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Tuesday, November 30, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Guest Editorial New Voter Conference
ny JAMES A. WECHSLER
Reprinted from
The New York Post
Political seuts for numerous Presidential aspirants will be closely watching the Emergency Management sponsored by the heads of 100 students bodies and scheduled to visit campus in Universityiversity campus in December. 3.
The three-day sessions, essentially an outgrowth of the national voter registration voting generation, will herald the next phase of that operation—the fight to secure youth representation in the next year's national conventions
But overtures of the conference may also offer clues to the direction in which the most advanced leaders were heading as the battles of 1972 approach. At least some politics will remember that it was a year before the group of 100 student leaders, organized by Allard Lownesten, who touched off the national movement and helped deployed the dramatic events of 1968.
PLANS FOR THE IMPENDING CHICAGO CON-LEaders of the Assn. of Student Governments—once considered a bulwark of Nixonism in contrast to the more progressive National Association for Students, NSA is torn by factional leftist feats and nihilist "anti-politics," the ASG has steadily become the student body of students who still choose to operate in the political arena but have hurne their backs on Mr. Kenny.
In fact, while the conference is designed to concentrate on organizing for the party to the party conventions rather than selecting a favored nominee, its diverse candidates will identify three prospective candidates as unacceptable to the party. Nixon, Sen. Henry Jackson and Nixon, Sen. Henry Jackson and
George Wallace. A move to add SEN Humphrey to that roster is expected at the Chicago conclave.
The wide geographical reach of the conference is indicated by the membership of its steering committee, Dr. Draper, ASG president and former student body head at the University of Oklahoma, and Mr. Draper, ASG presidents Tom Hart, Loyola; Mary Scoffs, Indiana; Larry Seidman, University of California; Thomas Carr, Steve Kapran, Harvard; Joe Stallings, North Carolina; Terry Lee, Montclair State College; Mary Ruth Mann, George and Larry Wallace of Vanderbilt.
Some of the other elected student heads on the Committee of 100, include James Tucker, Auburn; Tom Wales, Alabama; John Barkett, Notre Dame, Ron Wilson, Purdue; Jack Baker, Bob Walman, William Oregon State and Maria Jimenez, Houston.
In issuing their calls for the conference, the sponsors emphasize that they have no moral authority matters, but they set forth their commitment to end the war, achieve "a new beginning for social justice in America," and affirm that they are for America's political parties."
ACORDING TO THE PROSPECTUS, the conference will include workshops on prescient cause tactics, state legislative qualifications and resources for delegate challenges, state regulations and other aspects of the hard pre-convention season. While the conference offers an opportunity obtaining recognition from both parties, there appears little chance of achieving reform of rigid Republican rules in the Senate, the largest impact will undoubtedly be felt by the Democrats.
The conference will have facilities for almost 2000 par-
icipants, many of them student editors as well as campus presidents, but it will also be open to individual activists.
"We're taking all the risks of real democracy," Chairman Duane Draper remarked yesterday. He and his year-old wife, Deborah, met at Oklahoma U., are working full-time on the preparations.
Mrs. Draper said that while the conference would picture predominantly from college women were made to secure delegates from labor, black, Chicano and other groups as a basis for collaboration on a broader front and during the conventions.
IN VIEW OF ALL THE UNPREDICTABLES of 72, a well-organized youth caucus could be more than a footnote to history. We don't know when they will be free to support various candidates—except Nixon, Jackson or Wallace—and will stress the importance to put forward jointly credentials and rules. But there could come a time before the hour of decision when they feel compelled to candidate if fragmentation appeared to be producing an unwanted nominee. (Draper beware; it is probably the emergence against Humphrey as well as Jackson.) Meanwhile, there is a special symbolism about the Chicago case, call to the conference calls, to the Eugene McCarthy rebellion was begun and “it was not enough,” to be smarter. Now new hopes are in the air, and the ultimate question is who will become their embodiment this time. But they must merely set the stage for another debate; that is why this conference has a quality of unusual seriousness and realism that is part of this new “amateur” effort.
James J. Kilpatrick
Complexities Of 'No Fault' Insurance
Member companies of the NAII, who
But insurers make this point, that getting into "no fault" insurance is like buying a new car. What kind of "no fault" dya want? You can have a little old compact "no fault" with a wind-up motor, or you can take a few options--radio, air conditioner, carburator, and retractable headlights. And you will pay for what you get.
CHICAGO- Imagine, if you please, a convention of new car dealers construing the Tenth Amendment. You will have caught the general atmosphere of last week's convention of the National Association of Independent Insurers. The principles of federalism haven't been expounded more lusively since 1787.
The topic was "no fault" automobile insurance. It is a hot topic everywhere these days. The Hart-Magnuson bill is perplexing to many legislators and the Committee. A dozen State legislatures are studying the proposition, Sunday supplements are filled with articles on "no fault." Public opinion polls say that motorists are begging for a chance to buy insurance.
write more than half of all automobile insurance in the country, are agreeable to selling what forms of "no fault" the motoring public wants. They are pushing for new laws that would parallels an Illinois act that becomes operative in January. By analogy, the NAII bill is a medium-priced family sedan. They think it's a good model, but you know how it is with a new line of cars. What is they say, they say is experience on the road.
In urging this objection, they speak as rungingly as so many Jarnes Madison's authors, and the structure. Under our grand design the States are expected to function as experimental laboratories, trying out new ideas in government. The American theory, entrenched in the Tenth Amendment, is that the States ought to exercise legislative powers not delegated to the State. A new approach to automobile insurrection, the NAIH memoir insist, is a perfect example of what Mr. Madison had in mind.
That brings up the second point. If a major departure is to be made from the insurance system that now exists, the companies reasonably would like some experience in where they are going. They strenuously oppose the pending Federal bill, not because they oppose the concept of having a single monolithic, untested system suddenly imposed upon 50 states at once.
Seven states have begun to experiment with "no fault." Massachusetts is nearing the end of its first year with the plan. Florida and Illinois are coming on line to start building a national park, moved into the field, Minnesota and South Dakota offer options. Some of them are trying one thing, some another. It makes good sense, in the NAII view, to encourage retreats, and to wait until the returns are made before embarking upon anything drastic.
The insurers want to make a third point. A notion is gaining credence that "no fault" in any form, under the Hart-Magnuson bill or under State regulation, is bound to cost less. The companies warn that it isn't so.
About 20 percent of all motorists now carry no insurance at all. Under the compulsory provisions of a "no fault" plan, obviously they will pay more—and a good thing, too. Roughly 56 percent can carry maximum coverage, 8 percent have medium coverage and 16 percent buy minimum policies. Every one of these motorists will pay more, not less, access to actual damage if the same level of coverage under "no fault." The only prospective savings will occur for the motorist who now has Cadillac coverage goes to a Volkswagen level instead.
The subject is fearfully complex. There are almost as many combinations of "no fault" as there are combinations of colors, models and accessories in a new car showroom. If Congress were to pass a law that would raise the minimum wage would raise a howl. The prospect of one untested scheme of insurance ought to provoke some howling, too.
(C) 1971 The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
Garrv Wills
America's Dearth of Heroes
Any society needs heroes—though ours seems to be fresh out of them. When we are given any—an astronaut here, a medal-winner there—we nod, and yawn, and forget.
Perhaps the Kennedy period tired us with glitter. That Camelot of half-heroes adrift in the tilted yard looks ridiculous. Could anyone have thought Alarm Schiersen was glamorous?
I talked, not too long ago, with a black who was writing a book to prove the only heroes of the time were African Americans; these examples have faded, or given violent, or gone off. Huey and Bobby, Rap and Stokley, and Eldridge—where are they now? Only Angela survives as a cause, and she is the beneficiary of the incentives, the black and the feminist.
Yesterdays' heroes to the kids but suffered an even more horrific injury. Abbie and Jerry, Bernieha Dohrn and Mark Rudd—the have floated up (and off), or landed in the underground) and no one seems
Why is this? It is not because the blacks' or the kids' heroes were more spirited than the 'straight' culture's, nor because
their followers were more fickle than the rest of us. Everyone seems to have a short attention span in this respect. Those who cheered for Calley are just as bored with him, now, as the celebrants of Tom Hayden have become. Why is this?
Partly, I suppose, a heroism that can survive is a quiet thing than the quick acclaim of our TV lights, so quickly burn out. The man who was writing about black heroes did not put Dr. King up in the fire to discuss his thesis—King was "old hat" then. Yet he has survived better than the others in men's esteem. He was not out to blow things up—which made him less of an instant memorable or delightful), but the same fact has made him a more lasting hero.
These things occurred to me as I read a brilliant long article on Daniel Elsberg in the current *HarperCollins* series, which still excites strong feelings, for and against, as the magazine proves by giving the judgment of two famous people speaking for them. It is equally famous, speaking against it.
The article itself quotes some of the comments directed at Ellsberg by those who know and
d alike him—that he is erratic, egotistical, self-dramatizing. All these are charges that have been repeated sneeringly in the Right-Wing press; but as I read on Levi Craig (written by Frank Rich), I kept thinking of a man who has been a hero to those very organs of the Right Wing now so critical of Elsberg: Whittaker Chambers, or not so much as a Witness against Aiger Hass, but against the age.
Chambers, too, was medramatic and unsettled—so much so that he attempted suicide, fell dead under the pressure, and had all his considerable idiosyncrasies used against the point he was trying to make. One of the critics of the book has written a section: "His action is the less defensible because there seems no reason why he should have had the faintest hope of altering the world." The war by any such publications."
Funny. Whittaker Chambers stated, at the time of his public disillusionment, that most men of his type would stay prisoners of illusion. He did not seem to think that freed him from the burden of bearing witness. Chambers was breaking the spell in himself, if in
Griff and the Unicorn
By Sokoloff
from what they did without paying any price for their disastrous errors.
Chambers and Ellsberg are dues-payers. No wonder they look "odd" in a world of intellectual chizzlers and debt-evaders. They are both witnesses, for which the Greek word is "martyrs"—and those who do not want to pay their dues can always call the martyrs more victims of a "martyr" not paying up; and I think the dues-payers are the ones who will survive as heroes.
Copyright, 1971, Universal Press Syndicate
Ellsberg is shattering a very different kind of dream—the "realistic" reliance on tactical force that replaced all messianisms of the pre-Bomb era. But the witness is similar, though things witnessed to must of necessity be different (two Wars) as well as Bomb era are saying that their most fashionable contemporaries were deluded themselves, and misled others, and are walking away
no one else—the spell of messianic promise in Russia, and mild silly daydreaming about another America's more daring liberals.
"Copyright 1971, David Sokoloff."
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