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Friday, February 18, 1994
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Federal holidays can be inconvenient and costly
What a wonderful time of the year. Monday is Presidents Day! A time for friends and families to get together for a traditional holiday dinner and exchange stories about past presidents.
Sarcasm aside, Presidents Day is one of several legal holidays scattered throughout the calendar that are remembered around noon when the mail doesn't show up. Aside from complaints by college students who didn't receive their J. Crew catalogs, these governmental holidays are inconvenient and extremely costly.
Makenomistake about it, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Christopher Columbus deserve to be recognized. Their accomplishments helped form this great nation.
However, they do not merit giving government employees (and as a result, bank and financial service employees) a paid holiday. Honoring these men on a Sunday, for example, would serve the same purpose. Having Mother's and Father's Days on Sunday does not cheapen their meaning. What about Easter? Do we lessen Jesus Christ's greatest achievement by not making Easter a legal holiday? Of course not.
A more pragmatic issue is the cost. Giving every governmental employee a paid holiday literally costs the taxavers billions of dollars.
The private sector is also affected. With the government closed, businesses cannot send or receive mail, vital to their livelihoods. With banks closed, businesses are prevented from taking out loans or doing financial transactions. Almost every service, directly or indirectly related to the government, is affected.
In these days of cost cutting and deficit spending, the government should cut the holidays to make the government more responsive to the needs of the public.
RICHARD BOYD FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Taxing welfare benefits creates more red tape
The Clinton administration is formulating a plan that would finance the President's welfare proposal by taxing recipients of welfare benefits. The ability politicians have to try to make the world sound like a better place while creating more and more bureaucracy is bewildering.
The only reason the administration is proposing a tax on welfare benefits is because cutting them outright would sound too harsh and draw too much fire.
What the U.S. welfare system really needs is a plan that would encourage more people to get back into the job market and work toward supporting themselves. What the system doesn't need is a government that continues to create more bureaucracy that will stand in the way of giving welfare recipients the help they really need.
Although most welfare recipients need money to sustain themselves, they also need a system that helps them get back on their feet. And if the money to establish a job training program can't be found anywhere else, it should be taken from the welfare budget itself, but not through a tax on welfare benefits.
A plan stipulating that welfare benefits would be cut and that the money from those cuts would go directly to a job training program would save the government a lot of time and energy that could be used in the creation of a system that works.
Most taxpayers and welfare recipients would rather see welfare money helping recipients than paying more government employees to figure taxes on the tax money.
DONELLA HEARNE FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
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The night time is the right time to be with the studies you loathe
God is dead, and Elvis is questionable.
These and other bitter thoughts careen through my head as 1 plow through "Uncle Tom's Cabin" at 2 a.m.
Doctors and professors frequently decry the benefits of all-nighters. They claim it is far better to study in advance and get a good night's sleep. Easy for them to say. That is unrealistic when I write for the Kansan, work to pay rent, have four other classes and occasionally want to see my girlfriend.
Reality is I have a midterm in less than seven hours. My conscience (that whiny voice that I ignore as I punt my roommate's Pekingese over the couch) is telling me that I should have started studying approximately three days, not three hours, ago.
I settle down into the couch and take up my book. The Psychoviolets
I still fanatically believe that I can read three books before the unfeeling whistle calls me to disgorge my pittance of knowledge on an unreceptive test paper. I no longer try to fool myself into believing that I won't do this again. I know I will.
Another swig of Dr. Pepper sets me back on track. A Mountain Dew overdose a year ago has forever soured my stomach on that noble beverage. Instead, I turn to Dr. Pepper, whose life-giving caffeine content is second only to the powerful Dew.
mourn their existence on the compact disc player. I mourn my predicament as the words swim before my watery eyes.
The battle is rejoined. Caffeine troops hurl themselves against the sturdy bulwarks of boring textbooks. Only by dint of numbers can caffeine overcome the mesmerizing words.
With a start, I jerk my head up from my chest. I realize I have just read
three pages without being able to recall a single word contained there.
New weapons are needed to combat knowledge-induced coma. The Psychoviollets receive the death for which they beg. AC/DC roars in. Raw animal energy pours into my ears and infuses me with power. Screw the neighbors. They all hate me anyway.
Hard rock is a strong ally, but it cannot combat the tenacious boredom by itself. Munchies are needed. Sunflower seeds are the best. They require enough thought and motor skills to keep me alert but not enough to interfere with my studying.
Zombie stupor again steals over me calling for drastic measures.
Dwindling time relaxes my studying standards. Only every third sentence gets attention. Before long, the first sentence of every paragraph satisfies my blunted learning hunger.
The hours fly by on swift feet of panic far faster than the belligerent pages demanding my attention.
I step outside into sub-arctic chill wearing only glow-in-the-dark dinosaur boxers and a Brainwaves T-shirt. Cruel light lances over the
horizon, trying to part a dingy, bong- water colored sky
and pushes me to new scholarly heights as I race to cram a few final bits of knowledge.
Shower, shave and breakfast are
fortretened in the rush to get to class.
I will do fine on the test. Not as well as I could have but still fine.
All-nighters are a fact of young adult life. I am sick of hearing how it is bad for my health and dangerous. I don't know of any professor who has ever accepted "I needed the sleep" as an excuse. I will quit staying awake all night when professors quit holding secret meetings to synchronize their project due dates.
I pity those poor, weak fools who think that their two all-nighters a semester are a great trial. For some students, two all-nighters a week are the norm.
Forgive me if I rumble or sound a little grump. I will feel better after I get a few Z's in a lecture class. I'm sure you know the feeling.
Jacob Arnold is a Wichita Junior in Journalism
lam.
WHAT'S WORSE THAN HARASSMENT?
Dinner with parents is an adventure
A few weekends ago, my parents and I went out to dinner to celebrate my second consecutive "W" in Math 002, a distinction that I share with approximately 27,648 other KU students.
Actually, my folks aren't that bad, which is evident by the fact that only a small percentage of the restaurants we frequent lock their doors and shut off the lights when they see our car entering the parking lot.
But going out to dinner with my parents is not something that you just "do." You have to rest up, take plenty of vitamins and above all, invest in a latex mask modeled after a former president to avoid being recognized. I recommend the Deluxe Jimmy Carter #237B, which boasts a mouth hole big enough to cram an entire enchilada through if necessary.
However, there are a few places
where the parental "couth" factor (defined as my mom's resisting the urge to stare at every customer's plate and say "Oooooh, that looks GOOD!" can run at dangerously low levels. These places include Chinese restaurants.
My family has virtually no self-control at Chinese restaurants, myself included. When the waitress comes to our table in full body armor to take
our orders, my dad usually starts off by saying something like, "We'll have the won tons." Invariably, this will start a problem between my dad and our waitress, who incorrectly interprets this to mean, "we would like an ORDER of won tons." So when the waitress asks us if we want eight or 16, my dad gets a very solemn look in his eye, the kind that President Clinton gets when reading a Teleprompter speech calling for a very solemn look. He glares up from his menu and says, very deliberately, "I don't think you understand. We will have THE won tons."
Next, my mom, who is 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs under a buck, goes on an ordering kick and requests three of each menu item, all of them with authentic Chinese names such as "Moo Goo Shun Tsung Raki," which means "We Cater Weddings."
Several hours later, our food arrives. This is my mom's cue to vocalize her distaste for smokers, who somehow are always situated so that they form the boundary to the smoking sections when our table forms the non-smoking boundary. Usually, she will do this via a sudden, violent volume inflection in her voice, which never fails to get attention.
You know, my parents probably will never change, if I'm lucky. I mean, they certainly not boring, which is more than some people can say about their folks. I even look forward to getting back home for a bite to eat with them every so often. In fact, we're taking my dad out for his birthday this week. I think I go as Nixon.
Scott Agin is a Topeka sophomore in Journ nalism.
A hidden hatred exists on campus
It's amazing to me how many KU students say they are open-minded.
Because based on some snide remarks I've heard from just being an aware listener, many KU students aren't open-minded.
There used to be a time when I wouldn't even say that, let alone write and have it published. My eyes were thoroughly glazed over by my love for the University. I used to think that the University was a great place for all students, no matter how different they might be from each other.
They're bigoted.
But I never really listened for those snide remarks, either. This month I opened my ears. I heard some things that stripped the glaze from my eyes.
COLUMNIST
Among the snide remarks:
A student mumbling "niggers" after he spotted a car full of African Americans.
Students in a closed locker room referring to an Asian desk worker in Robinson Center as a "chink."
After the movie "Philadelphia," a student saying to her friend, "Well, he deserved to die. He's a faggot."
Another student referring to the movie "Schindler's List" as a "sob-story movie about those damn Jews."
This is what I can internal racism.
Internal racism can be heard only through the cracks of walls or as careless whispers in hallways.
Internal racism isn't a Ku Klux Klan bed sheet or a burning cross. It's something much worse. It's hidden hatred.
Internal racism fools people like me who don't look beyond KU's brilliant crimson and blue spirit. I figured that real, cold-blooded and widespread racism existed only in the pages of my yellowed history books.
And that's why internal racism is so dangerous. Because I didn't see blant, open racism, I thought that it didn't exist on campus. Countless others probably think the same thing. And that fightens me.
Don't dismiss me as an ignorant white kid from the suburbs. I knew that racism existed in other parts of the world. I thought that it existed in some sheltered parts of the United States.
I also was sick of the hypersensitive PC campus soldiers. It seemed as if
But the fact that racism exists on a college campus shocks me. Students are supposed to combat racism, not feed it. College is supposed to be a time of learning about other cultures, not reject them.
And I thought that the University encouraged harmony and understanding. To tell you the truth, I got a little sick of it.
I was looking forward to "Black History Month" about as much as any other "special" month. I figured those months were events to get through as quickly as possible.
It hurts society. It hurts the groups toward which it's directed. And it hurt me. Every snide remark was a sharp dagger to my psyche.
Now I'm glad that events such as "Black History Month" exist. I used to think that months like these were only ways for groups to separate themselves, not unite with others. I'm still not convinced that these months don't do this.
anything I said was criticized by them. Glyme me a PC break. Please.
But at least they increase awareness about other cultures. Other races. Other traditions. And awareness is the only way to combat the racism that I thought no longer existed.
I thought KU students' awareness didn't need to be increased. I thought everyone was aware enough.
I was shocked to find out that I was wrong.
Dan England is a Lenoxa senior in Journal
Jam.