OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
October 12,1983 Page4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Karan (USPS 60-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer-Firm Hall. Subscribes daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions. Excluding Saturday, daily during the regular school year and final period. Second class period. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for each student and $18 for six months or $3 for a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $3 a semester paid through the student activity POSTMASTER. Students must pay their subscription fee to the university.
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM STEVE CUSICK
Managing Editor Editorial Editor
LYNNE STARK
Campus Sales Manager
JOIN OBERZAN
Advertising Adviser
DON KNOX Campus Editor
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
DAVE WANMAKER MARK MEANS
Retail Sales National Sales
Manager
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
Wasted chance
Mayor David Longhurst had an excellent opportunity Monday to ask the Midwestern Governor's Conference for help in solving some of the region's problems.
The conference allows governors from nearly a dozen states to discuss and perhaps find solutions to a number of problems that affect the Midwest, such as agricultural policy and acid rain.
Longhurst, unfortunately, appears unable to take such an opportunity at face value. Instead, he used his welcoming speech Monday morning as a chance to ask the governors to help eliminate the fear of nuclear war.
Imagine that. The mayor is opposed to nuclear war. Surprise, surprise.
It's probably a safe bet that the governors at the conference are opposed to nuclear war, too. But just in case they aren't, Longhurst saw fit to remind them about it.
Yes, children, the bomb is dangerous. But Longhurst, ever humble, knows that he is only one individual. And the governors, because of their positions, are more influential than most people.
In a move reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's line about his daughter Amy and the bomb during a presidential debate, Longhurst even invoked the name of his son, John, in hopes of warding off the nasty nuclear monster.
What exactly does Longhurst want the governors to do? Should they call Reagan and tell him of their 13-year-old children? How about a march on Washington?
Longhurst's comments also call to mind his earlier talk of a Lawrence summit between Yuri Andropov and Ronald Reagan. Yes, right here in the River City, among amber waves of grain, humanity could be saved.
Nuclear weapons and their possible use are indeed cause for great concern. But nuclear war is not an issue that Longhurst needs to bring up every time the wind blows. Nor is it an issue that he needed to bring up at the governor's conference.
By doing so, he only belittled the other issues that the governors can and should address. Longhurst's comments should be forgotten so that both the governors and local politicians can move on to other things.
Acid rain compromise
The acid rain problem is everybody's problem, and the governors at the Midwestern Governors' Conference took a weak step toward admitting that by passing a compromise proposal for a temporary freeze on pollutant emissions.
However, the governors had an opportunity to take a hard-line stand, but they didn't, opting to represent home-state interests rather than the overall good of the country.
The defeated proposal, put forth by Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich, called for an amendment to the Clean Air Act that would prohibit one state from emitting pollution that could endanger the welfare of another state. It would require a 50 percent reduction in sulfur-dioxide emissions.
Illinois Gov. James Thompson proposed the compromise, which calls for a freezing of emissions based on 1980 total emissions for
sulfur and nitrogen oxides. It also calls for the establishment of a fund to research the problem. Kansas Gov. John Carlin agreed with the compromise and said there "has to be a more modest approach" than the Pernich proposal.
That's fine. But the pollutants are still being pumped into the atmosphere by industries throughout the Midwest. The Perpich proposal would've cut into those emissions. Such an approach is needed on the federal level, and the governors had the chance to send that message.
William Ruckelshaus, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, emphasized at the conference Monday that acid rain was a national problem. However, the process for eliminating it is expensive, he said.
But it'd be better to pay the price now than pay the higher costs in the future for reforesting dead forestlands and putting life back into lifeless lakes.
The last, lonely ring
Residents of Bryant Pond, Maine, have traded their cranks for dials and push buttons and the accompanying beep-beeps of direct-dialing telephones. They're dialing in a new era for their small town. But, to the sentimentalist, the new probably won't have the same familiar, comforting ring of the old.
The residents no longer will have to get "Mabel" on the line to place a call. They can do it themselves. But it seems that they'll lose something in the transition — perhaps a little bit of the personal touch and a sense of community the old system provided.
Bryant Pond was believed to have the last hand-cranked phone system in the country. But this idea, this inertia called progress said that it was time for Bryant Pond to join the rest of us direct dialers across the country. Some of the residents wanted to keep their town's little piece of telephonic history. They called themselves the "Don't Yank the Crank Committee" and complained, but progress won in the end
But why? What was the harm in letting a little town in western Maine hold on to a reminder from an earlier, seemingly simpler era?
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 information. The Kansan also lists 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
Langston Hughes' Lawrence
A Who's Who list of Lawrence luminaries would not be complete without the name of Langton Hughes, renamed black poet and author, who lived his life in a small house on Alabama Street.
Known for his writings describing the richness and extreme poverty of his own and other blacks' lives, Hughes used the grittiness of life in racially segregated Lawrence in the early 1900s to form the pearls of his later writings.
Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo. in 1902 but lived primarily in Lawrence with his grandmother, Mary Langston, from 1903 to 1915. His grandmother passed onto Hughes the family's tradition of fighting for freedom and racial equality.
Most of Hughes years in Lawrence were spent in great poverty, insecurity and, often, loneliness. Early 20th century towns, where blacks were racially segregated; blacks were refused service at
most white-owned restaurants and hotels, and were barred from white churches. Lawrence's abolitionist days had passed, and blacks and whites, for the most part, lived in separate worlds.
In his book "Not Without Laughter." published first in
KATE
DUFFY
Staff Columns
1930, Hughes described what it was to like up in the small fictional Kansas town of Stanton. But in an interview some years after the book's first printing, Hughes admitted that he had really been writing about Lawrence.
"Sitting one night in the Bar Boudon on rue Douai, where the Negro musicians gathered. I remembered once during my childhood in kansas my grandmother had given me an apple that had been bruseted and so had a brown spot on it. i dight I want to eat the apple." "My grandmother said. 'The matter with you, box? You can't expect every apple to be a perfect apple. just because it's a speck on it, you want to throw it away. Bite that speak out and eat that apple, it still is a good apple.'"
"That's the way the world is, I thought, if you hate the specks out, the will still work."
(From "I 'Wonder as I Wonder,' Langston Hughes' second pulbiography.)
So, when Hughes describes in his book, for example, the free-wheeling "Bottoms" area of town with its dance halls and bootleggers, he is actually describing the East Bottoms area north of Ninth Street in East Lawrence.
Knowing this, "Not Without Laughter" can be read almost as a history of early 20th century Lawrence — one written by a resident who, because he grew up on the "wrong side of town," never read any side of Lawrence that would never make the history books.
"It was a gay place — people did what they wanted to," Hughes wrote, "or what they had to do, and didn't care — for in the Bottoms folks ceased to struggle against the boundaries between gay or white and black, and surrendered amiably to immorality.
"Beyond Pearl Street, across the tracks, people of all colors came together for the sake of joy, the curtains being drawn only between themselves and the opposite side of the railroad, where the churches were and the big white Y.M.C.A. . . .
"To those who lived on the other side of the railroad and never realized the utter stupidity of the word 'sin', the Bottoms was vile and wicked. But to the girls who lived there, and the boys who pumped and fought and sold 'licker' there, 'sin' was a silly word that did not enter their heads."
Hughes was not one to clothe reality in overly elegant phrases. By the time he moved away from Lawrence in 1915, he had known enough hardship and misfortune to dissuade him from putting on what he called the "spectacles of Sunday school."
And it was those very hardships that fine-tuned his writing so that he could later write about misfortunes in such a that way they transcended his life and gave others' experiences as well.
When he died in 1967, Hughes certainly had not lived to see his dream of racial equality completely fulfilled. But he probably recognized that he had at least passed on this dream to millions of blacks who would not forget it — the same way Hughes carried on his family's dream and fight for racial equality.
Farmers headed for disaster
Thanks to misguided Reagan administration policies, the continuing worldwide recession and drought. American agriculture is strangling from a combination of low prices and a meager harvest. It seems as if the administration's goal is to lower food production by reducing agricultural uses by everybody in hundreds of farmers to go broke. This is a prescription that offends reason and morality.
In the next year, many farmers and the banks that support them will
ROBERT G. LEWIS
go under, while consumers will begin to pay sharply increased food prices. This miserable state of affairs was entirely predictable, given the prevailing economic policy of fighting inflation by slowing economic growth. For it is a slowdown in consumption — rather than overproduction — that is killing American farmers.
Economic Consultant
Thanks to the Reagan administration's payment-in-kind plan, which pays farmers to reduce their harvests, and this summer's severe drought, the U.S. crop failure this year has caused the biggest year-to-year decline in world grain production ever recorded. Production is down 94 million tons from last year, almost twice the previous
worst year-to-year decline of 56 million tons in 1974.
Signs of disaster are everywhere:
*Because of the shortages, basic agricultural commodity prices are rising and may run wild, spurring inflation. The price of soybeans may rise 60 percent, and that of corn 42 percent, over last year.
- Livestock, dairy and poultry producers will suffer severe income losses. Meat prices will rise, perhaps sharply, after an initial sell-off of breeding stock.
*American farm bankruptcies will increase sharply. Prices received by farmers, in real terms, reached in July the lowest ever recorded in the United States. Total annual net income from farming in the last four years, adjusted for inflation, averaged less than one-third that of 10 years ago and barely more than half of 1979's.
*The world's reserve of grain is just about gone. When the 1984 harvest begins, the worldwide carry-over from previous crops is projected to be just 12.7 percent of annual world consumption, compared with an average carry-over of about 20 percent throughout the 1960s. In 1973, a carry-over of 11.9 percent led to a tripling of grain prices and embargoes on U.S. grain sales.
- The government's expenditures for farm programs in 1983 will exceed a staggering $22 billion — six times as high as five years ago.
The Reagan administration's explanation is that farmers unwiseily overproduced, creating a mammoth "surplus" that depressed farm prices. The recession — for which the administration bears much responsibility — created this so-called surplus by cutting worldwide demand, and the ill-conceived and poorly timed PIK plan and the drought transformed it into the current food shortage.
The rational and humane solution to the agricultural crisis is for the United States to reject Reaganomics and allied doctrines that seek to counter inflation by raising interest rates and unemployment, thereby driving effective demand from the poor out of the market place.
We should instead adopt fiscal and social policies to promote vigorous national economic growth and make the American economy once again an engine that will pull the world economy ahead, so that more of the world's hungry can get jobs, earn money and buy enough to eat.
Copyright 1983 the New York Times. Robert G. Lewis writes extensively on agricultural issues. He was an administrator of commodity pricing and sales programs with the Agricultural Department from 1961 to 1965
Congress returning to secrecy
WASHINGTON - Despite "government in the sunshine" rules, Congress has found ways to close the blinds and leave the public in the dark at times about how it transacts the public's business.
As the sting of Watergate wears off, the passion to uncloak secrecy in government seems to be wailing.
Congressmen again are sampling what it's like to close out the press, public and lobbyists from committees and too many are finding they like it.
For example, Congressional Quarterly reported that a record 43 percent of congressional hearings and meetings had been closed in 1988.
Today, no one is keeping statistics. But any daily observer on Capitol Hill would soon find himself closed out of discussions ranging from legal issues to how tax dollars are spent in the system; a door, then by crafty maneuvers.
Granted, more doors to Capitol Hill committee rooms are open now than they were before 1975, when the Senate followed the House's lead and adopted open meeting rules for itself and other government agencies.
Both the House and Senate have "sunshine" rules requiring open committee hearings and meetings, except when they touch on national security, privacy, trade secrets, committee personnel or a criminal investigation.
The House rules have a giant loophole, allowing a committee by majority vote to close a markup on
BARBARA ROSEWICZ
United Press International
pending legislation for any reason.
But lawmakers in both the House and Senate have learned there often are easier ways to get around the rules.
Some of the more popular sneak plays, performed in public, are
- The football huddle. It was popularized by former Rep. Richard Bolling. D Mo., when he headed the rules committee. Lawmakers group head-to-head at the center or perimeters of a competition, and business in maddible whispers but in full view of the public.
- The committee caucus. Lawmakers take their seats at the scheduled meeting time, but before the gavel is poured they disappear in threes, fours or by full commitment, room to emerge with a compromise.
- The Senate Judiciary Committee tried the technique just last month, disappearing for more than an hour from a packed room full of citizens, press and lobbyists waiting for action on the U.S. Civil Rights Act, but not even the back-room negotiations yielded a compromise.
- Shuttle diplomacy It is useful when conference committee members are working out differences between House and Senate bills. Representatives and senators leave camp and then return separately in private and then send their staff back and forth between camps with bargaining proposals.
*The "I've got a secret" play. This phenomenon is found occasionally among House appropriations subcommittees, which will vote under their rules to close a business session on the bill, refuse to disclose the dollar amounts until the bill is put before the full committee.
These techniques don't even take into account the hard-to-track-down deals cut by telephone conference calls, through staff correspondence or in elevators and hallways.
Lawmakers explain that it saves time and their political hides to be able to cut deals in private, out of the watchful eye and ear of lobbyists and the media. But open government never was billed to be quick and efficient.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
City and University should support Haskell
To the editor:
"For a town that's supposed to be hip there really is prejudice."
That was the comment of Joseph Powell, a student at Haskell Indian Junior College who was featured in the Sept. 27 Kansan. And I strongly feel that I must agree with him and his statement.
In my opinion Haskell Junior College has not and continues not to receive support in its role as a community college either from the University of Kansas or from the University of Kansas and its students.
As a student working part-time through school, I have frequent occasion to visit Haskell and interact with its students. I also work with others who have dealt with Haskell and am personally appalled and ashamed of some of the comments these "educated" people let from their mouths. For example, I don't know how you'd feel, but I think describing a delivery out to Haskell as "making a run out to the reservation" is derogatory, degrading and downright insulting. Yet, this is the treatment the Indians seem to get throughout Lawrence.
Granted, there are some Indian
students who seem hostile toward "outliers," but after years of negative treatment from a city that virtually surrounds you, I'd expect the majority of your readers to feel the same way.
I feel it is past time for us to dispel our myths about Indians and give the students of Haskell, who only seek what the rest of Lawrence's population of college students are seeking: an education, some merit and assistance, whether this be in the form of access to the University campus, a part-time job in the community, or a smile instead of
frowns as we pass them on the street.
Also, your paper on Sept. 27 promised more in the way of articles and calendars of activities at Haskell. Well, unless I missed it, you have reneged on the promise and I for one anxiety await your next installment on the students and activities at Haskell Junior College.
I think you realize that in covering a "community" your paper has a responsibility to cover the entire community. This is why I use Haskell Junior College.
Gerry R. Cain
Camp Springs, Md., junior