4
Wednesday, April 13, 1994
OPINION
...
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Top 10 list: Why not to vote in Student Senate elections
10. Who cares how Senate spends $1.3 million?
9. I don't know how to fill in the bubbles.
8. Apathy is ... oh, well—never mind.
7. I like letting other people choose who will represent me.
6. Lobbying, recycling, communication and diversity are unimportant to me.
5. If I stop at a voting booth, I'll miss my bus.
4. Because Senate is so representative as it is.
3. What? Are there Senate elections this week?
2. I don't have two minutes to vote for someone who will represent me for the next year.
1. None of my friends are running.
The importance of Student Senate to KU students cannot be overstated. The amount of money Senate controls and its voting power on certain University committees make it necessary for students to be involved.
One simple way is to vote.
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Students should support Watkins expansion plan
On the Student Senate ballot today and tomorrow, students have the chance to vote for a referendum to expand Watkins Memorial Health Center. The plan should be supported by KU students.
The plan calls for raising the student activity fee by $15, from $179 to $194, for fall and spring semesters and by $7.50 for summer semesters for the next 15 years or until the expansion is paid off.
Watkins is financed by students. About 60 percent of Watkins' budget comes from the student activity fees. The other 40 percent comes from money received for extra medical care. If improvements are to be made, students will have to make them.
The expansion, at a cost of $5.6 million, would consist of 13 blocks of rooms in the general medicine department. Each block of rooms would have one office and two examination rooms. The urgent care area would be enlarged to about four times its current size. New equipment, such as an automated pill dispenser for the pharmacy, would be purchased.
The expansion is needed because Watkins cannot handle the continuing increase in usage. Between 1983 and 1993, usage of Watkins increased from 15,000 people to 49,000 people. In fiscal 1993, more than 18,000 of 24,000 KU students at the Lawrence campus used Watkins at least once.
Watkins' popularity is due to its low prices than can be found outside the University. A year's supply of birth control pills costs $78 at Watkins but $299 off-campus A $15 fee increase should keep Watkins' prices low.
If students do not pass the referendum, students can continue to expect long waits for doctors and for prescriptions, as well as crowded waiting rooms.
Watkins is considered one of the best health-care facilities in the country. If students want this to continue, they should support the referendum.
HEATHER KIRKWOOD AND NATHAN OLSON FOR THE EDITORIAL
BOARD
KANSAN STAFF
BEN GROVE, Editor
LISACOSMILLO, Managing editor
JUSTIN GARBERG Business manager
TOM EBLEN General manager, news adviser
BILL SKEET, Systems coordinator
JENNIFER BLOWEY Retail sales manager
JEANNE HINES Sales and marketing adviser
Editors
Aust Managing Editor...Dan England
Assistant to the editor..J.R. Clairborne
News ..Kristi Fogler, Katie Greenwald
Trade Paper ..Todd Klein
Editorial ..Colleen BeaCoin
Nathan Olean
Campus ..Jose DoHaven
Sports ..Dave Dorsey
Photo ..Doug Hesse
Features ..Sara Bennett
Wire ..Allison Lipper
Freelance ..Christine Laue
Editors
Business Staff
Business Start
Campus sales mgr...Jason Eberty
Regional sales mgr...Troy Tarwater
Retail assit mgr...Judith Standle
National & Coop sales mgr...Robin King
Special Section mgrs...Shelly McConnell
Production mgrs...Laura Guth
Gretchen Kootterhelmitch
Marketing director...Shannon Relly
Creative director...John Carlton
Classified mgr...Kelly Connealy
Teareeshers mgr...Wing Chan
Letters should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words. They must include the writer's signature, name, address and telephone number. Writers affiliated with the University of Florida may use this format.
Guest columna should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 700 words. The writer will be photographed.
The Kansan reserves the right to reject or edit letters, guest columns and cartoons. They can be mailed or brought to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Staffer-Flint Hall.
Stranger's overdose teaches lesson about uncertainty of life
I am not a sentimental person. I cannot remember what I got for my fifth birthday that reportedly kept me in frenzied anticipation for a week beforehand.
In third grade, I had a crush. His name was Darren. Or Dennis. It even may have been Derek. Whatever it was, his birthday is Nov. 17. I guess I have a selective memory. I remember one of the best days of my life vividly, not because of the day, but because of the night that followed.
Saturday, Oct. 19, 1991, began on a high note. My fellow actors in the allstate Thepian cast show arrived in town the previous evening for a weekend-long rehearsal. Because I hadn't seen them since August, Friday had been a boisterous evening that lasted well into the night. Despite bloodshot eyes Saturday morning, we regained our vigor in rehearsal. We were a bubbling frenzy of Thepian passion. At one point in my "dramatic scene," I looked at my friend Scott. His eyes crinkled up in the corners. Within seconds we were laughing so hard that I fell to the ground wheezing and rolled
off the edge of the stage. I returned somewhat bruised but still giddy with laughter. After several hours of this, our director gave in and let us go for the night.
We drove around for a while and made it to the movie theater just in time for that cult classic starring Tim Curry that is so dear to Thespians nationwide : "Rocky Horror Picture Show." While we stood in the lobby, we noticed a girl in a scarlet dress come reeling up to the glass doors. She was about our age, blonde and very pretty. Her hair was slightly disheveled, and her face was flushed. She grinned giddily while she tried to
open the door by leaning heavily on the PULL sign. We all thought it was funny, and it seemed as if she did, too. Somebody let her in, and she tootter into the theater with us. With a giggle, she stumbled into a seat behind our row. The Rocky regulars seemed to know her well.
About 10 minutes into the pre-show festivities, I heard a thumping noise behind me. I turned around and felt icicles run through my stomach. The pretty blonde girl was slumped down in the seat with her head thrown back and eyeballs rolling wildly. Pink foam bubbled out of her mouth as she gurgled hoarsely. Her convulsing limbs struck the seats around her.
A man picked her up and tried to carry her out of the theater. He couldn't hold on to her writhing body, though. I heard the bones crack when her skull hit the thinly carpeted cement.
I couldn't speak. I just sat there shaking with a funny feeling in my throat, as if I was about to be sick. I found out later that I had watched a girl die of a drug overdose. She was
dead before she reached the hospital.
I didn't know her, but her contorted face in its death throes is an image I cannot forget. I can see many faces in hers, my friends and myself included. The happiness and laughter surrounding my day suddenly seemed trivial. That girl had been laughing before she died.
I learned to be scared that night. Like many people, I had never seriously imagined myself dead. I had not visualized my body mangled in burning car wreckage or imagined the air rattling through my constricted rattle. Nor had I imagined visiting my friends' grieving families instead of my friends. Death can happen with or without warning. I can't live in fear of it, but I'm not careless anymore.
Since that night, I also have not been able to end a day angry at someone. I'm afraid that I won't have a chance to fix things tomorrow. For the girl in the theater, tomorrow ended that night.
Late-night computer nerds not alone
I was over at a friend's house late one night during the break helping him with his computer. It was about 3 a.m. in Topeka, so it's not like we could have been doing anything better. Jumping around the national bulletin boards, we were finding that there were several other late-night hackers from equally pathetic towns "on line," which is computer lingo for "staring at a nine-inch screen for upwards of six-hours without blinking while you wait to download some little 8-bit game with a name like 'Duke Nukum.'" This is an actual game that we took off of a "share-ware" listing.
Shareware, for those of you with a life, has computer programs that people sit around creating all day, then they upload them onto several bulletin board systems, or "BBS's." After the program is uploaded by its creator, it is later downloaded by hundreds of modem owners for personal use. Other programmers will post small suggestion boxes throughout the game that say things like, "If you
are enjoying this game, please show the programmer your appreciation by sending a donation of $20." Or, there may be a note from the bulletin board's Systems Operator, or "syssp," asking you to upload a program in return for the one you just took, hence the name "shareware." Our usual reaction to this type of prompt is to laugh hysterically and scream "Yeah, right, pal!" in much the same fashion as Math 002 administrators do when you ask them if there is any chance of you will pass the class.
So we played Duke Nukum for awhile, which really isn't a bad little
game if you enjoy manipulating a crew cut-sporting, fatigue-wearing little grunt around while destroying everything on the screen, including footballs, television cameras and entire plates of fried chicken.
We grew tired of o'l' Duke and decided to hop onto America Online, a huge national BBS, to see if anything was going on. Then, we stumbled across what is easily one of the most important discoveries since the invention of the squeezeable ketchup bottle: a Star Wars Trivia game.
As far as the Star Wars movies go, I am one of those people you hate who always sits behind you in the theater and recites the entire script word for word. My friend is the same way, so we knew that we were going to clean up on whoever was logged on when we joined in.
There were 18 people on line when wejoined, including a sysop who calls himself "Uncle Owen," which is a character from the first Star Wars movie. In fact, all of the game participants were going under Star Wars
names, except for us. My friend wanted to go with "Ryan," because that's his name, and it is his computer.
The way the game works is, Uncle Owen poses questions about the movie that 20 people in the whole world can answer, and then everyone answers them correctly. One of the questions was: "What is the I.D. number of the pressure maintenance hatch on the trumpeter in the first movie?" We correctly answered "3263827," and even received extra credit for pointing out that this was Mark Hamill's (Luke Skywalker) California phone number at the time of the film's release in 1977.
If you are interested, Uncle Owen now has fixed the time of the game at 11 p.m. every Friday. This of course means that the only people who will be on line at this time will be geeky computer hacker nerds with no lives whatsoever. Ryan and I should have no trouble winning.
Scott Agin is a Topeka sophomore in journalism.
Forcing greek members to vote is not ethical
Your vote for the Student Senate may come from a variety of reasons, but can you imagine being forced to vote for a particular coalition that you knew nothing about.
This predicament happened to me a few years ago when I was a member of the fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon. As a pledge, my duties were great. But when I was forced to vote for my fellow fraternity brother's coalition, it was a little beyond a normal fraternity task.
If the pledges and I failed to vote for his coalition, we would have been forced to do detail work or hard chores at 5:30 or 6 a.m. before greeks on the same coalition that year forced their pledges to vote in the same fashion.
Do Greek coalitions still do this today? That is a question we all must consider when we vote for Student
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Kyle Gregory Overland Park senior
Senate this spring. We can also be safe and vote for any of the independent candidates who cannot easily exploit others for votes.
In Ohio, his hometown newspaper turned against him. After Newsweek published his story, 38 letters responded, and 37 of those supported the sentence. Even President Clinton is pleading with the chief justice of Singapore for clemency on Michael Fay, but no one knows why Clinton does what he does.
Visitors in Singapore must obey their laws
Fay is about to be punished for vandalism in Singapore, and the government is disregarding the fact that he is American. The punishment: six lashes from a moistened rattan cane. I'm tired of hearing people sympathize for Fay because of the punishment he's about to endure. Americans may disagree with this penalty but that'S THEIR country with THEIR laws. You give up your constitutional rights the minute you cross the border.
Has anyone wondered why the crime rate in Singapore is extremely low? Here's why: if caught with a half ounce or more of heroin or any other illegal drug, it can be punishable by hanging; if you are caught chewing gum on the sidewalk, it can mean a $316 fine. People must abide by the other country's laws and be punished by them.
Komson David Weroha
Lawrence freshman
Abortion not legalized by Roe v. Wade decision
I'm writing this letter in response to the article appearing in Wednesday's University Daily Kansan entitled, "Blackmun to announce retirement." The article misinterprets the holding of Roe v. Wade, the
1973 landmark decision of which Blackmun drafted the majority opinion.
The article maintains that Roe v. Wade "legalized abortion nationwide." Roe v. Wade did not legalize abortion. The Court's decision struck down a Texas statute which prohibited a woman from terminating her pregnancy if she chose to do so. The statute was held in violation of a woman's right to privacy under the penumbras of the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. The Court did not, by virtue of its decision, signal the legalization of abortion nationwide.
The media routinely conveys the decision as something that it simply is not. Accurate information is needed about the so-called landmark decisions of the highest court in the nation, and the media should take caution when condensing the actual holdings of significant cases.
Dana Wright Topeka sophomore