Page 12 ___ University Daily Kansan, September 16, 1983
Activists seek to spread facts on Central America
By GINA K. THORNBURG Staff Reporter
A recent state-wide information campaign in Kansas by a national activist group found that people in this area were not well-informed about the Central American conflict, but that people were concerned once they were informed, the president of the group said yesterday.
"People are really hungry for information that is not characterized by the kind of rhetoric we often use," Lucus Walker, president of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, said at Latin American School, weekly rice-and-beans dinner at the Ecumenical Christian Ministries.
Walker, Englewood, N.J., was one of 14 members of IFCO to tour 30 cities in Kansas this week during IFCO's American Information Campaign Week.
Walker said the aim of IFCO, a New York-based organization, was to determine the places in the country where people were not as well informed about the Central American conflict as people in other areas of the country.
KANSAS WAS THE starting point for IFCO's effort
He said it was important for activists to devise new, creative ways to educate and involve people without using the typical political rhetoric.
"SOMETIMES WE MAKE the mistake of using stilted language that doesn't communicate to people who aren't political vet." Walker said.
Walker said the group wanted to reach as much of the public as possible to help them critically analyze Presidentagan's policies in Central America.
He said eight of the 14 IFCF members touring Kansas were from Central
"Our message is non-intervention," he said.
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Walker said he had kept in contact with the other IFCO members this week and that he had repeatedly been told that people were uninformed.
He said that he wanted to correct the "misinformation" given by the U.S. government, but that American people tendency to trust the government.
He said IFCO wanted Reagan to withdraw military and economic aid from El Salvador and to initiate negotiations that would bring a peaceful resolution to the Salvadoran conflict.
He said the common reaction to the Central American issue was, "Our government wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't the right thing."
But people reacted in other ways too, he said.
AFTER HE SPOKE with one group, Walker said, two elderly men approached him and one of them said, "We know that Reagan lies.
“But we don't know how to understand what he's saying. We just know that he's not telling the truth,” the man said, according to Walker.
He urged activists to find creative ways to reach the general public.
He said one way of reaching people was through churches.
"I'M NOT SAYING that people who are not originally nominally Christian ought to belong." he said. "I'these of us who considered ourselves as having outgrown the church kind of forgetting it, we ought to belong to the church.
The practical side of belonging to a church is the sense of community it provides for its members, he said.
"Most people on the left see the value of the institution, the gathered community, the people."
He said that instead of remaining outside of the community and asking for its support, activists should join it.
"It's far wiser to be a part of that community."
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