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University Daily Kansan
Friday, Jan. 17, 1964
To Rise Above
A challenge arises.
In a world ridden with hate, you are given the chance to show love.
In a world often dominated by cowards, you are given a chance to show courage.
In a world of persons afraid of being useless, you are given a chance to be useful.
Such a dramatic challenge we think of as going to the great or near-great—the world-movers of whom we read about but never see.
NOT SO, for greatness exists for those who will rise to a great challenge.
A week from Wednesday such a challenge will exist for the more than 700 sorority women of the KU campus.
To any one of the twelve sororities is given the chance to strike at the gut issue of racial intolerance—social discrimination among races which fosters the attitude Americans have worked so hard to overcome.
At least one Negro girl has signed up to go through Panhellenic rush, which begins the Wednesday of mid-semester break and ends the following Wednesday when bids for pledges are made and accepted.
To any of the twelve sororities is given the chance to smash the practice of white supremacy, to open the door to making Greek brotherhood or in this case sisterhood—a reality at KU.
THE ISSUE is clear this year. There is no way to skirt it.
In the past there have been two Negroe sororities on campus which occupied their own houses. Since women's rush last year both organizations have vacated these houses.
They have no place to entertain guests—or rushees, if you will—so the Negro sororities are not taking part in rush for the first time in many years.
That leaves what have been, up to now, white sororities.
All girls who wish to be considered must sign for the rush list of the Panhellenic council in early October.
As you can see, previously everyone could tacitly assume that the Negro girls were going to join Negro sororities.
OBVIOUSLY NEGRO girls signed for rush this year are—as in the past—investigating sororities and in turn being investigated by them.
This year the twelve white sororites are the only ones doing the investigating.
A discussion of the problems involved in integrating Greek organizations could go on forever. There are problems in the mechanics of the pledging system itself, although none of the KU sororities have discriminatory clauses in their charters.
IF SOCIAL integration should begin among Greeks there are very real working day-to-day problems to be mastered.
But these problems, menacing as they may be, are at the same time the challenge to noble thought and noble action.
They are the challenge to rise above the petty and the everyday, to rise above oppressive machinery of a system, to rise above the part of tradition which chokes—rather than nourishes—the development of one's character.
From time to time, to each of us, a challenge arises.
Hiroshima
There is a happy little saying that time heals all wounds.
August 6, 1945, was a wound—a great wound in the history of man. It was the day of the first atomic bomb—Hiroshima.
It was a bright, warm morning, with only a few small, white clouds in a sky that was as blue as the sparkling waters of the Inland Sea, reports said.
"The city was just settling to the day's work when the B-29 called 'Enola Gay' droned overhead from Tinian Island in the Mariana," writes Robert Trumbell, author of "Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
"The troops (Japanese) were assembled in their parade area for morning drill. Office workers were at their desks already, and legions of industrial workers, including thousands of boys and girls of school age who had been mobilized for war work, had taken their allotted stations in shops, war houses and construction sites."
A few American planes appeared over the city, but there was no disruption in the daily routine of Hiroshima. Visits of American planes during those days of World War II were common. The city was accustomed to scattered showers of bombs. On this particular day, there was no air raid warning.
Suddenly, shortly after 8 a.m., an American plane flew over the city and dropped a round ball-like object, followed by a parachute. The object was the atom bomb.
The clear blue sky was blanked out by the incandescent white light. People started feeling a lash of heat. The pleasant atmosphere turned uncomfortable in a very few seconds.
A PATIENT in the city hospital, one Tsutomu Yamaguchi, noted in his diary: "There came a flash! I jumped under a desk immediately, and my superior followed, or perhaps he simultaneously threw himself down.
Some said the hell ball was 100 times as bright as the sun. At the center the heat was 1,000,000 degrees Centigrade. There was a terrifying roar.
"Desks and chairs trembled . . . my bandages, which were very tight, were blown from my arm and face."
According to available reports, 6.820 buildings were instantly destroyed and more were badly damaged. The effects of radiation waves covered about a mile around the blast. The air was filled with deadly gamma rays, neutrons, and radioactive fission products.
"Simultaneously with the explosion, the heat rays kindled fires at various places all over the city, even as far as two and a half miles from
the explosion center." says a Japanese account.
APPROXIMATELY 78,150, more than half the population of the city, died instantly; more than 37.425 were injured; and about 13,083 were reported missing.
Truman's choice of Hiroshima as the first target of the atom bomb was reasonable. The city at the time contained 35 major military installations and many important war industries. And by destroying the Japanese war equipment and its important city, the United States secured victory within 10 days from the incident.
Weldon T. Ellis, a writer for the "Saturday Review" who visited Hiroshima a few months later, found the city still ashambles. There were skeletons lying around and surrounding hills were brown.
But this was not the end of the human disaster from the atomic explosion. Since that day, Japan has shown a sudden sharp rise in leukemia deaths among supposedly uninjured survivors.
In 1957, 65 were reported dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of atomic sickness. In the following year, the total of deaths was 36; and in 1956, it was 20. One out of six newly-born children was reported stillborn or deformed in 1957.
The worst damage to the bomb survivors who have not been struck by atomic sickness appears to be psychological. One Japanese survivor bitterly reported: "People are afraid of us. They think we are going to fall sick and become a burden, or contaminate them. We know how lepers feel."
Time magazine concluded through its public poll that 40 per cent of Japanese would not marry a bomb survivor.
HIROSHIMA is much tidier today. The rubble is cleared away. There are some people who don't even remember anything about the event. The city resembles a new-born child.
Beyond that, Hiroshima may have made the race a little wiser, a little more temperate in its actions. At least, Hiroshima was a very real preview to an atomic war. In was minus the retaliation, counter-retaliation, counter-counter . . . ad infinitum to total destruction.
So, what of the work of time? Yes, a wound heals, but heals into what? There is only the scar left, but scar tissue is ugly.
Considering the big picture, Hiroshima may come to be seen as a warning which preceded a new kind of international morality on arms controls—as is suggested by the recent test ban treaty—in a time which called for either a new morality or oblivion for man.
— Vinay Kothari
Cigaret Box
The People Say...
Editor:
Discrimination
We wish to call to the attention of all KU students a particular and flagrant (legal, of course) case of racial discrimination.
With arrangements completed, we were looking forward to our spring formal at the Plaza Club, with the use of the dancing floor and both pools.
Being a closely integrated group, in two senses of the word, it had entered no one's mind that our three Negro girls would be treated differently in any way from any of the rest of us. But upon the suggestion of one of them to our social chairman, she called to check the Plaza Club's racial policy.
We were angered and dismayed at the results of her investigation: 47 of us were welcome to dance and swim; three could only dance. As a house we have taken a stand on what we feel is essentially a moral issue. We will not patronize the Plaza Club.
We ask all other KU living groups to consider this instance and to realize that your patronage of the Plaza Club would condone racial discrimination, whether or not any member of your group would be affected.
Members of Miller Hall
Smoking Attitude
I must sympatize with those individuals who were not impressed with the recent report on smoking and cancer. These doctors only quoted statistics which people have been hearing for years. These statistics give the impression that lung cancer and other ailments are either-or matter, hence the analogy drawn to the correlation between driving cars and car accidents.
But a person can drive a car safely all his life and never be in an accident. There is no way to safely inhale smoke containing nicotine, tars, and other poisons
Editor:
such that a person who has been smoking all his life has no lung damage. With smoking the issue is not either-or. It is how much. I highly recommend that all smokers and non-smokers read the article in the July 1962 issue of Scientific American entitled "The Effects of Smoking" by E. C. Hammond. Here the usual statistics are quoted, but also there are illustrations of lung tissue which has been exposed to tobacco smoke. The changes which take place in the lungs and bronchi are shown. What it really means is that this smoke breaks down one of the most important defense mechanisms in the body: the protective cilia in the bronchi. After these are destroyed, the carcinogens in tobacco fars do their work.
After reading this article, one will have a more healthy attitude after smoking than any number of frightful statistics can give.
Dorothy Kelly May, Lawrence senior
Editor:
Straight Record Editor:
Cheers for Robert A. Barrett! The style books of both of Lawrence's daily papers need revising on at least one school besides Texas.
As an alumnus of the University of California, I wince every time I read about "California University," which to the best of my knowledge does not exist. When California State College of California, Pa., becomes a university the newsmen may finally be forced to mend their ways. But must we wait for that?
It is obvious that the editors have concluded that the space occupied by "of" is very precious. Perhaps there are many of us, who have heretofore suffered in silence, who are remiss in not having let the editors know the price of alienation of readers they have paid for their paltry gain in space. If so, let us set the record straight now that Barrett has so nobly led out.
Tom Moore U.C., 1949
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