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Tuesday, October 4, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
No excuse is a good excuse for not giving blood at drive
The students can come up with some of the best excuses in the world. Just ask for a door the day before an exam or the day after. The last paper is due on Monday.
If grandparents died as often as students said they did, there wouldn't be anyone alive over 60.
The art of excuses reaches its peak each fall when the familiar red, white and blue posters appear in every fraternity, sorority and residence and scholarship hall. The posters read simply, "Join Us! Give Blood."
Opinion
The posters remind us that today is the first day of the Red Cross' campus blood drive. Organizers have set 750 pints as their goal for the three-day event in the Kansas Union Ballroom. To achieve that goal, just 2.8 percent of the students on the Lawrence campus would have to donate a pint of their blood.
That's not asking too much.
But that goal doesn't factor in the student excuse variable. Blood donations at KU in recent drives have been down. Down significantly. Just last spring the drive came up 200 pints short of its goal
The excuses are weak and cowardly. Giving blood is simple and virtually painless. There is absolutely no risk of AIDS or other serious complications.
Students can always find excuses not to give blood. The list is long and predictable — I'm afraid of AIDS. I don't have the time. I don't like needles. I know someone who had a bad experience.
Sometime in every student's life, a close friend or a relative will need blood. When the need becomes personal, the excuses for not giving blood stop making sense.
Michael Horak for the editorial board
Anti-U.S. sentiment in South Korea during the Olympics prompted NBC, the U.S. network covering the games, to drop a scheduled feature on Korean women. The network also warned its staff members not to display their peacock logs in public.
Coverage hurt Korea, U.S.
Television coverage of the Olympics is over, but South Koreans probably won't forget or forgive it for some time.
South Koreans and the South Korean media were dissatisfied and enraged at television and newspaper reports focusing on the dark side of the nation. Students protested NBC's coverage of sports and non-sporting events.
Discontent about images sent by the media began after U.S. audiences watched a South Korean coach punch a boxing ring in the face.
The discontent about that turned to rage at NBC's focusing on negative aspects of South Korea in features on sweatsuits, gloves and skirts.
U. S. press coverage may have been objective, but it was not balanced. The NBC reports may not have been distorted, but they showed a lack of sensitivity to South Koreans' pride in their culture.
The responsibility to portray a balanced image of Korea is difficult because most U.S. journalists don't have much knowledge of the country. Caution and good judgment could help overcome such obstacles.
Journalists share a double responsibility when they report on another culture. The first is to the foreign country, South Korea in this case, to reflect a true and balanced image of their cultures and audiences in the United States a true portrait of South Korea.
When journalists fail to do that, the outcome is doubly negative. The image of the United States is hurt in the eyes of Koreans, and the image of Korea is imbalanced in the eyes of the U.S. public.
Muktha Jost for the editorial board
The editorials in this column are the opinion of the editorial board.
The editorial board consists of Michael Merschel, Mark Tillford, Todd Cohen, Michael Haruk, Julie Adam, Jile McMahon, Tony Lowe.
News staff
Todd Cohen         Editor
Michael Horak        Managing editor
Julie竿            Associate editor
Shilpman Wade      News editor
Michael Morschel    Editorial editor
Noel Gerdens       Campus editor
Craig Anderson     Sports editor
Scott Carpenter     Photo editor
Dave Eames        Graphics editor
Jill Jess          Arts/Features editor
Tom Ellen         General manager, news advisor
Business staff
Greg Knipp...Business manager
Debra Cole...Retail sales manager
Chris Cooper...Campus sales manager
Linda Prokop...National sales manager
Mackenzie Smith...Promotions manager
Sarah Higdon...Marketing manager
Brad Lenhart...Production manager
Michelle Garland...Ask production manager
Michael Ashman...Classified manager
Jeanne Hines...Sales and marketing adviser
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Accident teaches about drunk driving
Survivor learned almost too late that cars and alcohol are a deadly combination
I like to express my sincerity appreciation to the Kansan staff for the recent attention paid to the potentially tragic consequences that accompany drinking and driving. I am now, some say miraculous, now in graduate school as a graduate student in speech pathology. I hope one day to aid those victims of drunken driving accidents who, like me, have had their lives radically altered by drunk driving. I am also to drive under the influence of alcohol.
In May, 1967, I graduated from KU with a bachelor's degree in journalism. I moved to Dallas to pursue a reporting position at a newspaper there. Three weeks later I was hit and nearly killed by a drunk driver. I suffered considerable brain damage, and as a result spent the next two months in hospital. The police were present. There I underwent the agonizing process of relearning how to walk and speak.
Initially my prognosis was poor. The team of doctors, neuropsychologists and physical, occupational and speech therapists speculated I would not walk for a year and would never again feed myself. They predicted that at best I would spend the rest of my life in a facility for the physically and mentally disabled.
But for some reason that only God knows, when I emerged completely from the coma I had been in.
Colleen Siebes
Guest columnist
The team of doctors, neuropsychologists and physical, occupational and speech therapists speculated I would not walk for a year and would never again feed myself. They predicted that at best I would spend the rest of my life in a facility for the physically and cognitively impaired.'
for a month. I began to make progress. Within two weeks she was able to walk again as well as we were. I was able to before the accident.
I consider the ordeal to be the greatest experience of my life. But I am embarrassed and ashamed that it required nearly losing it for me to realize the degree of suffering that thousands of
Americans experience yearly because of the blatant disrespect their fellow countrymen have to deal with.
Twenty-four thousand Americans lose their lives every year to drunken driving, and thousands more experience irreparable physical and cognitive damage. My injuries were a paper cut by comparison with some of the victims I lived with in many towns. Many of those people will never walk again.
And although I am amazed by the tremendous legislative measures that our local and state governments have enacted, it is time to be skeptical of the irrational arguments of fellow students who attempt to justify drinking and drug use.
I am equally sickened by those students I've heard laugh about the time those rotten police threw them in jail for driving while legally flashing the license plate. I have a relatively small price they have paid for their mistake. And I have wondered often how many of these same students would be laughing if the memory of their friend's wild night were shared with them, rather than another barber conversation.
Colleen Siebes is a Lewood graduate student in speech pathology.
K·A·N·S·A·N
MAILBOX
Editorial challenged
There must be some reason that the Kansan editorial board refuses to print the whole truth about the grading system controversy. For example, one of the authors respond to one single question supporting the plus/minus system from the audience during my debate with (Stephen) Shaw (professor of physics and astronomy). This is because there were no such questions. Frankly, I was kind of surprised.
Remember the position the editorial board took supporting plus minus on the day of our visit to Washington. They were their timing didn't invite rebuttal, apparently they have some wisdom they would like to share
William Bayne
I will agree to use the same format used in my debate with Shawl and any moderator the chairman of the debate department chooses. The editorial board can pick the time and place. Hopefully, this time they will publish it before the day of the debate. This issue will go to a mail ballot in the Assembly, so we still have plenty of time to prove who knows what they are talking about.
issue will affect you, attend the debate. Don't wait to read about it in the paper. If the editorial board does not respond to this challenge by Friday, take this mean that you haven't been getting all the facts on an important educational issue; use the editorial board can't defend its position.
Therefore, I challenge the editorial board to a debate on the subject of the plus/minus grading system. They may initially criticize it but they are willing to support their position in public. I would especially like to see some student representatives who have been given the chance that I gave Shaw more current information than he had before our debate, maybe he might be ready for another round. This time, let's keep
Students, if you really want to know how this
Editor's Note: The editorial board stands by its editorial.
Lesson in leaves
There's a man who spends several hours a day around Wescoe Hall, nisily擦劳颊 leaves and refuse on the stairs and walkways. He does not use his computer, but back there that seems to operate on the principle of a vacuum cleaner in reverse. It is often hard to concentrate when he's nearby, whether the object is study, conversation, or "lear scurve" to avoid the no noise to 1 object this man's job.
I'm sure he's well paid. At least I hope he is.
For all he has to put up with he should pay $25
an hour. It's the person who assigned him that
job who should be fired.
The man blowing leaves around Wesley is a teacher. He's teaching us what we want to know. We want to know that problems are not to be avoided, because they can ruin on the steps? Don't pick it up, blow it away. Let somebody else deal with it. Of course, nobody will, so tomorrow the same trash has to be dealt with all over again. Naturally, it looks different and more difficult place so we need a different problem.
University teaching is not restricted to the classroom. The obligations and responsibilities of citizenship, discovered through studying and learning, must be met by the leaf blower. If you live in New York, put your garbage on a barge and send it out to sea. If you get your electrical power from a coal fired plant in Ohio, just crank the A/C in the summer when the sun shines. If you attend the University of Kansas? You pay
someone to relocate the leaves and refuse to another part of campus. Then you throw your copy of the Kansan on the ground after reading the instructions, they may be different, but the problem is the same.
All these people have one characteristic in common: They believe they can create problems but not be required to solve them. Sadly, history has proven them correct. But history is not all that you can learn at a university. Perhaps you can learn that bug problems often start off as ones that appear trivial. Perhaps you know someone leaves go somewhere, they don't just去 away.
Dennis Lowden Lawrence graduate student
Mason on track
Now that we've heard from several people who've never played football, it think I it is time that someone who has speaks up for Coach Jordan to play the players' issue created by the media.
First — the sport of football is a rough and tough sport, unlike, say, working in the classes at college. (You can play with your knees in Nebraska or Oklahoma roaming the halls of Wesco trying to hit you as hard as they can not slap you on the helmet.) So if you can't take a ball from the football ball and get a job with the classics department.
So I say this to Coach Mason. Take it from me, the student body is behind you in your efforts to do better. We can't win without though we've lost several games, we are headed in the right direction. So keep up the good work.
Second — the coach was trying to prevent injury, not inflict pain. Anyone who has played basketball or any other sport must have our territory when they go over the middle, so the quarterback has to be careful how he throws his pass. Otherwise the receivers can get hit by a long shot and end up getting this point across to his quarterbacks.
Chris Seferyn Philadelphia senior
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed
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