OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
September 9,1983 Page4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 bv students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kanan (159N 60340) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer Pint Hall, Lawrence, KS, 60044, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during break. Subscribes are $1 for six months or $2 for three months. Subscriptions by mail are $1 for six months or $2 a year in Douglas County and $1 for six months or $3 for a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $1 a semester through the university. **MOSTWAYED:** Send a check to the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer Pint Hall, Lawrence, KS, 60044.
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM STEVE CUSICK
Managing Editor Editorial Author
MICHAEL ROBINSON
Campus Editor
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
MARK MEARS National Sales Manager
LYNNE STARK
Campus Sales Manager
DAVE WANAMAKER
Retail Sales
Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Advertising Adviser
Bolivar's unity
Simon Bolivar had the right idea for Latin America. He wanted a Latin America united by a Hispanic bond. The Hispanics didn't need America or Europe meddling in their affairs. And they still don't.
The bicentennial of Bolivar's birth recently was celebrated at the University of Kansas, Bolivar, the "liberator" who led independence movements throughout Latin America in the early 1800s, believed that common bond could unite the region. And his words are becoming the rallying cry for those who want to tie the splintered, war-torn region together.
Bolivar's idea of unity is a goal of the Contadora group — Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela. Representatives of the group met this week to discuss a peaceful solution to the region's problems.
But as long as the two superpowers continue filling the region
with bombs, that goal may never be realized.
released.
The Contadora group wants the superpowers to quit pumping weapons and military advisers into the region. They also don't want U.S. soldiers entering the fray.
soliters entering disasters. Bolivar would approve. But he had an even greater vision for Latin America. He wanted it to be a balance between Europe, an old power, and the United States, an emerging power in his day.
energizing power Latin America can still achieve that position. But the role must expand — it can be that common ground between West and East. And Latin America would truly be free
But that's not likely to happen as long as Reagan and his cronies keep trying to resurrect the Monroe Doctrine and the Soviets continue exporting instability to the region. The superpowers keep meddling in a part of the world that belongs to neither. It belongs to the Latin Americans.
Group keeping watch
With our nation's lawmakers continually hounded by special interest groups ranging from popcorn growers to Nazis, it's hard to believe they ever have time to listen to some of the saner voices lost in the lobbying shuffle.
the lobbying effort.
Thus it comes as a nice surprise that some federal officials are taking seriously allegations made by the National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform. The coalition this week accused the Department of Health and Human Services of failing to ensure that nursing home patients received good care or that taxpayers' money was well spent.
was well prepared "The public needs and expects a strong, effective regulatory system, which provides essential protections to vulnerable persons who have limited choice of services, limited
mobility and limited opportunity to voice their concerns," said Elma Holder, the coalition's executive director.
The government is now studying the coalition's proposals, which were endorsed by 40 other organizations. The 1982 Reagan administration proposals to relax inspection requirements for nursing homes have been put on hold.
Surely, the state of America's nursing homes is not the elderly equivalent of a scene from "Oliver Twist" or "Life in the Iron Mills." But perhaps that is because groups such as the National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform are keeping watch. Let's hope that our lawmakers seriously consider and, if need be, act on these allegations.
Our elderly deserve no less
Needed tax increase
President Reagan pooh-poohs all the talk about budget deficits because he can't bear to think of closing the gap by raising taxes. Besides, there's an election coming, and Congress — that magical temple of fearless, principled leadership — thinks tax increases are bad politics, too.
The unhappy result of this craven behavior is that Uncle Sam is continuing to spend far more than he takes in — as much as $200 billion more in fiscal 1984 — and this imbalance is threatening to freeze the recovery's momentum in its tracks.
Congress has a few months (before the onset of the election
This could represent an important step back toward budget sanity and would show the world that the United States is serious about getting its fiscal house in order. Such tax increases would stir Reaganites' wrath, to be sure. But when prospects for the whole U.S. economy are at stake, it would seem time for the issue of fiscal responsibility to be squarely joined.
year, when political courage gets rare as rubies) to approve the tax increases — $73 billion over the next three years — that it already has signaled by adopting its 1984 budget resolution.
—The (Providence, R.I.) Evening Bulletin
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 position. The Kansan alliates individual submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hail. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
LETTERS POLICY
The world mourns and rightly grieves the death of 298 innocent passengers and crew members aboard a South Korean airliner which was apparently shot down by a Soviet fighter; but at the same
Response fans Cold War flames
trying to create the impression that something has been added to the communist arsenal of evil deeds: the practice of shooting down unarmed commercial planes so that none of us can feel safe anymore as passengers on commercial airliners.
time it is deeply regrettable that the U.S. administration has used the incident to fan anew the flames of the Cold War.
Referring to it as a "massacre," the president has milked the unfortunate occurrence for all its political worth, asking for renal support of his armament program to deter "terrorists." Depriving this incident as evidence of communist brutality and callousness, Washington is
The world reaction to what happened, which was highly detrimental to Soviet prestige and to Soviet goals (such as the goal of forestalling the stationing of U.S. cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe this fall), could easily have been predicted.
Assuming that it was not an accident or a case of misidentification of the plane as one Soviet source alleges, and assuming that the order to fire did not come from a lower level of the Soviet hierarchy, why then would the Soviet leadership have decreed a course of action from which it obviously had much to lose and apparently nothing to gain? Although we would hardly approve of the shooting down of the plane, no matter what the reason, is this not perhaps one question we should seriously be asking ourselves?
The South Korean Boeing 747 has three independently operating, computerized cross-checking navigation systems; it also was equipped with radar that enables pilots to follow specific terrain features without difficulty. As a standard practice, crew members always check the entries made on keyboards by their colleagues. The
it had happened, in spite of all odds against it, it should have been noticeed immediately, and the course corrected within minutes.
In light of these undeniable facts, why did the plane stray some 500 miles into Soviet air space and飞 close to 2/4 hours, not just a few minutes, over highly sensitive and highly secret Soviet military installations?
GUEST COLUMN
Moreover, the powerful Shemyra radio station, 150 miles from the third way point along the Aleutian chain, provides an excellent opportunity for passing planes to tune in from Shemyra. The direction and distance from Shemyra.
automatic pilot keeps a plane on course from designated point to designated point along a prescribed route — and there were nine such points listed along that route on pilot maps.
No one is trying to minimize the terrible loss of life of so many innocent human beings; but does intelligent world opinion not have the right to demand an answer to these questions? And when the president asks that all necessary steps be taken to assure the safety of the skies for all our planes, and when he and his aides ponder what these steps should be, shouldn't attention be focused on an all-out effort to make certain that in the future our planes and the planes of our allies do not fly over Soviet territory and military installation$^2$
American experts seem virtually united in their view that under the circumstances it would have been practically impossible for the Korean plane to have strapped accidentally into Soviet air space; but if
Harry G. Shaffer is a professor of economics and of Soviet and East European studies at the University of Kansas.
Statutes aimed wrong way
State wastes time, money on liquor laws
The Kansas Legislature has demonstrated a paternal instinct, but instead of protecting its fledglings from outside evils, it's trying to shield them from their own wantonness.
It wants to keep them from drinking.
Consuming alcohol is one of those activities that was long ago branded as sinful and is still tied up in moral
and legal strings. Those strings are continually being yanked in different directions by those who want moral laws against the evil spirits, those who want protection laws against animal cruelty, and those who want to choose for themselves what they put into their blood streams.
Alcohol has its victims. Some people can't drink it without letting it rule them. Others ignore their altered state after drinking and, slow and uncoordinated, slip behind
the wheel, jeopardizing the lives of others on the road.
But most people can drink without hurting others, and most enjoy it. It's not an institution that's going to disappear and it shouldn't be burdened.
promoted.
Laws that try to directly protect citizens from those who drink irresponsibly are good. Noble, even. But a law that focuses on keeping 17-year-olds out of bars for 18-year-olds, and 20-year-olds out of 21 clubs is aimed the wrong way.
Yet that is what a state law that went into effect July 1 is designed to do. It cracks down on those who borrow or loan I.D.s or obtain or make fake ones to buy liquor be'ore they've reached legal age.
they've reached legal age.
The law makes you take a fake I.D. a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $500 and a month in jail. It stiffens the penalty for loaning an I.D. to someone under age who uses it to buy alcohol or get a fake driver's license.
a fake driver or
It also makes dealing in false
identification a felony that can be
punished by a maximum fine of
$5,000 and a prison sentence of up to
five years.
five years.
It's an irritating law designed to uphold another one — the one that assigns an arbitrary age of responsibility. That law brings out the rebel lurking in young teenagers, who, when given a chance, will drink themselves blind and sick, not
because what they drink is sweet but because it is forbidden.
The age law tells 18- to 20-year-olds that although they must assume the duties of adulthood, they may not yet partake of all the privileges. The government in this case usually argues that it is protecting its novice adults from their immature gluttony.
If we didn't have laws to protect our thirsty selves from ourselves, we probably wouldn't drink so much. More people would learn to drink at home and would become to handle liquids like time they were used to drink. They would think of alcohol as an enjoyable drink, not as a danger to be tested to the limit
But we do have laws and they're getting tougher.
You can go to jail for getting into a club with a fake I.D., hardly an uncommon commodity in any college town in Kansas.
It could even be really daring and direct more energy at productive things, such as education programs and the arts.
The intentions of the state may be honorable. But if Kansas is concerned about the welfare of young adults, it should increase efficiencies in prisons and in threats. It should fight real injustice, not college students at play.
Instead, it's wasting time and money trying to keep 20-year-olds out of the clubs.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Columnist used fallacious logic
To the Editor:
I got a good chuckle out of the editorial page item "Industry Needs a Real Disaster," by Noel Perrin, in the Sept. 1 Kansan. His clever use of fallacious logic led me to speculate about applications of the same process.
A person convinced of the evils of homosexuality might hope to see 10,000 gay outlaw bikers descent on a Boy Scouts jamboree and proceed to batter the youngsters in attendance.
A person opposed to commercial whaling might wish to organize an expedition to exterminate all remaining blue whales for the TV cameras to demonstrate the importance of his or her views.
Someone opposed to the private ownership of bandguns may long to see card-carrying members of the National Rifle Association whip out Lugers and shoot up the forthcoming Democratic convention
Radical feminists might tout the promotion of anti-ERA rape gangs in Washington, D.C.
I can even see applications to a prejudice of my own. I'd like to propose that the Kansan locate a member of the lunatic fringe of the nuclear freeze movement and convince him to write an article advocating mass death and destruction from a preventable nuclear accident. I suppose that's too much to hope for, however.
Robert T. Curry
Director of laboratories
Department of physics
and astronomy
A record stained in blood
WASHINGTON — A curious process sometimes comes into play when the West casts its eye on Mideastern radical and one-man regimes. The process is a form of canonization — or the equivalent of it.
In the minds of Western policy makers looking for solutions to diffuse problems, the leaders — onetime radicals, despats, usurpers — become not saints but moderates. The policy makers submit themselves to a willful and bisfustal act of amnesia.
athissa:
It happened to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. It happened to the Palestine Liberation Organization's Yasir Arafat. Now it's happening to Hafez-al-Azad, Syria's president.
The Reagan Administration, frantically searching for a way to save a desperate state with a nuclear solution lies in Damascus. Ergo, Assad has become
AMOS PERLMUTTER
Professor of Political Science at American University
a moderate — despite the conspicuous absence of any sign that he would be remotely accommodating to a peaceful solution in Lebanon.
But the continuing Lebanese stalemate, the skirmish involving U.S. Marines and Assad's malicious behavior in the region generally make it imperative we all chose this alleged savior more carefully.
A look at the Assad record shows just how futile it is to place any hope in him. The record is one of sustained violence, deviousness and implacable hostility to the United States.
Assad came to power in 1966 in a brutally engineered coup in which about 400 high-ranking Moslem officers were killed or exiled. In 1970, he turned on his parties; Jadid in another of 1973, Assad joined Egypt in a joint attack on Syria which Syria suffered heavily.
Yet in all that time he was seen by the West as a force for stability and political continuity in Syria. Assad used this tactic against the UN, as a despot who brooks no opposition.
This was demonstrated two years ago when, threatened by a fundamentalist rebellion of Sunnis, he acted quickly and in bloody fashion, very nearly raiding the city. He then head-quarters for the main source of the rebellion. In the process, an estimated 30,000 civilians were killed
His record in Lebanon is twisting and violent. Once Lebanon's civil war began, Assad became a political whirling dervish, first supporting the Chamisal and then supporting the Palestineans then supporting the FLO against the Christians.
The ultimate result was to leave Assad with a stranglehold on more than 50 percent of Lebanon. Since the end of the Lebanese war, Assad has consistently rebuffed any efforts to find a peaceful solution.
It is futile to think that U.S. special envoy Robert C. McFarlane will fare well with Assad, especially after Assad unceremoniously refused to see his predecessor, the highly respected Phil C. Habib.
10 court Assad is plain fool-hardiness on the part of the administration. He is about as benign as a fox in a chicken coop. He is not now and never has been a moderate, nor is he a potential friend.
Copyright 1983 the New York Times
1