best dreams must be realized.
—Mike Moffet Associate Editor
Letters to the editor should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 380 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation. Letters must include the name of the institution must provide their name; year in school and home faculty; student's first name and position; others must provide their name and address.
--an closing, I find it interesting that the Kansan saw fit to send a male reporter to cover Morgan's appearance and that the two women concerned Morgan and the February Sisters were likewise written by males. Am I to assume that there are no qualified female reporters who can assist these tasks? Or perhaps it is time that the sexism
Letters Policy
Garry Wills
Alvin Toftner's best-selling book, *Future Shack*, tries to sell us doom on the installation plan. It inches pop sociology up into the realm of a new genre, pop eschatology. Life ahead will be awful; but we must learn to put up with it. We can be community by dutiful self-administered doses of the most recent awfulness.
Future Schlock Talk
The only trouble with "accepting the future" (that brave old liberal phrase) is that we do not know what the future is, so long as it is future. What the phrase comes down to in practice is accepting some professor's version of the future—which is often an outmoded idea by the time it gets stated, and has the power of becoming a present reality. Thus we can accept A, along—instead—comes B; and we are worse prepared than ever for the present.
Or, in Toffler's case, we will have swallowed all those immunity-inducing
After all, the only thing I'm sure I'll be doing in the future is—nothing. In long-range terms (which our work often does), our mission in fact, I might be dead tomorrow.
doses of the future's arsenic, only to find that the real poison, when it its us, is strychnine. Better, then, to wait; and to happen, whatever it is, when it comes.
Why waste time today getting ready for what I may not be able to do on some distant tomorrow? The real rule is the exact opposite of the puritan version: We should never do today what we can put off till tomorrow. Put off, for instance, reading Future Shock until you might want to read it, but hardly for shock. Only for laughs. When Toffer is not safe (i.e., non-predictive) in his "predictions," he is random; when not dull, he is silly. His book, like its companion best-seller, The Greening of America, is one of those fads that are so hard to imagine descends to the level of recommending the comic strip Barbarelle and a Kaiser Aluminum guessing game as ways of becoming "future-conscious."
Future-consciousness is essentially passive. It asks us to accept the future, whatever it may hold. But the energies
of life reject what is alien to life. Life judges. Only death accepts.
But what of our "responsibility to the future?" Well, in the first place, that is a responsibility to have life now, and so we can be a genius in discriminate absorption, by not serving life, serves neither future nor present. Because we can do certain things, must we do them? That was the key for me to be a particularly passive and unhereto miracle of accumulating mechanisms. Should it also be the principle for human genetic experiment? Toffer seems to be a genetic experiment; makes us slaves to our own inventions.
Those who worry about future population and ecological problems do their own cause a disservice when they ask men to act for a tomorrow that may never come. The earth is polluted and overpopulated, right now. Men have long opined that things may reach a toxic degree of clutter; and they did need to go back to that condition. We have famous's problems in our today, which is the only place to encounter them. Toffler's "future-consciousness" only diverts us from that task. Talk of future shock is a present soporific.
Copyright, 1972 Universal Press Syndicate
Readers Respond
Objectivity
To the editor:
I was quite put off by Mike Moffet's editorial concerning Robin Morman who appeared in a magazine that helped but feel that Moffet approached his subject with a certain敏感性 unbecoming a journalist.
Mofet then stated that Morgan, rejected Marx andLenin because "they were men." Out of context, they seemed to have received pure female chauvinism. It should, however, be noted that the remark accompanied an insistence upon the shortcomings of Marxist doctrine as it regards the condition of women. Women do not receive professional medical system, and therefore can find no satisfaction within traditional evolutionary Marxist thinking. Female nurses Lenin did not concern themselves more with the special circumstances of females. In addition, nurses not "they were" unsympathetic. i.e. unsympathetic and ignorant of the problems facing oppressed females. Her point has far less appeal than that of Mofet's superficial and simplistic account. would be more realistic. They have received better services from their paper had the transcript of Morgan's remarks in Moffet's edited memorandum and Moffet's editorial omitted.
Sisters; Sisters; Sisters . . .
Moffet stated that at the beginning of the lecture men were asked to move to the back of the chair, and then occupy their seats. He then drew an implicit comparison between this request and the old racist practice of "move to the back of the bus." This provides UDR readers with a grossly inaccurate impression that they are more important than Morgan asked that all males who were seriously struggling with their sexism give their seats to them. She felt that it was more important that women hear her remarks on male Compliance Put, because situation bore no resemblance whatever to the prescriptions white American to harass blacks.
reflected in our paper receive critical examination.
Tom Page Wichita senior
Misconceptions
★★
To the Editor:
We have just returned from Kate Millet's movie "Three Lives, and we are amazed. This film shows the experiences to be found these days when everyone is so involved with ego tripping and playing the games. As we walked through the front of us were discussing the movie—quote "This woman had all she could have wanted and she had gone to mansion in the Philippines, seven live-in servants, and an alcoholic husband for whom she waited at a bar. And crying over what she considered to be her lonely, sterile life). According to this person, "her only problem was herself. We could have sat there and listened to her explaining her feelings, her ideas about life and still feel that she is more than a woman. How did he miss the whole essence of her personality and the significance of her life and the she was learning about herself."
Is he going to deprive himself of a whole experience of life with the kind of women who, like most men, can be so scared and some answers because he can't see beyond the traditional newspost of our narrow, sick ACKM woman's afraid of change that they discredit it even when it's put down to women for fear of change women's liberation really going to have something important to say to every one of us and not just a few isolated people who are fearful for it? It seems there are people right on this campus who feel that a woman wants to be taken care of upon women as having the same needs, as having anything unique and important to say about life, to be married to women, to wife and mother. This isn't to discredit marriage (necessarily) and parenthood—but only to say that we need to designate women designed to live together, to both "live and contribute to each other" lives in real ways, not to be scared or stereotypes. No one is satisfied with that kind of life" once they realize that something has happened all search deep into our creativity
and imagination and try to realize the potential in each of us—and realize too that, to us, our own experiences matter more than men's liberation is all about
Valerie Kelly Columbia, Mo. Senior
Ann Jochems
Bellevue, Nebraska Senior
★★
Ann Jochems
Naivete
To the editor:
About the editorial of Feb. 9. I am glad to you agree that the Sisters need publicity. I am also confident our organization as having great conviction and "such a good cause." Your slightly patronizing tone but that alone would not have prompted me to write. What I find most displeasing and unpleasant is my approach to complex problems and a naivete that one hoped had been lost during previous years. We recognize the justification for individual anonymity in such an action as occupation of a law firm. This action has been used too often by authority as a means of destroying a liberation action against the demands and problems that provoked the action. We must realize by now that this is a step in the wrong direction and leads to destructive action, as well as an intensification of an problem. When the photographer Kansan threaten the anonymity of the Sisters occupying the body partly because part of the problem is part of the solution, and be dealt with as such. As well, it is dealt with a false representation of the news publication, specifically occupied the building, rather than reporting that a group of women were infiltrated into the organization such an action. Let's not constantly constate only the false issues of a movement; this has meant the mistake of the press in general.
You say that it is not the University's responsibility to provide a day care center. This line of thought would fit better than the university instruction was seen as a privilege for the upper classes only. The responsibility that the university has to offer is to teach the students representation, to aide a junior newspaper to offer opportunity to
By Sokoloff
Bill Nelson Wichita junior
Delusions
journalism students; the university has this same responsibility to provide a day care center. By offering a day care center, the University is denying a tremendous right to too many people.
The temptation to suggest a
different way of asking could come from is strong, but will leave that to the people who are paid to make such decisions.
But it seems more likely.
To the Editor:
Griff and the Unicorn
★★★
I wish to comment on the letters of John Overbrook and Darrae Delamadeia which I read in the New York Post February 9. The writers seem to be under a delusion which is very likely shared by many others. They believe that the demands of the brunettes Sisters were already being dealt with positive way by the Administration. What evidence do they have for this? Are they responsible for the administration as prima facie evidence that significant action had already been taken on some of the demands? If so, they who have been patiently attempting for months, by working within the system, to get the Affirmative Action Program by the University, can state that no such program has been initiated. The only work which is being done by the Affirmative Action Program is a detailed faculty salary study being made by Vice-
Within the past 5 months there has been much correspondence and conversation with the people she initiated not only by my committee, but also by Dean Emily Taylor and by Professor James Morton and the committee chairman. We have had promises and no results. I applaud the courage of the women who, by their action last year, helped to ensure that others were not able to achieve by working within the system. They had evidently failed to keep pace with patience ceases to be a virtue ("Thos. Morton, 1798). In the words of Chip Cresser's editorial of attention upon a situation that long has been ignored and which now can be acted upon." It is important that such attention takes to action before the Administration really lists. Their action also accomplished another thing. It opened up lines of communication serving to invite women in many areas of the University community. It is no longer (if it happens to happen) which concerns a "poor opposing group of about 30."
Chancellor Heller's office. This study is, however, but a small expansion of an action program; since it will only serve as part of an analysis of deficiencies in one area. Where are the goals and timetables for correcting these deficiencies? If so, what action" has been taken in these areas, why hasn't the committee shown us any evidence of it.
Joan Handley, Chairman Committee on the Status of Women KU-AAPU
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