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Opinion
University Daily Kansan, February 10, 1983
To an anxious friend
July 27,1922
July 27, 1922
You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply that you can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people — and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive. That is the history of the race. It is proof of man's kinship with God.
You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger. No one questions it in
calm days, because it is not needed. And the reverse is true also; only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital to justice.
Peace is good. But if you are interested in peace through force and without free discussion — that is to
say, free utterance decently and in order - your interest in justice is slight. And peace without justice is tyranny, no matter how you may sugar-coat it with experience. This state today is in more danger from suppression than from violence, because, in the end, suppression leads to violence. Violence, indeed, is the child of suppression. Whoever pleads for justice helps to keep the peace; and whoever tramples on the plea for justice temperately made in the name of peace only outrages peace and kills something fine in the heart of man which God put there when we got our manhood. When that is killed, brute meets brute on each side of the line.
So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart. This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold — by voice, by posted card, by letter, or by press. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.
William Allen White,
The Emporia Gazette
This week, the commission rendered its findings.
Since the weekend of Sept. 16-18, 1982, when Sabra and Chatilla entered our vocabulary of holocausts, an Israeli commission has been trying to find out who was responsible for that Beirut massacre.
its findings.
Excerpts from the report speak of negligence and, at times, downright indifference to the danger involved in letting armed Phalangist militiamen into camps inhabited by unarmed Palestinian refugees.
The commission cited several government and military figures, most prominent among them Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, as particularly responsible for allowing the militiamen into the camp and not removing them soon enough.
But neither can the United States hold itself totally blameless in this running tragedy. Our angry and indignant response after the fact does not absolve us of our failure to make clear beforehand what we expected.
clear beforehand what we are all we can hope for now is that those people involved and named by the commission will follow its recommendations and resign their positions.
Everyone owns a share
The responsibility must also lie in Israel's decision to return to Beirut after the assassination of Lebanon's President-elect Bashir Gemayel.
But the commission did not absolve Sharon's superiors, including Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
certain death in consequence
Barbie, 69, was sentenced to death in
1952 and 1954 in France in absentia under the war crimes act. France has no death penalty now. Regardless, in a few years Barbie will be dead. Already dead are the millions who died during the war, the thousands who died from its effects, and the hundreds who, like Barbie, were hunted down for years afterward.
end.
Barbie, "The Butcher of Lyon," allegedly ordered the detention, torture and execution of 4,000 Jews and resistance fighters. He likely will face two charges: the deportment of 43 Jewish children and 83 adult Jews to certain death in concentration camps.
The sins of the fathers
"France was swept by controversy Tuesday over threats by Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, to reveal the names of Frenchmen who collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II."
DUKE'S HELPING ME WITH MY BIOLOGY LESSON.
afterward.
But Barbie's death, and the deaths of others like him, will not stop the pain begun with Adolph Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie. Children will remember the deaths of their friends and loved ones, and their children, and the children after them, will remember the pain of their parents.
their parents.
Hitler's National Socialism was to have ruled for 1,000 years, but ended in catastrophe after 12 years. Or did it? Perhaps in a physical sense it did, but not in a spiritual sense; for as long as the hate is reborn, the fear is rekindled and the horror relived, Hitler and his obscene movement will survive.
But the nightmare itself may never end.
A statement similar to the one above might have been published in this paper at any time during the last 38 years, and it is likely that such statements will continue to make news until at least the end of this century. Only then, perhaps, after death claims the remaining players in the drama that was World War II, will these stories, with their connotations of hate, fear and horror, finally cease.
Drinking, driving still a game
Deep within my wallet is a small card with a lot of information. I keep the card between a picture of an old girlfriend and an expired car registration form, way in the back. It rarely sees any light.
any light
sticking next to me as I write this. It is a blood alcohol content card. It tells you how drunk you are, according to your weight and the number of drinks you’ve had.
The card is divided into three colorful sections; yellow means caution (0.0-5 percent blood alcohol content); orange means your driving is impaired (0.9-5 percent b.a.c.); and red means you're legally drunk (10 percent and up).
I don't know why they bother putting in the red section, I probably couldn't focus on the little numbers, even if I bothered to remember how many drinks I had.
According to the card, I have to imbibe about seven drinks to be over .10 percent a.b. I don't know about you, but by about my fifth drink, I've either run out of money or can't find my wallet.
cinder block.
As if my informative card wasn't enough, it seems as if a popular club in Lawrence decided to install one of those breathalyzer machines. They put it, rather conspicuously, by the front door.
The breathalyzer, put anywhere, is hard to miss. It stands about six feet tall, has two digital displays and enough flashing lights to make you thick it's some new oral version of Pac Man.
Personally, I think that the breathalyzer is something new in the bar scene that John Travolta can make a movie about. First he popularized disco with its lighted dance floors;
Is this club running under the belief that people are actually taking this machine seriously? I hope not.
then came cowboy bars with their bucking machines. Now we need a movie about the 1980s with video games and breathalyzers.
The breathalyzer not only resembles a video game, it even operates like one.
The drunken patron steps up, deposits his quarter and blows through the handy straw
HARRY MALLIN
provided. Then he waits as his "score" lights up.
"All right! 0.198 percent!" proudly declares a bleary-eyed bar-goer. His friend steps up and tries it for himself.
"Oh wow! 0.788," he says with a heart.
"I won't O210. he says with a happy grin.
"And I'm driving!"
maybe someone is taking it seriously. When they see how drunk they are, they may don't attempt to drive home. And maybe one accident will be averted.
will be averted.
But I haven't seen it. Everyone I saw up at the breathalyzer was blowing for sport, not for information.
One night, I decided to test just how accurate my wallet-sized card was, according to the machine. I didn't want to drink that night so I sought a suitable subject for my little experiment.
Try it sometime. It makes for one great pick-up line. "Hi, I'm doing an experiment and I'd like to buy you some drinks and all you have to do is drink them and then blow through a straw. It sounds kinky, but my intentions are purely honorable."
It's not as easy as it sounds. First, I had to find a subject, preferably female. The hard part was finding a girl who would admit her weight.
finding a girl who would admit
I finally found my guinea pig. Let's call her
Boopie X. She weighed in at 130 netts,
weight and drank Vodka soars at $1.95 a shot.
Lucky for me I had allocated $50 out of the
Kansas' petty cash drawer.
kallas's pet cat.
The experiment started quite honorably. I logged him time and her condition with each drink. By 11:00 p.m. she had two drinks and was still standing, averaging a drink every 20 minutes. To top that, she had begun asking for doubles. My little card only went up to nine drinks. I guess they had assumed that after nine drinks, you'd be in a coma.
on me.
I dragged her over to the breathalyzer and tested her test. Her blood alcohol content was a healthy 0.231 percent. Not too far off my card. I was satisfied.
experiment. I would retire if the
I quickly changed my mind when she tried to
shift my heater control into reverse. I was suddenly not in the mood to become a statistic
I decided I had better take her home and, in the process, complete the latter half of my experiment. I would let her drive.
boopsie X was in no shape to operate heavy machinery - my car, or possibly a fork lift. She was in shape to throw up all over her leather-like vinyl dashboard, but I got her home before she could try.
The next morning, I evaluated my experiment I suppose it was a success since my little card was nearly correct. I guess I don't sound too optimistic, but I just got a call from Boopie X. She said I can take her out whenever I want, as long as I buy her drinks.
For some reason, I'm not too happy about that
Weariness dulls college experience
One fine day after I graduate, when I'm wise and well-fed and dug in somewhere out in suburbia, I'll look back fondly at my days at KU through a jumble of images and that first awesome memory of my eyes opening to endless, windswept ranges of knowledge.
But right now, such a day lives in the mythical future, alongside the belief that when I graduate I'll actually get a job in what I'm studying.
1 I爬来,
I am creeping with spring学期 burnout.
I creep every year about this time, like a pack of hungry dogs 'round the bones of my grade point average.
point average.
Don't get the wrong. I know how to work and I don't hard through the fall. I attacked my classes with a vengeance and picked off the A's like so many riddled tin cans on a fence row. But as winter lengthens, I struggle to keep from being sucked under by it all.
I don't think I am alone. In the darker corners of Flint Hall, former employee of the University Daily Kansan can be seen wandering vacant-eyed and muttering about deadlines, or working at desks, earnestly cutting heart-shaped pieces of cloth from their sleeves.
My college stint has turned into an academic Vietnam. Entered into under loft platitudes and with unwavering moral resolve, it has been diminished into a grim war of attrition. Wily, Viet Cong-like professors and ceaseless pressure are wearing away at my mind.
But the question is, why am I not motivated,
and what should I do?
or entropy, has the recessing way to all the order of my notes has given way to a garbled set of doodles and scribbles. My study habits consist of waking up, long after the sun rises, and napping without fail in the afternoon, which I follow with frozen pizza and TV watching until I again can escape into dreams and darkness.
sure are weiling away by the reason. The reason for this is simple physics, I reckon. The second law of thermodynamics, the scourge of entropy, has me reeling and on the run.
darkness.
Something that I can't get out of my mind is that I do not get any easier. It is not as if college is one last hurdle to be crossed before a lifetime of ease and happiness. It is just the opposite. There is no way out of the future, but I am stumbling now.
Drugs and alcohol only make matters worse, accelerating entropy and leaving a person dim-witted and soggy. But it sure is a relief to get blown away and forget about it all.
Still, where does a person go from here?
An old man once told me, talking about some
BONAR MENNINGER
minor traval, "Boy, as trouble goes, that ain't nothing."
I believe he was right.
I don't know who I'm trying to kid when I'm complaining how hard life is for me. Compagped to what? Compared to whom? A coal miner in South Africa? A 24-year auto worker laid off up in Michigan? A women who is hurt and can't work for her kids?
Nobody told me it was easy when I signed on. I sometimes think parents tend to romanticate life for the eyes of little ones, but I guess that's OK.
Still, the bottom line is, if I am going under for the third time, it is because I enjoy being miserable and insecure. I care about my hearts about how rough it is for me. They have got troubles enough of their own.
As far as college goes, being here is a privilege that a lot of people never even get to experience. To do less than my best is a crime — a disrespect to the professors who have given their life to teaching; to teaching who are footing the bill; to the millions who will never see knowledge, not to mention to myself.
knowledge, no. So I'm sorry for going on in this manner. I have taken too much time. I am going to fight system and every bend in the road. I am an open system, and entropy can never reduce me to the equilibrium state. I'm going to keep on moving that range of mountains.
toward that range of mountain. And if anybody else there feels as I do, burn away the haze, and keep on rushing toward the future, before it washes over you.
The University Daily
KANSAN
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