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Monday, February 15, 1993
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
IN OUR OPINION
White House job cuts send positive signal
President Clinton said last week at a town hall meeting in Detroit, "Everyone will have to pay their fair share." Everyone, he quickly added, just the government
Clinton was referring to his plan to slash the White House staff by 25 percent and to reduce the overall size of government by 100,000 jobs in the next four years.
The move, although largely a political gesture, is a welcome one. Clinton said the cuts could save the government $9 billion over four years.
The job cuts will be achieved through attrition and not layoffs. Each year, 200,000 workers leave the 2.1 million-member civilian federal work force. The Clinton plan will simply leave some of these positions vacant.
In addition, Clinton signed an executive order scaling back perks such as free air travel for executive branch officials. He also abolished several government,panels deemed to be of marginal importance,such as the Board of Tea Experts.
but keeping these cuts in place could prove a difficult task, as past presidents have discovered. President Reagan went to Washington in 1981 promising to slash government spending and cut the size of government. He left town eight years later after presiding over the largest federal spending spree in history.
So although Clinton has indicated his intentions to cut the size of government, only time will tell if he will be successful.
President Clinton has spoke often in his first few weeks in office of personal sacrifice. By cutting his own staff, he has sent a positive signal that he is willing to share in that sacrifice. Ultimately, for his economic plan to be successful, the American people must be willing to do the same.
CHRIS MOESER FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
AIDS trading cards exploit tragic illness
Trading a Magic Johnson for a Rock Hudson may not be your typical collectors card trade now, but it could be later this month when the inaugural AIDS trading cards are unveiled.
This new series is made by the same company (Eclipse Enterprises) that produced the "True Crime" set last year. Those cards depicted murderers such as Jeffrey Dahmer, an endeavor that netted $1 million. This time, you get 12 cards and a condom in each 99-cent pack.
It can be expected that these cards will create a stir, because this money making scheme goes too far. The exploitation created far outweighs any informational or awareness value the cards may have. The exploitation comes from the fact that none of the people shown on the cards gave their consent to appear on the cards. This leaves some people who never revealed having AIDS with their picture on a card.
Some good could come of this project. The cards carry medical information and 15 percent of the proceeds go to Broadway Cares-Equity Fights AIDS. However, the bottom line is that people will be hurt by this.
There could very well be people in the set who do not have AIDS, or people who do, but don't want it revealed. AIDS is devastating enough for the victims; no one deserves to deal with worries over an unnecessary set of trading cards.
CHRIS RONAN FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
KANSAN STAFF
GREG FARMER
GAYLE OSTERBERG Managing editor
TOM ERLEN
General manager, news adviser
STEVE PERRY
Business manager
MELISSA TERLIP
Retail sales manager
JEANNE HINES
Sales and marketing adviser
BILL SKEET, Technology coordinator
Editor
Aest Managing ... Justin Krupp
News ... Monique Guelain
... David Mitchell
Editorial ... Stephen Martino
Campus ... RC Trauer
Sports ... David Mitchell
Mallard ... Matt Dowling
Features ... Lynne McAdoo
Graphics ... Dan Schauer
Campus sales mgr...Brad Broon
Regional Sales mgr...Wade Baxter
National sales mgr...Jennifer Pearlert
Co-op sales mgr...Ashley Hessel
Production mgr...
Ashley Langford
Marketing director...Angela Cleverenger
Creative director...Holly Poty
Joshua Gee
Art Director...Dave Haliger
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Women need to stick together to combat male-dominated world
My sister and I have an ongoing argument about abortion rights.
She takes the conservative side, and I take the liberal side. My sister is one of the most intelligent, logical women I have ever known, yet she does not see what seems to me to be such an obvious point.
After a number of years and late nights arguing with my sister to no avail, I have decided that Robin Morgan and many other feminists have a point. Abortion should not be a government issue — no one should have the right to interfere with another person's body.
No, all women do not believe the same things. Some of us are prochoice, some anti-abortion. Some of us are religious, some not.
We have different goals, different lifestyles and different sexual orientations
Of course, this is also an extremely pro-choice viewpoint. My little sister would call me pro-murder, but I still love her.
But in spite of our differences we, for the most part, have a commonality of purpose. We believe in the importance of women.
STAFF COLUMNIST
Most of us have found different ways of coping with the oppression of women, but recently we have observed a destructive trend. We are allowing issues to tear us apart and turn us against one another.
When women begin criticizing other women for the choices they have made in their lives, be that to work or be a homemaker, to love a woman or a man, to terminate a pregnancy or to sustain it, we live up to unpleasant stereotypes of women that we have heard since grade school.
As a little girl I was continually amazed at what was expected of the females in my family. At large family
gatherings the men would sit in the living room, talk, smoke and drink. The women would bustle around the kitchen cooking, cleaning and talking. That is all of the women but me. I refused to do any of the things the males did not do. My grandmother and all of the other women were of the opinion that I was lazy. My mother rarely forced me to help, and I never understood why.
I think now that something inside my mother admired my ability to make choices. The women of her generation were not allowed to be quite outspoken, and for my mother, though she has made her own strides, it was unheard of to question the roles of men or women.
Many women are becoming visible this year in positions of great power. They are in Congress; they are in the Cabinet and on the Supreme Court; they run cities and states. Women are showing up in positions my mother would have never imagined. But I would.
Women are making choices to succeed. We are rejecting the rules of this so-called "man's world" that does not
consider our needs or lives in their definition of success. We are standing up and pointing out that there are women who are intelligent and able, may be mothers or wives or lesbians, and the rules must change.
Well, since the men do not need to change them, we will Child care, health care and family leave must be brought to the forefront.
These issues concern all women. Some men will always have trouble when faced by women who make their own rules. But, if women wish to see change, we must unite and organize. There are, on this campus, groups such as the National Organization of Women and the Women's Student Union. Both groups welcome new members. We must be careful not to allow men like Rush Limbaugh and his followers to turn us against one another, but even more important we must watch ourselves.
The women of my mother's generation lived by male-imposed rules. We, of a new generation, have the choice not to.
Lisa Cosmilito is a Lawrence graduate student majoring in journalism.
Basketball no match for British soccer
I am no athlete. In fact I'm not even an arm-chair athlete. It takes all my stamina just to get out of bed in the mornings. When I do indulge in a spot of exercise, it is only to splash around in the swimming pool. Even then I have to take my bed for the rest of the day with a cup of hot chocolate and an obscenely calorific donut to compensate for my wanton dose of activity. Therefore I was completely amazed to find that I really got into the atmosphere at the Kansas-Oklahoma State basketball game last week.
I haven’t had the chance to go to anything like it before because college games are no big deal in Britain. There are exceptions, but as a rule hardly anyone knows or cares whether their team has made sports history or not. I couldn’t imagine anyone getting worked up about our school’s rugby team. In fact, I don’t even know if Aberystwyth has got a rugby team. I have been told that we do have an excellent splat-ball team though. However hiding behind a tree and shooting your opponent with brightly
colored paint canisters just doesn't have quite the same dramatic effect as KU basketball games. Come to think of it, the only time that I have ever been into our sports hall is to take an exam, so this will give you some idea of how college sports are viewed by the rest of the population.
American games like basketball and football seem to be fun for the whole family. But the British equivalent is definitely male dominated and not a place for children or the faint-hearted. To be a bona fide British soccer fan you need to have an overly keen sense of team loyalty and a
ready string of obscenities to screech at your opponents. The genuine British soccer fan always has a score of witty football songs and chants to add spice to the game. Whereas American fans follow the tactic that actions speaker loinder than words, us Brits are (for want of a better word) more expressive. Poetic gems such as "come over here if you think you're hard enough" and "you're going home in an ambulance" are some of the more endearing chants which are yelled among the fans in a very unsportmanlike manner. It is not surprising we have a problem with football violence.
I know that an American college basketball game is not really much of a comparison with a British soccer
It was really strange then to be able to shout for your team as much as your larynx would let you without getting your head kicked in, not that there was much danger from the opposing supporters anyway. There were only about six Oklahoma St. fans there.
Yell leaders, bands and mascots are traditionally a very American thing to have at games and somehow I think it is going to remain that way. Something tells me that the average swarthy British football fan would have a few choice words to say if an animated Jayhawk dressed in a pair of hideous yellow boots minced on to their pitch.
match apart from the fact that both games attract large crowds. My point is that British football draws a predominantly male audience and is definitely not a place for family entertainment. The atmosphere is sometimes aggressive and intimidating toward the players and I would think twice before venturing into a British football stadium. I can't compensate for this by supporting my University team because they are usually low-key affairs which focus solely on the game rather than becoming a show for the audience like a lot of the American games that I have seen.
Francesca Glyn-Jones is a Ludow, England, Junior majoring in American studies.
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