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Thursday, October 6, 1977
Universit y Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed column represent only the views of the writers.
Scrutinize drug group
the coordinator of the Douglas County Drug Abuse Council, Lisa Erickson, says she will resign her position Oct. 15. Her resignation is the second this year by a council coordinator; Randy Schwering stepped down in April.
stepped down in April Erickson told county commissioners that the council needed a "major revamping. Scrap it and start over."
Screw it and turn it She accused council members of a lack of goals, a lack of interest and a lack of commitment in their work.
If the council suffers from internal problems, it is indeed unfortunate. But more importantly, what is the council supposed to be doing? Most University of Kansas students have never even heard of it.
ERICKSON FOCUSED attention on "the almost comic attitude the community holds toward the ineffectiveness" of the council. "Public apathy," she said, has plagued the group.
Perhaps anonymity, not apathy, has been the council's problem. If a group is set up to combat drug abuse, drug abusers need to know about it. Erickson's statements about the council's problems raise one simple question: Whose fault are those problems?
County Commissioner Robert Neis, the commissioners' representative on the council, said the county should determine whether it was getting its money's worth from the group. But Neis and the commissioners pride in the more relevant issue of why the council has basked in security since it was formed two years ago.
THE COUNCIL receives money not only from state and county funds, but also from federal revenue sharing funds. Where the COUNCIL has less than passing interest to Douglas County taxpayers.
Peter Whitenight, commission chairman, said he thought Schering had encountered problems similar to Erickson's. If so, commissioners should ask him about the frustrations of persons asked to head a group whose objectives are unclear and whose public support is low.
It is not enough for government to set up an agency for every problem. If an agency is established, it must receive continual scrutiny directed at whether its existence is justified. If the drug abuse council is any indication, Douglas County may need to examine its groups more closely than it has in the past.
Monev tarnishes Graham's halo
God has blessed evangelist Billy Graham.
The main arm of his ministry,
the Minnesota-based Billy
Graham Evangelistic
Association (BGEA), operates
on an annual budget of about $25
million.
That same Graham organization supplies 80 to 90 per cent of the $2.9 million of assets of the World Evangelism and Christian Education Fund. These funds include blue chip stocks and include blue chip stocks and include
Last weekend, Graham broke ground for a $15.5-million Billy Graham Center at his alma mater, Wheaton College in Illinois. The funds for the international training center for missionaries and evangelists came from $90,000 individuals. Individual donations were as much as $147,000.
NOR IS GRAHAM personally doing too badly. His first book, "World Affair," published by Doubleday, was a best-seller. His lastest, "How to Born Again," has sold 650,000 of its initial printing of 800,000. More than 200,000 additional copies will be distributed to K-Mart stores and two Graham organizations, the Grason Co. and Wide Wide Publications. At $6.95, the book isn't exactly a free ride to
Rick
Thaemert
Editorial Writer
Literary by-products of the Graham association are making a mark in foreign lands and in some countries. A mission to Hungary, Graham drew as many as 10,000 people on the hills north of Budapest. Large crowds are not unusual and their attractions attracted them in 55 countries.
Things are going so well, in fact, that God may have decided to toss a tribulation Graham's way. Last week, the evangelist came under fire from the Minnesota Securities Commission and the Council of Better Business Bureaus for failing to comply since 1978 by providing registration and annual reports of annuity plans sold in the state.
UNDER THE Graham enterprise, donors can receive gift cards that are pooled into a pooled income fund. Ten times since 1973 the BGEA allegedly ignored routine requests for benefits and subscriptions funds.
at the two accusing agencies, saying he was being used as a "whipping boy" to gain cooperation from the country's nonprofit fund-raising groups. He added that many of their staffs also were not cooperating with the council.
BGEA executive vice president George Wilson called the failure to report finances an oversight. Graham lashed out
Graham's excuses, however,
don't cut the holy mustard.
"Oversights" involving
thousands of dollars were
enough to give Bert Lance the
sound. Surely they're enough to
make questionable the
quality of Graham's good deeds.
STATING THAT other clerical organizations haven't complied with the law doesn't cut it either. Two wrongs don't end together. The company has incorporated a Catch 2 clause for men of the cloth.
Graham's most foolish justification for not reporting finances was that he feared the public would think his organization too rich and insulted. He brought bengries crying to touch the greenback hem of the association's garment.
Graham should know from
the Watergate and Lance affairs that keeping secrets doesn't inspire Americans to reliose in praise.
As for beggars, well, Graham should have have known long ago that those who help fulfill people's spiritual needs draw both honest people and leeches. The need for these needs is part of Graham's calling, Who, if not those like Graham, will take the time?
*PERHAPS GRAHAM'S fears of having publicly reported finances are substantiated. A growing number of old-guard Christians already have protested the extravagant amounts proposed for the new center in Wheaton.
Billion-dollar churches, book-peddling at K-Mart and Christian organizations' concern with keeping profits in the black are widening the narrow Christian path. Perhaps a reenactment of Jesus deserves the temple is more important if its purpose is being corrupted by big business profiteers and mass media religion. God shouldn't have to take a back seat to money.
Religions of the world are in
armour. Catholics are arguing over moral questions. Some Lutherans recently have questioned the interpretation of the Bible. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon has cast a cloud of deceit over all religious boundaries, bringing and submissiveness to the point of poverty for his followers. Ex-Watergate conspirator Charles Colson and former militant Eldridge Cleaver, now bornagain touring Christian speakers, are among those who believe that religion is a refuge for crooks and losers waged instant credibility.
Such circumstances should lead Graham to tread lightly on thin ice. His reputation as God's minister and a promoter of brotherhood has been an exception. His finances, no matter how legitimate, can't become suspect in a fog of Bert Lancelike oversights and concealments. He should heed the message in a hymn that advises, "Count your many adversaries, name them one by one."
After all, God has blessed Billy Graham. He doesn't have the right to let God down.
would fall short as governor
The coughs, wheezes and whistles heard from the south-central part of this state are the sounds of Vern Miller's campaign machine and all-purpose medicine show sputtering into action again. And as it begins to pull out of the driveway, he faces Kansas City, where the Kansas turnpike toward Topeka, those who are weary of Miller's campaigns can only wish him a quick breakdown.
Vern Miller probably never has been accused of being unoriginal. Over the years, he has unleashed a fusideload of unusual tractions to public bearers with fearless entrenchment of the law.
Dave Johnson
Editorial Writer
Under his direction, Miller's agents confiscated cartons of liquor aboard Amtrak trains
As attorney general, he jumped out of car trunks to arrest drug pushers. He once disguised himself as a wealthy businessman from New Orleans to make a drug buy at no less a conservative icon as the Kansas Agricultural Hall of Fame.
passing through Kansas. Later he swept the friendly skies of Kansas in ordering an injunction to stop the commercial aircrafts landing from a draft serving liquor on their flights. During his four years as attorney general of Kansas, we couldn't have asked for a more diligent law enforcement effort of his own. Fife himself out from the hinterlands of Mayberry RFD.
OPERATING OUT of his district attorney's office in Wichita, Miller has continued his crusades against pornographic films, massage parlors and, as always, drug traffic. On the sidelines, he has been called on by a paign for the governorship, an office he narrowly lost to Robert Bennett in 1974.
After three years out of statewide office, what would make Miller want to run again? Power? Fame? Money?
"My prime objective is beating Bennett," Miller has said, "and if somebody else can win that would be all right with him."
Apparently Miller is banking on his ability to do the job. Although he hasn't formally declared his candidacy, he already has named his first choice for a running mate, Charles Plumb, an Overland Park lawyer. Plumb is a former Republican and a Republican. Once again, Miller is casting his line out to the waters of conservative Kansas. The voters shouldn't bite.
KANSAS IS going to need a governor who is more than just a headline-grabbing Super Sheriff. The problems facing the state will be enough to tax state officials and administrators. Miller, entertaining as he is, has neither the expertise nor the ability.
With indications that enrollments will decline at colleges and universities in Kansas, the state legislature will be viewing more critically increased funding for higher education. Kansas is going to need a governor who can increase educational opportunities, dilemma even-handedly, and Miller has not been known for handling sensitive matters with a soft touch.
Within the next decade, farmers in western Kansas face a declining water table. Even Miller might have trouble dispatching enough agents with buckets of water to irrigate all of the wheat fields in western Kansas.
As farming income continues to decrease, other ways of earning revenue will have to be considered. There may be a need to introduce non-polluting industries into Kansas compulsory labor markets. Industries are given tax incentives to locate in Kansas, the state legislature will have to consider ways to subsidize the
tax revenues lost in these communities. A governor who is diplomatic and knows the state legislature will be needed to set up such a plan, and Miller must equip the necessary equipment.
HIGHWAY construction. Tax revisions. Prison reform. All are areas in which Miller may have some expertise. But in his 15 year career he did not shown he can handle the state's largest problems. And as he prepares for yet another run for the governor's seat, there are still no indications, no sign from the heavens that a problem prepared to tackle problem unrelated to law enforcement.
I do. You haven't changed, Vern.
When asked whether he could think of any conditions that would persuade him not to run next year, Miller said, "I don't know of anything that I can train unless, of course, some act of God, or unless I felt it could not be good for my family and the state."
To the Editor:
The Kansas deserves credit for presenting two thoughtful pieces on a subject that appears to be recapturing American attention. I refer to Andy Warren's editorial praise of postwar West German political and economic behavior and
Germany's contrition genuine
Context determines history's relevancy
Editor's note: In a recent New York Times feature, printed on the Kansan editorial page, Harvard University professor of history David Herbert Donald expressed his doubts about the relevancy of the history he teaches. The following essay, also a New York Times feature, is the response of one Harvard history, Edward L. Keesan). Dear David:
It was a pleasant surprise to come upon your essay, "Our Irrelevant History" in today's book. I wrote it for the New York Times.
1. too, struggle each semester with uncertainty about the worth of "facts" in the classroom, and even, when the hour is late, with darker doubts about the worthiness of my activity; and 2. not to be for the activity who can find no jobs, and for the Republic that provides them none.
first few paragraphs, how similar are our
recounters? You call this 'turn of self-
crutality and self-sacrifice'
But I had always assumed that those who, like yourself, were occupied with the "mainstream," our own history, had less cause for such misgivings than does a teacher of medieval Russian history. How fortunate, I thought, were you to be imparting the outlines of the common national experience to students in an environment a round your interpretation of its meaning?
THE MORE, then, my surprise in discovering that you and I emerge from our pre-term self-examination with such radically different conclusions. It may be that temperament is at work here, perhaps a husband's emotional trait, but I suspect that other factors are involved as well.
Two of these are, I would suggest, the fact that I have been studying and teaching a history and culture that are not originally my own, and the fact that ideology, the materialist interpretation of history, and the continuity of history may be related to any consideration of Russia's history.
Relevance, like other forms of meaning, is contingent upon context and mode of thought. History is relevant, if only because young people want, as you yourself say, "an understanding of how the American past relates to the present and the future," and because that understanding will influence their self-perception and behavior.
It is this professional experience, I think, that leads me to profound disagreement with what I take to be the central point of my essay: "Consequently, the 'lessons' taught by the American past are today not merely irrelevant but dangerous."
The question, then, is not whether history is relevant—individuals and nations will continue to find relevance in historical fact or myth, whatever our poor efforts—but what the past has given historical expectation might be to a given current or future one—that is, how is relevant?
Here again I come to context, and the mode of thought. While it would be imprudent and graveless to challenge your interpretation of American history as such, I would suggest that, in broader context, one might derive a slight but meaningful meaning from the facts to which you refer.
HISTORY IS relevant, if only because readers will respond to your elogent essay out of an intuitive awareness that historical argument is relevant.
For other nations and societies have had periods of wealth and abundance, and have responded to them, in terms of social and industrial development. In the production of human resources, differently
OTHER NATIONS have spread over vast territories rich in good land and natural resources, ravishing and fouling them much as we have—perhaps worse—and now find themselves under siege by pollution, but with social, political and spiritual problems far greater than our own.
It is not my purpose to be self-congratulatory, for which, I agree, there is little reason; the causality in the above cases is, so far as I can tell, dissociated from any innate moral or spiritual national characteristics. But it is significant that the fortunate immigrants who spread across this continent built not only factories but schoolhouses, free and public, not only colleges but the same colleges, not only jails but—of the same granite—courthouses, however troubled and beset with doubt these institutions may now be.
And there is some meaning—again in relative context—in the fact that this population emerged from its brief period of abundance as the bearer of a culture that can embrace both the most obsure consumption and the most determined, and most power, traits; both gross social and racial injustice and the strongest—and most effective—civil and human rights movement, both remarkable cultural stability and rapid social change.
Some of these resources—our students—are, for a time, committed to your care and mine. We must strive against our doubts to teach them to see the past in a context in which they can discover not only that history is relevant but that they are.
The most important "means of production" and the most crucial resources are human resources, those embodied in a highly trained, inventive and responsive citizen. Such resources we still have, even in our present abundance that is the child of our Abundance.
such a treatment, as you will appreciate, sets off several alarms in the mind of a Russian historian. What is dangerous, it seems to me, is not so much the lessons of the past as the risk of losing them to the present. We are included and life-lending materialistic view of that past, a view I know not to be yours.
YOU SAY that the lessons of the past are not only irrelevant, but also "dangerous"; I judge from your further argument that you mean primarily the socio-economic lessons drawn from the Age of Abundance as we face a more Soartan economic future.
KANSAN Letters
nese are serious allegations, and Mifsud's evidence does not always support them.
James C. Mifsud's subsequent rebellation. Both are rather polemic in tone, but Mifsud's refutation raises questions of fact and interpretation that warrant serious examination.
Basisically, Mifsud dismisses West German acts of national contortion and benevolence as little more than power politics and "Realpolitik" with a public relations façade. As the years pass, the GDR falls behind the European character will reappear to wield its power, albeit not so dangerously this time.
The suggestion that the West German government is insensitive to the crimes of the Third Reich would surely startle the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD). Several members of the SPD executive committee, a personalission Hitler's wrath some beside Jews and Communists in prisons and concentration camps. Its chairman, Willy Brandt, renounced his German citizenship and fought bravely in Norway and Germany in the underground resistance. As chancellor, as leader he dropped to his knees and wept openly at a memorial shrine in a former concentration camp.
All of this hardly squares with an image of a pragmatic, cold, calculating, public relations government. Nor is there any reason why leaders are significantly less aware of the burdens of the past.
Mifusd, of course, is quite correct in ascribing pragmatic motives to German generosity. Yet does this preclude sincerity and humanitarianism? Was not our stellar humanitarian program of the postwar era, the Marshall Plan, also justified to
the American people on political and strategic grounds? The Germans are increasing, not decreasing, their nationalism. They have agreed, despite Mitsud's assertion to the contrary, to stop exporting nuclear reprocessing technology.
Mifsud's most significant argument concerns his fundamental skepticism about German democracy. His point must seem reasonable to Americans who today read screaming guidelines that说我是个右翼党 by a band of leftist anarchists or is about to succumb to a neo-Nazi military putsch or both.
Happily, there is little reality in any of these contentions. Mifsud's own evidence is Almouse and Verb's *Economics*. In 1983, a "1984 book based on survey data collected in the summer of 1959.
The empirical evidence collected in the 1960s and 1970s consistently refuted the Almond-Verba point of view. West Germany now has respected the traditional role Each of its postwar governments has achieved power through straightforward constitutional means. Its people have pioneered an impressive grassroots political weapon called "citizens' initiatives," and it has a remarkably broad base. Naturally, there should be more vigilant recounting of the holocaust to younger Germans.
Yet I find it ironic that Mifunass assails the Germans from the "bastion of liberty" and democracy, the United States, where fewer than half of the adults bother to vote in local elections, where fewer than three-fourths make the effort to participate in the election, our presence here where we are absent on forgetting our own very recent Vietnamese experience.
Ronald A. Francisco Assistant professor of political science
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