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Monday, October 10, 1977
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent only the views of the writers.
Clinton can wait
The Army Corps of Engineers' reiteration last week that Clinton Reservoir would probably be filled gradually over a four-and-a-half-period period caused local officials by surprise.
Despite the fact that the Kansas Water Resources Board announced the staged filling six months ago, several community leaders apparently thought that a full lake would be attracting campers and boaters by early 1979. So when Colonel A. G. Foster, engineer, reported the plans for staged filling, he found an unhappy audience.
Mayor Marrie Argersinger expressed the source of officials' worries when she said, "It's some concern to me that the boost in the economy would be delayed." State Rep. Lloyd Buzzi, R-Lawrence, or a law firm, could resources board and the corps to discuss the staged filling.
Probably more frantic were the invoiced reactions of uninformed land developers, real estate agents and merchants, all of which foster for the influx of customers and investors.
Such concern is based more on the desire for short-term financial gain than on reason.
True, financial benefits might be delayed,
but the corps has assured that its more important commitments—flood control and water supply—would be kept.
Over-erager businessmen and concerned officials should also realize that a reservoir filled in stages might in the long run, draw more tourists. The corps' stated reason for the slow filling is that it would enhance the development of the game fish population—which is the concept that was used in fillins in recent years. This is carried over to some extent in long-finished reservoirs by varying water levels so fish can take advantage of shoreline vegetation.
And at the very least it is encouraging to see the Corps of Engineers, so often criticized for its disregard for the environment, helping the conservationists' recommendations.
The delay also will give Lawrence time to catch up with Clinton. At best, Clinton Parkway will not be finished until 1980. The four-lane parkway will extend west four miles to the dam from the intersection of three streets; it already crowded intersection that, it is hoped, will be improved during the construction of the new highway.
Increasing University enrollment and industrial development are giving Lawrence a healthy economic boost now. The community should be happy to sit back and wait for Clinton to fill, using the extra time to better prepare for the lake's impact.
So did Ronny Zamora, a 15-year-old Floridian who, was convicted of killing and robbing 82-year-old Bilton Hagerglass. Earl Mackay pleaded not guilty pleaded "insanity via intoxication with television violence."
Television went on trial last week
Verdict on TV violence: Guilty
The case isn't the first to link TV violence and crime. In another case, a young man accused of bombing a school in New York stole more than 200 sticks of dynamite and, using things he
Rick Thaemert
Editorial Writer
had seen on TV and a little common sense, conceived a bomb. In another incident, a boy shot his younger brother during pretend shootout after watching Clint Eastwood in "Dirty
PERHAPS RUBIN'S statements that TV makes people unable to distinguish reality
from fantasy are substantiated.
Fellow lawyers have called Rubin's defense of television-bred insanity brilliant. At any rate, his stand is not only strong but also sound.
Statistics back him up.
Michael Rothenberg, a child psychiatrist at the University of Washington, has received 25 years of hard data on the subject-50 comprehensive studies in which to understand every possible background. Most studies indicated that viewing violence tends to pro
Soviet dissident asks for support from West. . .
BY ANDREISAKHAROV N.V. Times Features
MOSCORO—Two years ago, the Final Act of the Helsinki Accord unanimously curtied and Cooperation was signed. Its historical significance was the proclamation of an inseparable bond between France and an open society; that is, the freedom of people to move
MICHELLE CONDUCTOR GROUP INC. AWARD 2014
across state borders, the free exchange of information and the freedom of conscience.
Is the West prepared to defend these noble and vitally important principles? Or will it, little by little, accept the interpretation of the principles of Helsinki's duties as an emperor and the letter to the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe are trying to impose?
The Soviet and East European representatives have supported the humanitarian sections of the Helsinki accords by emphasizing the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs
BUT THE FACT is that these protestations are out of place and contradict the United Nations Charter and
other pacts, as well as the declarations of rights in the Helsinki accords themselves, where violations of human rights, accepted international standards of civil rights and the openness of society are concerned.
At the same time, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries think it quite permissible to conduct their own impudent campaigns against a foreign enemy or against human rights in the West.
Such a one-sided understanding of detente is not limited to words (and I am aware of the many rights). Every person serving a term in the hall of present-day Gulag for his beliefs or the open profession of them, every opposition to political reasons, every person refused permission to emigrate or travel abroad, represent a direct violation of the Helsinki accords.
I AM REFERRING here to persecution for religious activity, to the refusal to allow Pentecostals and Baptists, Germans and Jews and people of other nationalities to emigrate; to the reprisals for lawful and human activities that
have been visited on hundreds of persons who are suffering for attempts to leave the country; and, especially, to the scandalous fact of repressions against those attempting to gather and publish materials on the violations of the human rights of the Helsinki accords, organizing groups to monitor their fulfillment or even simply belonging to such groups.
THE MONSTROUS cruelty of the sentences imposed this year on the Ukrainians Mikola Rudenko and Oleksa Tikahe, who were given 7- and 12-year charges of disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda, out of sight of the public and in violation of their rights to a legal basis. The police, Yuri F. Orlov, Aleksandr Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharsky, who formed a group to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki accords, are not simply violating the right of freedom of conscience, but a defiant act by the Soviet authorities—a test of the fulfillment of the principles of Helinski.
TO INGORE this challenge would be a faint-hearted capitulation to blackmail.
I believe that Western parliaments should insist upon inaction to the Bologna conference on the Helsinki accords, convened last week, which would make further capitulation imminent.
It is necessary to insist on the rapid liberation of "reusenfs" and those arrested for expressing criticism, on a basis of national identity and the facilitation of emigration and foreign travel and on the free distribution of books, newspapers and magazines published as a condition or conclusion of the Belgrade conference.
We are going through a period of history in which decisive support of the principles of freedom of conscience, an open society and the rights to become an absolute necessity.
The alternative is surrender to totalitarianism, the loss of all precious freedom and political, economic and moral degeneracy.
The West, its political and moral leaders, its free and decent peoples, must not allow this.
Andrei Sakharov, Soviet physicist and dissident leader, won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1975.
... But Sakharov's pleas are useless in vacuum
By VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV and YELENA KLEPIKOVA
NEW YORK—The inability and unwillingness of Soviet dissidents to look truth in the face and acknowledge it as a moral doxical resemblance to the Kremlin rulers against them they are in opposition on the essence of things, but not the
Dissidence in Russia is living out its short life span. This has already become obvious. No matter how sad it may be, it is better to admit it forthrightly.
ON ONE HAND, they have been weakened by emigration; on the other, by enforced segregation and ensuing of censorship, growing brutality of the police apparatus, anti-Semitism, searches, arrests, blackmail, etc. The role of the dissidents is more than political, and that is diminishing with each day.
The Soviet disissides, weak in numbers and quality, semi-mobilized without clear legal status, have now been weakened but not actually reduced to an actually reduced to an action in practical activity.
But these are merely external causes of the obvious fiasco being suffered by the Soviet dissidents and by the liberals and nonconformists who extend cautious sympathy to the government because is internal; the democratic movement's lack of roots in Russia, which at present has the government it
deserves, and perhaps even better. It could be much worse. It will be worse, and that is what we fear.
ANALYZING the democratic movement, we should make it clear that we include ourselves in its ranks and that we are not required to be looked upon as bitter, sober and essential confessions, as a form of self-criticism. Also, it is important to achieve the defeat than to achieve victory.
The Russian dissidents are
all as remote from their own
people as the party bureaucratic
clique. This is a tragic situation. The argument about Russia is being carried on by the sides in a vacuum, outside the country, not inside
True, in contrast with other dissidents, we do not claim the imperial imperative to demand that West for do Russia what Russia cannot do for itself and, most importantly, what Russia does not want; Give the country freedom.
MEANWILH, WE are witness to a striking geological phenomenon: The transformation of a peninsula into an island. By we refer to the American André Saklayaro.
It has always been thus.
Russian political history has developed completely apart from the history of the people.
His closest colleagues have been arrested: Serger Kovalev, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Yuri F. Orlov, Andrei Tverdokhlebov, and Ukrainian and Georgian dissidents. Many dissidents have left the Soviet Union.
The tiny remnants are involuntary dissidents—the Jewish villains, the satirists, "the sitters." In fact they are hostages, condemned persons.
HOWEVER paradoxical it may seem, the KGB is the
main seedbed of nonconformist thinking and the hothouse of dissidence. It is as if this person might find itself without work
But up to now it has managed to cope with its principal task: Isolating and barricading Sakharov and turning him
SAKHAROV IS too good for Russia, if not altogether ahead of his time. A solitary person who is not involved in the political climate of a traditional country such as Russia. All its great reformers—from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin—ended in inevitable IASco.
into a general without an army. The tragic isolation of Sakharov as a political figure has been intensified by a profound loneliness in his daily life. The KGB exerted much single-minded effort toward that end—making the renowned academic helpless in the fullest sense of the world.
The epistolary triumph evoked by President Jimmy Carter's telegram of reply to a letter from Mr. Clinton followed by a severe lewdness.
Like an exotic, heat-loving plant, Sakarov needs appropriate conditions, helping hands, special care and an artificial microclimate, even when the environment is Russian. The Russian environment is just the opposite—from national traditions to the counteraction of a powerful state apparatus. The marvelous miracle-plant will, regretfully, fade away without a trace.
duce aggressive behavior in the young. More than 2,300 other reports and studies indicate the same results.
MARQUIS DE CUSTINE, whose book about Russia has not lost its relevance to this day—so much so that the Soviet press dare not even allude to it—wrote in regard to the Russia of 1839：“Mercy is called weakness by the people, who have been made hard by this. This is even more to a Russia that has endured a revolution, carriage of civil war, 1937, World War II and the agony of Stalin's final years.
Mephistopheles depicted himself as a force aspiring to do evil but creating good. Russians criticize Mephistopheles' illusions, creates the opposite: Good, not wishing it and not even knowing it, is the cause of evil—greater at the end than the evil it sought to eradicate.
THE SITUATION, already recorded in world literature, is that of Don Quixote. But with the difference that the foes of Sakharov, the Russian writer, do not by no means mere windmills.
The KGB's goal is to make clear to naive Soviet listeners of the Voice of America and BBC the danger, not merely that the media would be bombing Sakharov, how as complainant or collaborator.
It is with shame one finds himself a helpless spectator to this battle, in safety beyond the borders of Russia; not in the battle arena but in the spectators' stands. From a crowd of hundreds a hand to the fallen warrior—the general without an army, Don Quixote, Academician André Sakharov.
Vadimir Solovyv and his wife, Yelena Kieplowa, both literary critics and journalist immigrated to New York City.
One American Medical Association recently criticized the television industry, saying that it is "insensitive to health problem and an environmental issue. Sponsors quickly redirected their money to lessivi
CHURCHES AND THE Parent Teacher Association were quick to jump on the antviolence bandwagon.
Dr. Benjamin Bloom of the Dr. Benjamin Bloom of the University of Chicago noted that he has undergone as much intellectual growth as will occur over the next 13 years. Children are malleable; they imitate
According to A. C. Nielsen, the man responsible for television ratings, children under five watch an average of 23.5 hours of TV a week, compared to adult's diet of 44 hours. Accumulated over 17 years, or up to high school graduation, TV watching will place second or third deep sleep on activity. Time magazine calculated that such children will watch 350,000 commercials and viciously participate in 18,000 murders by age 17.
my quoted an 11-year-old as saying, "You see so much violence that it's meaningless. If I saw someone really get killed, it wouldn't be a big deal. I guess I'm turning into a hard rock."
IT WOULD BE foolish to assume that kids aren't affected by TV. If we believe that they are, we must know during their 30 hours of attendance a week, must also accept that they absorb much of what they see during their 20 or so hours of TV a day. The TV in our home TV is more fun than school—they pay closer attention.
Some effects of television
rhapsody are visible. Kids
strugging around crooning
"Aaaaaaay," just like the Fmz.
Bionic toys sell like bionic hot-
toes; a creature is a hero to most
viewers.
But some effects can't be seen. Attorney Rubin said Zamora was neglected at home and was beaten. Thus, for six hours a day he turned to the only friends he could find within
the confines of his home—“Kojak,” “Baretta,” and “Police Woman.”
SADLY, THAT'S how the television industry wants it. The idea is to entice the viewer with enough action to draw him back episode after episode, before he becomes part of the show. Heroes, idols, friends.
PROGRAMMING violent shows presents serious ethical problems. Violence is popular. So is smut. Should such topics be allowed even if they erode society morals? Unlike specialized magazines or other publications, television is ostensibly free from media action. And it doesn't let up. It keeps giving more of what the public wants, whether it's good for them or not.
The only feasible solution to the violence explosion is in the home. Parents who don't monitor their kids' TV time are as much to blame as TV programmers. TVs don't jump out and grab kids. The tubes have to be removed before the tube can be tuned in. Parents should be around. That's one of their duties.
There are few solutions to the problem. Curtailing violent shows would mean cutting the audience from violent shows are among the most popular. Having visually walked on the wild side of crime, few children are content with watching a story to write a story about churning butter. A song and dance man like Donald O'Connor can't compete today. Contemporary heroes bust pushers, pimp and bandwomen.
CBS vice president Gene Mater said, "Should TV be programmed for the young through midnight? It's a real problem. TV is a mass medium and it is more than just children."
Another possible solution, regulating times in which violent shows can be shown, would be more foolish. Moreover, it would be discriminatory. Forcing crime show films or live shows at an unreasonable time would be unfair.
If that fails, we can always stamp in bold letters on each television set: "Warning, TV content to your mental health."
Second, calling preferential treatment for minorities by the euphemism affirmative action for minorities is a poor choice for whites discrimination is a thin disguise for an absurd and racist proposition. That is, preferential treatment is only when it works against minorities.
Word games used in affirmative action
To the editor:
First, that a program is remedial does not make it any less preferential. The two programs are not exclusive and in fact, an affirmative action program that favors minorities in admission procedures is a remedy for students through preferential treatment.
Statements in the Oct. 4 Kansan attributed to participants in the reverse discrimination seminar exemplify the word games often played by pro-affirmative action programs.
It was claimed that admission procedures at state institutions that favored minorities and women were not preferential, but merely remedial. Further, the fact that discrimination was harmful to minorities, affirmative action did not harm whites.
KANSAN Letters
I do not condemn all affirmative action programs that benefit minorities and women. Such devices as quotas have great utility in areas where there are no adequate safeguards to insure the equal distribution of public benefits. In such instances, quotas are the only feasible means of insuring equality by the traditions of racism and sexism are not perpetuated.
However, where equal standards are available, as they are in the admission procedures of professional schools, there can be little difference to extraordinary measures of the affirmative action programs.
To ease existing admission standards for minorities can work only on the detriment of those groups. The person admitted to a professional school on such terms is being told that he is not equal and the law will not treat him equally.
Jack O'Connor Lawrence law student
Social Security facts inaccurate
To the editor:
For the information of the
UPI and any of your readers who might have been misled, all military members pay full Social Security taxes on their earnings. Why did they sink into the system in 1967, probably about the time this dedicated UPI researcher was born.
Col. Walter M. Wondrack Professor of Aerospace Studies
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