OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
August 25, 1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 bv students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansas (USPS 606400) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer-Finn Hall, Lawrence, KA 60645. daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer semester excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays, and final period for students in Douglas County and $1 for six months outside the county. Student Subscriptions are $3 a semester through the student activity for POSTMASTER. Send
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A chain on ideas
The United States was supposed to be a place where political ideas were allowed to float about unfettered by tyranny or other suppressive forms of power.
But chains have been placed on ideas, and ideas that don't conform to a certain mold aren't given the room to grow or die with time.
Those chains have made a fence around the country, and that fence won't let in a Nobel prize winner from Colombia.
U. S. officials have refused to grant a visa to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the 1982 winner of the Nobel prize in literature. They say he has connections with leftist organizations.
Garcia Marquez was invited to lecture at the University of Kansas in September to mark the 200th anniversary celebration of the birth of Simon Bolivar. He declined the offer because the U.S. government had refused to give him a visa for 20 years, he said.
"The reasons they are using and
have always used are foolish and ridiculous," he said. "Other persons who really are communists go from coast to coast of the United States without any problem."
He's right, very right. The government may as well kick out all who have leftist leanings in the United States if it wants to keep commies out of the country.
American officials have granted the novelist provisional permits to enter the country, but Garcia Marquez said that wasn't enough — he wants the visa.
He's declined 17 similar invitations and he said that 80 percent of the Latin American writers and artists were denied visas to enter this country. That's dangerous.
A nation cannot live alone. It cannot screen out the rest of the world. And a government cannot choose what its people will listen to. Otherwise, those people, suffocated by a lack of growth in ideas, will definitely turn their ears to music from across the seas.
Witch hunt for drugs
At a time when many people take for granted the use of cocaine in professional athletics, the current drug scandal at the Pan American Games — and the fanaticism through which it arose — seems a bit specious at best.
Already, 21 medals have been disallowed, and 13 American athletes have withdrawn from competition — although not necessarily because of drug violations.
Were these medals disallowed because of the athlete's use of cocaine, heroin or even marijuana? No. Other drugs were involved, scandalous drugs such as caffeine and the male hormone testosterone. To be sure, just because amateur athletes haven't taken to snorting cocaine like their peers in the pros doesn't mean they are free from blame or from their own special kinds of drug abuse, but they should not be subjected to the witch hunt going on in Venezuela.
The drug testing equipment at the Pan Am Games is considered to be the most sophisticated of its kind,
and is similar to the apparatus that will be used next summer at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. If an athlete has taken steroids up to a year prior to these games, the machine will detect it, and out the athlete goes, whether or not he quit the drugs in an effort to conform to amateur regulations. And if the athlete has taken drugs recently, is stripped of his medals in Venezuela and swears off the drugs forever, he still has probably ruined his chances for competing in the Olympics next year. This machine, you see, doesn't forget.
And William Simon, president of the United States Olympic Committee, has made it clear he doesn't forgive.
"It's about time we adopted a get-tough attitude," says he. "I think it's ample warning to the athletes that the game is over."
If Simon's witch hunt continues, and the world's amateur athletes continue to drop out of competition in disgust, his game — the Olympic Games — may indeed be over.
Reagan should not go
[ President Reagan should not go to the Philippines in November. ]
We're supporting another loser in Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, and it won't be long until he goes the way of other right-wing losers of the past — Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran.
The assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino has focused world attention on the newest hotspot on the other side of the world. Government officials there are investigating the murder, but opponents of Marcos don't doubt that he had a hand in the shooting.
aren't going to tell it to the whole world.
Reagan should not lend credibility to the Marcos' regime by visiting the Philippines in November, especially after the murder. Marcos unpopularity in his own country is evident in the turnout to see Aquino's body. An estimated 50,000 people have walked by his coffin since Monday.
The result of the investigation is pretty predictable. If Marcos did order the shooting, his own troops
The dictator has a poor human rights record, and there are frequent news dispatches of battles between government troops and communist rebels. Marcos may be a friend to the United States, but he hasn't been too kind to his countrymen. And we ought to drop him before the other extreme takes over.
Protesters pushing too many causes Groups commemorate 1963 civil rights march
Griping and complaining are American institutions.
Americans have an uncanny ability to find injustice, to invent solutions and to proceed with change.
In fact, the United States was founded with dissent, protest and violence.
The civil rights march on Washington, D.C., 20 years ago illustrates American self-criticism and response.
The more than 200,000 who gathered in Washington had defined a problem and wanted a solution. And within a year,
laws, and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The House has already voted 338-90 to create a holiday for King, and now that President Reagan has endorsed such a measure, the Senate will probably go along with the idea.
Representatives of a barrage of causes and factions are combining to make the 20 year celebration of the 40th anniversary of the very least, a strange parade.
And a local march, which also is scheduled for Saturday, also seems merely to be a gathering of a hedgepodge of social do-gooders.
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Their cause is just — discrimination exists and further changes are needed  and I generally have to be the one to make situations. Something must be done.
Yet, the way they are handling this march cannot help any of the causes.
The meaning of the protest is lost in the collage of issues.
If the purpose of protest is to educate and inform people, Saturday's march can only confuse those who are affected of a focus, the causes will be lost.
The civil rights marches 20 years ago made the public more aware of
MICHAEL
BECK
Staff Columnist
Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which covered, among other things, voting rights and job discrimination.
People chanted, "Pass the bill,
pass the bill," signaling to the
nation it was time to change.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, and the nation listened.
And Saturday, Americans again will take to the streets in protest — for more jobs, more freedom, a national holiday honoring King and an end to business with South Africa.
The protesters also are pushing for better housing, more restrictions on military aid to El Salvador, changes in immigration
racial discrimination in the United States. And although we have not reached interracial tranquility, the special requirements were "were specific, gave us direction."
The Vietnam War protest movement also had a more or less clear-cut direction, evoking a war of aggression in American military state of mind.
However, today's protesters are embroiled in several powerful and complicated issues. And the flavor and impetus put on each particular item, when enmeshed with the others, is lost.
The right of people to protest is sacred. Yet these people are making a joke of the system by claiming that the problems with one broad sweep.
Although more than 715 groups have endorsed the march, the National Urban League justifiably wields a lot of power in toting it too many issues.
also, the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations have "enclosed" the march but have refused to participate.
On the local scene, a group called the New Coalition of Conscience is sponsoring a march down Massachusetts Street to South Park, where marchers will congregate to listen to speakers.
By following the national example of the protest, local organizers are also sinking in the quagmire of issues.
Pushing for a national holiday for Martin Luther King is admirable. Even pushing for additional housing might be justified.
But tacking on issues like El Salvador and the nuclear freeze is asking too much.
Poverty is returning to America
WASHINGTON - Two decades after the historic civil rights march on Washington, America's own march toward economic and social justice is not only stalled butivoting backward.
Until 1980, enormous strides were made. Nearly 11 million Americans, including six million children, had escaped the grasp of poverty, thanks largely to federal assistance. However, since 1981 that trend has been tragically reversed.
Since the administration took office, more than two million children have become impoverished. Half of all black children are living in poverty, as are more than half the children in the rapidly expanding number of female-headed households. Among black and Hispanic families headed by women, 70 percent of all children are growing up poor. Overall, 22 million of our nation's children, or more than 20 percent, live in poverty.
Nor is poverty limited to the jobless and minorities. It now covers millions who prided themselves on their self-sufficiency and never thought they would be poor. They include low-income wage earners, two-parent families and millions of other Americans who
live at the margin of economic security.
LETTERS POLICY
A childhood of poverty dramatically reduces a child's chances for educational achievement, good health and economic self-sufficiency. Infants in low-income families die far more frequently in their first years of life than other babies. As children, they also
GEORGE MILLER
Historically, the federal government has taken a leading role during periods of economic decline and growing poverty. But in the past three years, the administration and Congress have largely turned a cold shoulder to the suffering poor.
Democratic Representative from California
suffer from much higher rates of malnutrition, child abuse, educational disabilities, alcohol and drug dependency and teen-age preg—which begins the cycle all over again for yet another generation.
While many studies have established a link between good nutrition and health, since 1981 we have
Administration officials have repeatedly admitted that programs for children and families work well and save money. Yet the three budgets proposed by Reagan would have cut more from domestic programs than from any other area of the budget on the ground that domestic spending was "driving the deficit."
Preschool programs like Head Start save nearly $5 in future costs for every dollar spent, yet the administration has effectively frozen Head Start funding and cut more than $30 million in food and support supports, despite Heagan's reported enthusiasm for the program.
drummed 3.5 million children out of school food programs. The food program for high risk, pregnant women and their infants saves $3 in medical expenses for each dollar it costs, yet the administration proposed cutting this program by as much as 30 percent and reducing it to 600,000 at people of the rolls. Fortunately, Congress said no:
Now, after three years of enormous cuts and soaring debts, it is evident that programs for our poorest citizens are not responsible for the $200 billion deficit. So it appears that Congress and the
administration believe these programs should be sacrificed in spite of their successes, not because of their failures.
Tragically, the damage that has been done may be largely uncorrectable. For those who simply cannot afford to wait — the high-risk infant, the pregnant teenager, the sick child — the economic recovery will come too late and do too little. The costs of a stingy government refusal to fund programs that improve the lives of children will be paid for decades by the children themselves.
Programs to eliminate poverty will require money, and the government will have to assume much of the burden of financing them. An activist government that commits its resources to reducing poverty and to preventive services can still break the cycle of poverty threatening to become a permanent condition for millions.
Smooth campaign rhetoric that appeals to "individual initiative" and promises to solve problems cheaply rolls easily off politicians' lips. But it cannot solve the underling sources of poverty.
Persian Gulf war continues to drag on
Next month, the Iran-Iraq war will be three years old, and after more than 100,000 deaths it has settled into a grim military stalemate that costs each side about $1 billion a month. The rest of the world is largely unconcerned, in some cases even pleased to see the struggle continue as it does not spin out of control.
Copyright 1983 the New York Times. George Miller is chairman of the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families.
Iraq alone wants to end the war, which has forced it to abandon an
ELAINE SCIOLINO
Newsweek Special Correspondent
ambitious development program and drastically reduce oil exports. Baghdad has welcomed every peace mission and tried every tacile to the end war the short of meeting Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini's demand that President Saddam Hussein be topped before peace can be discussed.
In contrast, Iran needs the war as a distraction from internal turmoil and a vehicle to export Islamic fundamentalism. Although Iran lacks sufficient air power to mount a battle against a strong military, it is able to launch endless nuisance strikes designed to embarrass Saddam and drain his officers.
The Gulf states have profited from the war. The Saudi-backed sixmember Gulf Cooperation Council, which excludes Iran and Iraq, would have not been created had it not been for the war. The Gulf oil production has also helped an more dramatic cutbacks in oil production had Iraq and Iran been pumping as much oil as they were before the war.
As for the other Arab states, Egypt has carried favor with its Arab brothers by selling Iraq $1 billion in Soviet-made military hardware, while Jordan has supported Iraq with encouragement and use of the port of Aqaba — moving closer to the center of Aqab power — without much political risk.
supplies by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
What about the superpowers? Neither can do much to change the course of the war or end it. But neither has tried and both have benefited indirectly from the fighting.
foster discontent among Moslems inside the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union keeps a strong foothold in the region by supplying Iraq with 70 percent of its arms. Yet Moscow does not want a victorious Iraq that might move closer to the West and put pressure on the policeman. The war also keeps Iran too buoyed to help the Afghan rebels and too distracted to
The United States has maintained a neutral position that seems to border on indifference toward the lighting. U.S. officials have not sent military aid to
The rest of the world is largely unconcerned, in some cases even pleased to see the struggle continue as long as it does not spin out of control.
either side, but it has allowed its allies to help both countries.
American policy in the region remains narrowly focused and almost solely military; to protect Western access to Gulf oil by supporting friendly Arab regimes, and to build up American military installations in the Gulf. We have little leverage over either Iran or Iraq that would allow us to defeat them. And instead of trying to develop such leverage, President Reagan's administration rarely bothers even to speak out against the war, except when it fears that Iran might block oil
Perhaps Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, was right when he said the United States was holding out for Iran's eventual return to the American fold, a return he believes is inevitable. Certainly the United States would want to hold on with oil reserves, huge population, strategic position in the Gulf and its historically weak ties to Moscow — as the region's biggest prize.
Prospects for peace will remain dim until Iran abandons its demand that President Saddam be toppled. But ignoring the war is risky business. Both Iran and Iraq know that serious escalation would be foolhardy, but even continuing to fight as they are could be extremely dangerous in the volatile Gulf region, which is vulnerable to any radical change of leadership or shifting alliance.
Neither the superpowers nor the Arab world would be unhappy to see Iran and Iraq continue to divert and exhaust each other on the battlefield. The war is in just about everyone's interest — everyone except the populations of Iran and Iraq.
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Copyright 1983 the New York Times