OPINION
The University Daily
KANSAN
April 17, 1984 Page 4
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily KANSAN
The University Daily Kanean (USP5 800-640) is published at the University of Kansas. 118 Stuart-Flint Hall, Lawrence, KS 66032. For regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer session, education packages are $15 for six months or $27 a year in Dougles Court and $18 for six months or $3 for each out-of-the county student. There are $6 a semester paid through the student activity card. POSTMASTER Send address changes to the University Lakeside Campus, 119 W. Sawyers Drive, Kansas City, KS 66109.
DOUG CUNNINGHAM
Editor
DON KNOX
Managing Editor
SARA KEMPIN
Editorial Editor
JEFF TAYLOR ANDREW HARTLEY
Campus Editor News Editor
DAVE WANAMAKER Business Manager
CORT GORMAN
Retail Sales Manager National Sales Manager
PAUL JESS
JANICE PHILLIPS
Campus Sales Manager
DUNCAN CALIHOU
Classified Manager
General Manager and News Adviser
A good decision
The Texas Board of Education made a good decision Saturday when it repealed a 10-year-old rule requiring textbooks used in the state's public schools to describe evolution as "theory rather than fact."
The decision, which also struck down a requirement that textbooks state that evolution was "only one of several explanations" of the origin of human beings is a victory for foes of censorship.
Opponents of the rule had petitioned for the change and threatened to sue if it did not take place.
Most importantly, the ruling was a victory for parents and school teachers. Before the decision, textbook publishers were forced to weaken their treatment of evolution in books sold across the nation if they wanted to sell textbooks in Texas.
Textbook sales in Texas are about $65 million a year — the fourth-
Despite the threat of a lawsuit challenging the decision, members of the board said they had no choice but to repeal the rule because of pressure from many state political and business leaders who were concerned about criticisms of schools in Texas.
largest textbook market in the country.
"This is going to free publishers to write about science accurately, unharmed by religious dogma," said Michael Hudson, the Texas coordinator for People for the American Way, a national anticensorship group.
The board made the decision to repeal the rule a month after the state attorney general, Jim Mattox, said the requirement was an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into state matters.
But whatever the reason for the change, Texas and the rest of the nation is better for it.
Taking drastic action
President Reagan has unnecessarily pushed the United States deeper into involvement in the embattled Central American nation of El Salvador.
On Friday, Reagan authorized the immediate sale of up to $32 million in military equipment and medical supplies to El Salvador, thus thumbing his nose at congressional advice to limit economic support of the nation.
Reagan took the drastic measure of circumventing Congress when his lobbying power was weakened by news of CIA-backed mining of Nicaraguan ports.
Although the president was within his rights — he is authorized to make an unlimited sale of military equipment to a nation and deferring payment for up to 120 days — his actions cannot be justified on moral or economic bases.
If El Salvador cannot cough up the money before the 120 days is up, the Pentagon will be stuck with the bill.
Administration officials said that Reagan had decided on the delayed payment plan to El Salvador "to prevent unnecessary loss of life and to assure security required for the runoff election" in the country.
Besides offending congressmen, who both support and oppose aid to El Salvador, the logic of spilling millions of dollars worth of military equipment into an already war-torn country has to be questioned.
The United States has already sent $1.2 billion in aid to El Salvador. One must wonder how much good the money is doing and whether President Reagan can justify pouring more money into the strife-torn nation.
Clearing the hills of guerrillas and quieting distant mortar fire might bring a few more ballots into the box, but improved voter education and balloting equipment would make each vote in the El Salvadoran elections the true voice of the people.
Paying big human cost
The Reagan administration was right when it said its welfare cutbacks would save money and reduce caseloads.
But while saving money on welfare, the country has been paying some staggering human costs: a dramatic rise in the number of people without medical insurance, sometimes without food or shelter and seldom with any hope for the future.
Proponents of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 probably would call it a success.
But there are some other statistics worth pondering. Of the nation's children under the age of 18, one in five now grows up in poverty.
The welfare case load has dropped 13.7 percent and there are now 493,000 fewer cases than there would have been without the 1981 cutbacks.
It has, after all, been saving the government $93 million a month in welfare outlays.
The infant death rate . . has been rising in states such as Michigan and in the District of Columbia.
Does anyone truly profit from producing more emotionally and physically handicapped children and more despairing families who see no way out of poverty?
Detroit Free Press
LETTERS POLICY
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten on one sheet of paper, double-spaced and should not exceed 200 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or position. The Kansan also invites individuals and groups to submit their Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Staffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
A surprising generation gap
I was talking with an 18-year-old woman, a senior in high school. She said that she wanted to ask me something.
"Who was Ed Sullivan?" she said.
I said that I didn't think I understood the question.
"I mean, who was he?" she said.
"Was he, like, your generation's David Letterman?"
Not precisely, I said.
"Well, what did he look like?" she said.
I asked her whether she meant that, were Ed Sullivan to walk into the room at that moment, she would not recognize him?
"No," she said. "I wouldn't."
"Did he look like this?"
I said that actually he had indeed, looked a little like that. Where had she seen him?
"Let me ask you something else," she said.
She stood up and let her arms hang in front of her like an orangutan.
"I think I saw him in a Beatles video," she said.
I said to go ahead.
The Beatles hadn't made videos, I said ; they had made movies
"Is it true that Elvis Presley and the Beatles made their first appearances on the Ed Sullivan show?" she said.
I said that, basically, that was true.
"Well, why did you watch them, then?" she said. "If they hadn't been on TV before, how did you know that you wanted to see them?"
I said that we watched Ed Sullivan every week.
"You mean you watched his show no matter what was on it?" she said. I said, yes.
"I see," she said. "Kind of like MTV."
Alas . . . it has come to pass. My generation, which alienated the rest of America in the '60s and '70s by
BOB GREENE
Syndicated Columnist
acting as if we had created the concept of youth, is now on the far side of a generation gap that excludes millions of our younger countrymen who have no real memory of Ed Sullivan.
The young woman is not alone; there are millions upon millions of bright, intelligent young people out there who are no more familiar with these girls than we were with Rudy Vallee or Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy.
To them, Lyndon B. Johnson is as distant a figure as FDR was to us; to them the idea of watching Jack Paar on television is as unimaginable as our thought of listening to Fred Allen on network radio.
Because we represented a big hump in the country's demographic profile, we always felt comfortably surrounded by others just like us; there are so many members of our generation that often we felt important just by being alive.
This shouldn't be so surprising, of
But there has never been a generation that seemed so happily, smugly certain that it was inventing the world for the first time than those of us in the so-called Baby Boom.
course; it happens to every generation, and it is probably a healthy thing.
This phenomenon has even extended to politics. Those of us who grew up during the war in Indochina and were still relatively young when Wateregat happened view the universe with a gimlet-eyed perverse that we always considered sort of weather-beaten and world-weary.
Which makes it all the bigger a shock when we now realize that a completely new generation has come along — a generation that frankly regards us as middle-aged and sort of quaint. The fact that they're right doesn't help any.
We may have assumed that the generations that came along after us would eagerly imitate our political attitudes.
But as my 18-year-old acquaintance said to me: "I'm real sorry about Vietnam and everything, but I
don't see why your generation hates the government and hates America so much."
Although she was over-simplifying, I knew exactly what she meant, it is far more likely that a member of her generation will join her in marching on a picket line protesting some bit of American foreign policy
I asked her what kind of music her mom and dad played.
"You know, classical stuff," she said.
My conversation with her was not the first time I have seen this new set of attitudes come up. A few months ago I was talking to another teenager, this one 17 years old, who seemed like to oak tapes in their ear.
"Like what?" "I asked."
And my old college roommate called me the other day to ask me whether I'd seen the present issue of Playboy — the one that features a pictorial about young men being actively involved with older women.
Like when I asked
"The Grateful Dead." she said.
"The older women" in the article are younger than we are!" he said "The older women' are 35 years old!"
Waiting to hear Gary Hart's new ideas
I was going to tell her about Topo Gigio, but I didn't have the heart.
Oh, well. My 18-year-old acquaintance asked me another question about what Ed Sullivan's show had been like.
An epidemic is sweeping the country.
It has been enveloping the East for months, but it is steadily enveloping the country.
It's not a rare form of the flu, nor does it have anything to do with Michael Jackson or even be
This affection is called, for lack of a better term, Hartmania.
It's difficult to pinpoint just how it all started, but once it had, it began snowballing, seemingly overnight.
One day, a young-looking senator from Colorado was talking another one of the Democratic candidates to him.
Then suddenly, without warning, we faced him on the front pages, middle pages and even back pages.
We turned on radio and televisions and heard everyone talking about him. It seemed everyone
I think my father is the only Ottawa native who hasn't been interviewed by the press about knowing Gary back when folks had to bother with that unwieldy "pence" after Hart. Dad was a Den Chief for Gary's Cub pack snack.
"I tried to lead him in the right direction," Dad
now modestly claims.
"C'mon Dad," I recently pleaded. "Surely you can remember some muckish tidbit about Gary."
"Maybe he did fewer good deeds than the others, or didn't pay his membership dues on time. And by the way, just how old is he?"
Dad couldn't come up with anything exciting.
I'll have to depend on the press and People magazine to inform me of any events in Gary's past.
JENNIFER FINE
Washington Columnist
Meanwhile, as long as people are inimputed with Hart through the media, a cure for Hartmarius is
Young people are the prevalent victims of this affliction. Acquaintances of mine, all incidentally
between 20 and 35 years old, have contracted the affliction.
it's srange to see how it affects them. They hear the word Hart and their eyes open wide, and they frantically start spouting off stuff about new ideas.
Sometimes I think I can help these people by letting them indulge in an explanation of these "new ideas." I hope that it could be therapeutic.
"Oh, well. he has lots of them," they reply, and go on with their business. Sometimes they'll go as far to say, "I really like his Central American policy," leaving me to wonder whether they really know what it is. Or if Gary even knows exactly what it is.
But then again, maybe I'm being too hard on Gary. After all, his campaign is supposed to be "thematic". Hart has said that rather than being self-centered, he should "until the country is ready to hear the message."
Maybe he does have some "new ideas" somewhere. His timely book, however, seems to be full of glittering generalities, while unremarkable is a pretty penny in his campaign pocketbook.
I think we're ready now Gary
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Suggesting day
To the editor:
I propose that the present "Wear Blue Jeans If You're Gay Day" be changed to "Wear Clothes If You Are Gay Day."
This will mean that on each "Wear Blue Jeans If You're Gay Day" everyone in the world would be a homosexual simply because no one would go outside with no clothes on.
This would obviously be a great victory for the gay community.
Within one day everyone in the world miraculously would be changed into a homosexual, simply boy. Boy, wasn't that easy on Friday. Boy, wasn't that easy on Friday.
I, for one, fail to see the connection
between the wearing of blue jeans and being a homosexual.
Right now the only type of pants I own are blue jeans, and I don't intend on buying a different style of pants to wear on "Wear Blue Jeans If You're Gay Days" just to prove that you are not a homosexual (which I am not).
I also suggest that everyone else on campus not recognize this idiotic whim of the gay community either.
I will not let the Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas impose its will upon me; therefore, I will not ask. Blue Jeans If You Are Gay Day."
Frank Lone
South Mount Laurel, N.J., freshma
I am sure that the gay community would be offended if the heterosexual community came up with a new way to express their sexual day," because that would
Mr. Menninger:
To the editor:
Redefine reality
mean all the gays would have to go around bare-chested.
Frank Ehle
Technology is advancing at a faster rate than our minds are able to use or understand it.
Thank you for trying to define the biggest problem that faces mankind. The line that really hit home is, "I don't know, my answers have become obscure."
We are still acting like cavemen. We are swerving clubs at things that we are not able to understand. The today is that our clubs are nuclear.
It is time that we understand history and realize that we have been responding to our problems like reptiles.
It is time to break tradition.
Reality can be redefined. If communism is our enemy, let's fight it with real capitalism, not guns.
Sony TV sets for El Salvador. Let us accept the less fortunate and make them our equals. Capitalism is necessary to exploitation and self-obesity.
Let us not try to control events.
Our system was based on individual
expression; that is what made our
country great.
We can lead the willing to take the chance. I'm ready, are you?
Jim Slough
Lawrence special student