OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
September 1, 1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansan (USP$ 605-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 181 Stauffer Finst Hall, Lawrence, KS 66535, daily during the regular school year and on Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions. Subscriptions are $15 for six months or $27 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 for a year. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $27 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 for a year. Subscriptions by email are $15 for six months and paid through the student activity "POSTMASTER." Send address information to: U.S.Postmaster, 415 Broadway, New York, NY 10020.
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Firsts in space
What the United States needs is a Vulcan in space. Or, at the very least, a Klingon.
Once again, the nation is making the most out of a space first: Guion Bluford, the "first black spaceman." Bluford joins firsts Sally Ride, the "first American woman in space" and his crew member William Thornton, who, at 54, is "the oldest man in space." While these may indeed be legitimate aeronautical milestones, they also point out just how young our space program really is, and just how far it has to go before the question of firsts becomes passe.
Already people are demanding other firsts. For instance, Juanita Morgan of the National Black Women's Political Caucus wants the United States to concentrate next on sending a black woman into space. How many more firsts are needed? First Hispanic. First handicapped person. First homosexual. The list is endless.
Perhaps some of us have become
spoiled by the creatures found in "Star Trek" or movies such as "Star Wars," who, with their pointy ears, foreign origins or monstrous faces, make the statement "first black spaceman" ridiculously over-emphasized in comparison.
Such television shows and movies, if nothing else, may at least convince our children that there really isn't anything special about blacks or women or older folks in space, although even 20-30 years from now a Vulcan may still be news.
Yet, one must begin somewhere, and it is important that with Ride, Bluford and Thornton we finally have begun the important task of making space travel a truly universal experience, bridging the gap between a space shuttle and space stations, moon cities, space caninas, Death Stars or whatever. It's just rather sad that it's taken the United States so long to begin this journey.
Still living in poverty
Twenty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s stirring message to thousands who marched on Washington, one-third of America's 26.5 million billions still live in poverty.
The Census Bureau reports that blacks still "overrepresent" some of the lowest paying jobs in America. They account for over one-half of all private household cleaners and servants, and one-third of the maids and garbage collectors.
If better opportunities are not available to blacks, especially black single mothers, America will see a generation of black families trapped in an even deeper poverty.
Earlier this week, leaders of the coalition that helped organize the anniversary march announced they were setting up an office in Washington to keep its members apprised
of key legislation and local legislators' voting records.
This political pressure, coupled with Saturday's march, said Walter Fauntoy, the march's chairman, might help produce the necessary reforms that could steer the nation toward making changes that would ease the burden on America's low-income families.
The coalition could play an important role in the future of black Americans. With a poverty rate nearly three times the rate for whites and with 70 percent of poor black families headed by women, who traditionally hold lower-paying, dead-end jobs, blacks need to lobby hard through such coalitions, the voting booth or whatever it takes to get structural changes in the american economic and social structure.
Let's hope America's decision makers listen to the coalition.
Using high-tech to reach top 10
After two years of telling people he wanted the University of Kansas to be one of the top 10 state universities in the nation, Chancellor Gene A. Budig apparently has pulled a quick verbal two-step.
Instead of emphasizing that goal, Budig, who began his third year as chancellor this semester, now is telling us that the University can play an important role in developing high technology.
It seems that the first two years of his tenure were built around that theme of making KU a top-10 school. Budig made a tour of every county state, promoting higher education, general and his goal in particular.
The past two years of road shows and speeches amounted to nothing more than pulp for the rich alumni.
The chancellor's rhetoric had a hollow ring. In his speeches, Budig didn't let us in on which yardstick he
"top-10 school" captured the imagination of many students.
nation of many students.
That was the problem
GENE
GEORGE
Staff Columnist
Or perhaps the political climate wasn't right at the time for him to reveal the whole plan.
But now, there is an opportunity for Budgi to give his goal meaning and perhaps even achieve it. That opportunity — the development of high technology — grew out of the state's recent budget erisus
intended to use to determine our status. He didn't tell us how he intended to get us there, or how much it would cost or even what we students should do to help. And he would get there, or just when we would get there.
The Legislature last year had to curtail some government services and even had to take back some money it had allocated to universities when revenues fell short of projections.
The governor and lawmakers agreed that expanding the state's economy could prevent such problems in the future, which is why the state has become interested in developing a high-tech industry here.
Perhaps he didn't know himself
As often happens, action has grown out of a crisis. And whether or not there has been a conscious shift in behavior, one of our University could stand to benefit
KU already has been given an important role to play in the development of high technology. When the Legislature was doling out research and development money, it established "centers of excellence" two other Board of Regents schools to study high technology
According the the statistics, the world's population has grown by a billion in 13 years, from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 4.7 billion as of the end of June. The countries contributing most to the increase include poorer countries such as China, Brazil and Bangladesh.
References to that top to goal have grown few and far between these days, but I wonder whether this means the goal has been abandoned
Budig may only have been restating his original goal when he said at this year's convocation that high tech research would allow KU staff to "make enduring contributions in areas of economic significance."
can get. And the world's natural resources continue to dwindle.
China has instituted aggressive birth control measures in the past, and other nations have experimented with ways to control population growth. But the problem belongs to the whole world, and it won't be solved until world leaders treat it as such.
A shrinking planet
Put into plainer terms, this means that we could enhance our own prestige and at the same time help the economy of the whole state.
Industry needs real disaster
THEFTFORD CENTER, VI. — What's happening in the nuclear industry is being called a disaster. Default and bankruptcy in the Pacific Northwest, Default and bankruptcy perhaps looming for Seabrook in New England. Unbuilt plants all over the Midwest.
When rats overpopulate and run out of food, they eat each other. When people overpopulate, somebody must go without food.
Now that's something a little more substantial than speeches.
The trouble is, it's the wrong disaster. No one will learn anything
NOEL PERRIN
And the problem will not get better if the latest statistics on world population growth are an indicator. The Census Bureau reported that the human race grew by 82 million in the past year.
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 also invites individuals to submit post-columns. Columns and letters can be mailed brought to the Kansas office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
Professsor of English at Darmouth College
That means 82 million more to carve out space on a shrinking little ball and to take whatever food they
We don't need a nuclear war. We do need a nuclear accident — and a nice big one. Soon.
People already are starving in the Third World, and as world population continues to swell, the ranks of the hungry will grow.
Memories of Hiroshima are not enough. Science may learn from theory; the human race learns from experience. It has to be real experience, too. Artificial experiences like movies, novels and movies may teach a little but not much. We are a race that learns slowly.
from it except investors. What's needed from the nuclear industry is an actual catastrophe — such as it almost gave us at Three Mile Island. Would that it had. If there had been a meltdown instead of just talk of one, an event would have occurred that the whole world is waiting for.
Me. I'm more hopeful. I think Three Mile Island would have done nicely. Because of the plant's location and because of the prevailing wind patterns, probably no more than a hundred people would have died from the initial contact with the fish. But the rest would have had time to flee.
There is room for argument on how big the accident needs to be. Some people think the city of Los Angeles or Edinburgh, Scotland,
or two. The state would have had to find a new capital, since Harrisburg would have been part of the contaminated region.
But those rest — several hundred thousand of them — would have been exiled from their part of Pennsylvania for at least a decade
If we had those exes — noisy, bitter, but alive; nearly every one an ardent convert to nuclear disarmament; one or two dying now and then from the delayed effects of radiation sickness. We would not now be having a debate about a nuclear freeze, we would be having the freeze itself. Even the sunny mind of President Reagan would be clouded. Even hard-liners in the French nuclear industry would be a little softened. The world would be far safer than it is.
A mettledown at Three Mile Island would have been the best thing that could have happened in the 1970s. For pure bad luck — except, of course, for central Pennsylvania — we'd get it it is still colder to hope in the 1980s? Yes. Is it also the only sensible thing to hope? That, too.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
LETTERS POLICY
Drug laws are a waste of money
To the Editor:
A recent local news show presented a Douglas County official characterizing Kansas Attorney General Bob Stephan's marijuana-mowing raids as expensive publicity stunts. Although not for the same reasons, I totally agree. Such law enforcement is a waste of the taxpayers' money.
Why not legalize all drugs, sell them over the counter, apply a reasonable governmental tax, and use the dollars now spent on the futile, "holier-than-thou" campaign to stop the drug business to fight legitimate crimes? This would take the market from less than trust and guarantee drug well as the mob and guarantee drug clean, uncut product plus quality, sterilized syringes and other paraphernalia.
Notice I said "users," referring to the many individuals who smoke, snort or shoot whatever for occasional, recreational use and have no problem living without the substance. For those lacking the necessary self-discipline — the abusers — the tax revenue generated by legalization could be used to help free public centers to help them, free legal harassment. The abusers and the legal harassment whether legalization occurs or not. The abusers will merely suffer more, and more alone, without it.
One of my main personal laws to live by is that a person should be able to do as he wishes, as long as he does not violate anyone else's same
right. Therefore, I believe a person should be allowed to do with his body what he wants including killing himself with cigarettes or choking to death on his alcohol-induced vomit. After all, if we are to be mature about drugs we must admit that alcohol, nicotine (plus cigarette smoke itself) and many other socially acceptable drugs are just as bad as many of the social unacceptable drugs can contain cocaine with as much common sense and moderation as one can drink vodka. I would like to see at least one of this society's double standards eradicated.
Doug Humphreys Great Rend senior
Drugs in sports
Your Aug. 25 editorial criticizing efforts being made to eliminate the use of performance enhancing drugs at the Pan American Games and the Olympic Games was so ridiculous that one is left wishing that an "intelligence enhancing" drug was available for use by Kanans editors.
To the Editor:
Do Kansan editors actually think that athletes who use chemicals to artificially and momentarily raise their performance levels should be free allowed to defeat athletes who believe that competition should be an honest contest between trained bodies and disciplined minds?
The editors bithely belittle concern over use of the male hormone
Had the Kansan editors given this matter the thoughtful consideration it deserves, I believe that they would be praising the attitude of William Simon and the use of the machine to not forget," not condemning them.
Have they considered the effect of the large doses of male hormones over an extended period of time on female athletes? Have they, in fact considered the long term effects of performance enhancing drugs on the athlete who feels pressured to use them?
testosterone, which they sarcastically label a "scandalous drug."
Gary J. Bjorge Librarian II, Watson Library
Sir Gowen
Don Warder
To the Editor:
Friends of the late Professor James A. the "Tony" Gowen and Kansan readers who found the article on the English department softball team ("Softball and literature join players for" "Olde English" "in the Aug. 25 Kansan" interest interesting might to know that one of the team's names — Sir Gowen and the Green Knights — was the creation of Nan C. Scott, former teacher in the department of English and wife of William O. Scott, professor of English.
Assistant professor of English
The state of labor
We pass the days in surrealism.
We peace and forgetting. Universities feed our contentment. We think we are winners and we layer and prize winning journalists.
In most areas of the nation, Labor Day, for its true meaning, will go unnoticed.
This weekend students will seek refuge from school in various pursuits. Labor Day is Jerry Lewis, the unofficial end of summer and the last three-day weekend until Thanksgiving.
And in aspiring, we have left our heritage at the gates of the University, forgetting our birth in blue collar resolve and determination.
We have left labor and its day prone, gassing from lack of attention and prestige. In the flight and transition from blue to white-collar blue-collar jobs are left tramped by both illusion and reality.
Labor, specifically union labor,
has been blamed for everything
from inflation to unemployment. We
have forgotten its legacy.
Few, if any, college graduates intend to take jobs in a General
For the past several decades, college has been the answer to the nation's problems. Increased technology has forced many to school, into white-collar jobs — away from manual labor.
MICHAEL BECK
Staff Columnist
Staff Columnist
Motors assembly line. We have become a nation of young people who are too good, too wise for machines as primitive as manual labor.
Those of us who attend America's colleges are privileged and have set high goals, but at the same time, we have forgotten some of the essentials.
in the streets of New York 101 years ago, 4,000 men led by two socialists, marched, cigars in hand, to demonstrate unity.
The growing self-respect and enthusiasm that triggered unrest and unity in the 19th and early 20th centuries is dying in the United States because of a declining percentage of blue-collar workers.
And in 1899, Congress declared the first Monday in September as a national holiday for the men and women who forged the nation from an assembly line and other blue-collar positions.
a reflection of labor's decline In 1980, union members made up 25 percent of the non-agricultural labor force in the United States as
The nation is becoming less dependent on manual and unskilled labor. Computers are making many decisions that seem perhaps the beginning of the end.
The percentage of workers belonging to unions has continued to decline since the end of World War II
Retraining workers is an option, expensive but viable. Although the worker must adapt to survive, such change may be the death of the American worker who helped give us our lives.
The American worker, especially in these times of unemployment, needs a pat on the back and a bit of recognition.
Through the electronic haze of the future, the American worker hobbles aimlessly to an obscure destination. With but all the changes, we have a duty to open our eyes to the plight of the blue-collar worker.
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