OPINION
The University Daily
KANSAN
October 13, 1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansas (USPS 605-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer-Findl Hall, Lawrence, KS 60955, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions. Subscriptions are $15 for six months or $27 for a year. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $27 for a year. The county student subscriptions are $3 a semester paid through the student activity for POSTMasters. Send the address to: USPS Office, 118 Stauffer-Findl Hall, Lawrence, KS 60955.
MARK ZIEMAN Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM STEVE CUSICK
Managing Editor Editorial Editor
DON KNOX Campus Editor
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
LYNNE STARK
Campus Sales Manager
DAVE WANAMAKER
Retail Sales
Manager
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
MARK MEARS National Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Advertising Adviser
Farm resolution
Farm-state governors at the Midwestern Governors' Conference have taken a good step in their approval of a resolution calling for a bipartisan, national agricultural policy committee. The resolution, however, could easily suffer the history of many similar initiatives: many intentions, no actions.
A positive sign for action on this latest initiative is that it is to be discussed by the National Governors' Association next year.
A negative sign is that the resolution is vague. Some governors at the Midwestern conference opposed a description of the committee as a Federal Reserve Board for agriculture. One governor questioned whether the committee would conduct central planning similar to that of the Soviet Union. Indeed, these questions came from farm-state governors who eventually voted to recommend the resolution not from governors of non-agricultural states who might be especially skeptical.
The problems faced by many farmers throughout the nation prompted the resolution on the agricultural policy committee as well as other farm-related resolutions at the conference. The resolutions covered topics that ranged from soil conservation to exports, but the most important resolution, because of its broadness, concerns the committee.
Such a committee may not be a panacea, but national farm policy has been in a herky-jerky metamorphosis for years. A committee that would consider future needs of consumers and producers rather than just day-to-day political concerns could greatly strengthen the state of agriculture.
More thought and preparation, however, are needed to give an agricultural policy committee a firm basis and to keep it from becoming yet another paperwallowing monument to inaction. In the arena of agricultural politics, the wheat has to be separated from the chaff.
To the highest bidder
The presidential election is more than a year a way, but the high-powered political organizations of Walter Mondale and John Glenn already have raised millions of dollars — a reminder that presidential campaigns have become too expensive.
And so far the players have just pitched in the ante. The stakes will grow as election time draws near and President Reagan starts tapping his rich Republican friends.
became a game for only those who could make the highest bids.
Mondale has raised $6.1 million this year, and Glenn has raised $4.1 million. How, in good conscience, can a candidate spend that much money on a presidential bid? How, in good conscience, can society permit it? Somewhere, sometime, some priority became twisted, and that poker game for the presidency
Mondale raised about $1 million during the third quarter of 1983, compared to Glenn's $1.5 million. Mondale will qualify for $3 million in federal matching funds in January, and Glenn will qualify for $1.7 million.
The cries for spending reforms will grow as the campaign coffers fill. But we'll start early. Candidates are spending millions too much, and it's time some sane limits were put on campaign spending.
Presidential contenders may be able to bluff the public with their rhetoric, but in a society that seems to rarely realize those sweet promises, that money could be put to better use than being wasted in a poker game.
From the bust of Pallas
With October resembling bleak December, the rains turning the dark, barren campus into dismal tarns and pools and the tolling bells of the campanile evoking shivers of afright at the melancholy menace of their tone, it seems only logical that our thoughts turn to death.
The death of Edgar Allan Poe.
And Halloween.
One hundred and thirty-four years ago last Friday, Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital. But there is no space here to properly eulogize the master of the macabre, and besides, it is more useful to read Poe than to praise him.
Instead, let us ponder over the cooling corpse of Halloween, grieving with a sorrow that can be equaled only by Poe's yearning for his lost Lenore.
All around us, the death knell for Halloween is sounding. It rings
across local fields of shriveled pumpkins killed by the drought. It echoes through increasingly deserted streets each Oct. 31, when news of razor blades, drug injections and molestations keep frightened children inside. It roars in the heads of psychologists who seek redeeming social value in spook houses, and lead campaigns to have them banned.
One hundred and thirty-four years after the death of Poe, the Raven has returned to croak the obituary of Halloween. With this lonesome October, Halloween's most immemorial year is at hand. Soon, as we sit in hope on Halloween night with our candy, popcorn and caramel apples, and imagine a child's faint tapping, rapping at our doors, we will open them to find —
Darkness there, and nothing more.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 300 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 faculty or staff address, the Kansan who lectured individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
LETTERS POLICY
Senate shouldn't dissolve panel
Are you aware that at the last Student Senate meeting an attempt was made to merge the Minority Rights Committee with the Student Rights Committee?
On the surface it may seem to some a simple task, efficient in nature. But as a student senator and member of the House of Representatives, Union, I am very concerned about
the long-term effects this rule change would have on minority students.
The justification behind this proposal came from those who think the Minority Affairs Committee hasn't had time to take action, and how this decision was made since
A comment by Robert Walker, chairman of the Student Rights Committee, that the Minority Affairs Committee had not proposed any legislation, is ironic in that many Student Senate committees have not proposed bills, and when it was suggested that a last Senate meeting, it was stifled by Walker's technical maneuvering of Roberts Rules of Order.
none of the people involved with this proposal have ever attended a Minority Affairs Committee meeting.
It would also be foolish to dissolve the Minority Affairs Committee based on what the Student Senate record says. It is a summary of what each committee reported and not what they actually have done. At the last Senate meeting several com-mittees were present, gave no report. Should we assume that they have done nothing? Should they be removed from office because it looks on paper as if they have done nothing? That's what
some are trying to do with the Minority Affairs Committee.
However, it is my contention that the actions of the Minority Affairs Committee have been ignored or overlooked. I would dissolve the committee is like
GUEST COLUMN
pulling the welcome mat from under our feet before we have a chance to get in the door.
Walker has no business trying to run a committee that was established solely to meet the needs of minority students. What gives him or any other non-minority the right to tell us what we need? My advice is that the Rights Committee stick to writing policy and let the Minority Affairs Committee handle its own concerns. The Rights Committee hasn't done anything in the past to help minority students so why should we expect them to do something now?
My special thanks to those senators who vote to keep the Minority Affairs Committee a separate standing committee. To those students who were not at the last Senate meeting, I hope you will weigh this issue and vote in favor of keeping the Minority Affairs Committee separate. I urge all minority students to stand up for what was designed to meet their needs. Write the editor, attend the next Student Senate meeting at 7 p.m., Oct.19, in the Big Eight Room of the Kansas Union.
More minority students also should run for the Student Senate and show they are just as capable of making their own decisions. Did you know that of 56 Senators, only two are black, and that there are no native Americans, Mexican-Americans or international students in the Senate? If you don't stand up for what belongs to you, no one else will. Together we can accomplish what we could not do separately.
Cheri Brown, 21, is a Topeka junior majoring in social welfare.
Bill addresses child-support problem
The growing number of parents who financially abandon their children is a national disrace.
— is beyond belief. Yet it happens every day.
That a divorced father (or mother, as in the rare case) would refuse to help support his children — in effect deny them food, shelter and clothing is beyond belief. Yet it happens
Child-support delinquency has reached epidemic proportions and is growing in all income brackets. A struggling California mother collected $13,761 in back child-support payments only after her former husband spent several days in jail following an eight-year nationwide
MARGE ROUKEMA
Republican Representative from New Jersey
chase. A Pennsylvania woman, whose pre-divorce income was $178,000 a year, now finds herself refused regular money for the children and must fall back on food stamps in order to survive.
Such cases are not rare. In 1981, according to the latest Census Bureau data available, only 53 percent of the custodial parents received the full court-ordered payment due their children. Twenty-eight percent received nothing. Out of $9.9 billion due in
A system of mandatory deduction of wages would relieve crowded court dockets, use existing state agencies more productively, provide universal coverage and keep many families off welfare. Most importantly, it would guarantee as completely as possible that no child is held hostage by inadequate economic support.
The bill would require states to enforce laws to collect child-support payments through mandatory withholding of wages from the time a support decree is issued. The withholding would be no more
court-ordered child support, $3.8 billion went uncollected. The issue here is not alimony — only child support.
The present system of collection is costly and ineffective. Fundamental reform is in order. And the heart of any such reform should be the mandatory withholding of wages for child support, coupled with a reciprocity agreement among the states. Legislation designed to do just that, called the National Child Support Enforcement Act*, is now under consideration by a House subcommittee.
The system must apply to all economic classes. Previous attempts at reform have generally focused on collection problems involving families that are dependent on welfare. Such class-oriented approaches and does nothing to help the children of families not on welfare.
It also must be simple to enforce It should use exist state mechanisms, establish no new bureaucracies and place no further strain on already overcrowded court dockets.
complicated than other current wage deductions; for example, an employer would send only one check to each state child-support agency. The reform could exclude a parent who frequently clean record of compliance.
Finally, we need genuine reform.
not just the illusion of reform. Some reformers have suggested that we allow two months of missed child-support payment before triggering wage withholding. But to permit workers to expect that would be to perpetuate the complexities — and the pain — of the present system.
Some fathers argue that the threat to withhold payments is a necessary weapon to insure their visiting rights. Yet to engage in economic terrorism with one one's own children as hostages is not the solution. Automatic withholding of wages removes the children as pawns. The main objective is to prevent delinquency in all cases.
A system of mandatory deduction of wages would relieve crowded court dockets, use existing state agencies more productively, provide universal coverage and keep many families off welfare. Most importantly, it would guarantee as completely as possible that no child is held hostage by inadequate economic support.
Child support is not a voluntary commitment. Denying a child the support he or she needs is an assurance that can no longer be endured.
Copyright 1983 the New York Times
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Cost of Vietnam memorial small price to pay
To the editor
This letter is written in response to a letter written by Mark Cline that appeared in Frida's Kansan
I would like to point out to Cline — and anyone else who entertains similar thoughts — a possible "train of thought that could lead a rational student to the conclusion that we should spend money on a fountain dedicated to the victims of a colossal foreign policy blunder."
Vietnam was not a "colossal foreign policy blunder"; it was U.S.
involvement and intervention on behalf of a beleaguered nation being forced to succumb to a communist neighbor. Vietnam was the giving of 58,000 lives (roughly the population of Lawrence) to assist another country. Vietnam should not and cannot be forgotten — it produced 2 million veterans; 2 million Americans who have had to fight for freedom. The multitude of Cines who refuse to accept them and give them the respect they have earned because war is "morally wrong."
Cline suggested that the money be
spent on a series of talks and lectures to inform us of the evils of involvements such as Vietnam, and that Americans be allowed to choose whether we become involved as a nation. Talk is fine for dinner table conversation but, if it is not backed with some form of action, it is just talk. The last defenders of Saigon can attest to the effectiveness of discussion America is informed — she has the finest and most extensive media system in the world. As for the suggestion that the American people decide U.S. action, they already do; every two and four
years the american public goes to the polls and elects those people it feels best represents them.
The fact remains that the $20,000 for the memorial is a small sum in comparison to a life How can someone be so callous as to deny the need for the acknowledged of the American Vietnam veteran and his sacrifices? Obviously Cline does not realize the plight of the veteran nor is he among those of us who lost relatives and friends to Vietnam.
1
James A. King Eudora senior