4
Friday, November 17. 1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Health Dept., Heal Thyself
The Lawrence Douglas County Health Department has once again been forced into the limelight of civic concern and as in times past the department does not look too good.
Mrs. Raymond Cerf, a resident of Lawrence, took on the task of comparing the department to six other Kansas health departments. In her conclusion, she made it clear that in her opinion the local health department did not do the job it should. She was particularly concerned that programs to provide house calls by public health nurses and physical examinations for people who request them.
Cerf made several good points in her report, but some of her comments need to be criticized. She said the health board should not be held responsible for the problems of our health department because she believed that they had been systematically misinformed. This is a weak excuse because it is their job to be informed about the health care correct in claiming the area. If Cerf is correct in claiming the area, the bers of the health board had been misinformed, then two groups should be chastised: the group that gave the wrong information and the health board, which passively accepted their information without occasionally checking it.
Even more disturbing than her weak excuse for the health board's mistake is her attitude towards the health clinic's practice of dispensing Kansas students. In other words, that the county taxpayers should not be responsible for health problems of KU students. (One has to assume
that if she resents students using the health clinic for obtaining birth control pills, she would not want them to use the clinic for other reasons; less she is particularly sensitive about dispensing contraceptives.)
No matter what her feelings may be concerning students who use the health clinic, she ignores the fact that KU students are taxpayers. Students have no special privileges that allow them to buy items in face of absence without paying sales taxes. Only those with housing or apartments escape real estate taxes. No matter what permanent residents of Lawrence or KU students may think about the matter, students are a part of the Lawrence community. They pay taxes and have the right to consider themselves citizens. It is not appropriate to expect some services from the governmental departments they help finance.
It is possible that the health department will experience some changes as the result of Cerd's study. Whatever they may be, I hope that the people who effect the changes do not take Cerd's advice to get KU students. Any health program in this city will help them into account that approximately a third of the city's population consists of college students.
Students are not a superfluous group that this city has to endure but rather an economically and sociologically important sector of this city's population which should be accounted for in any city programs, particularly those involved with the community's health.
Mary Ward
WASHINGTON—One of the biggest prizes seized during the Indian raid on government files was a memo written by Vice President Joe Biden to Secretary Rogers Morton on behalf of a bank taxing to
Jack Anderson
The story of Agnew's intervention to help Olmsted start an Indian banking operation has been dug out of the looted files by the angry Indians who occupied them and then sacked the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They escaped with thousands of government documents.
He agreed to hold the stock in escrow for the Indians until they could accumulate enough money to take over the ownership as well. All Omitted wanted out of it is a modest management fee and a share of the profits for his banking combine.
The banker, George Olmsted,
wanted to establish an American
Indian National Bank which
would have outlets on the major
routes of New York and Los-
becoming Vice President, was a
director of an Olmsted bank.
Indians Discover Aide in Agnew
The vice president passed on the proposal to Morton in a memo dated August 6, 1970.
Among them are letters and memos showing that Olmsted approached the vice president in 1970 about starting the Indians in the banking business. Olmsted offered not only to put up $1 million to launch the bank but also to train the Indians to run it themselves.
"Attached," wrote Agnew, "is a letter from General George Ohnsted, chairman and president of the International Bank of Washington, wherein he sets forth a proposal for the creation of an American Indian National Bank.
"It would appear to me that this idea has considerable merit
Readers Respond
Despite Agnew's reservations about becoming "personally involved," his office has continued to press for the project within the federal establishment. In response to Indian Affairs, in response to a task force of Indian leaders to form the bank.
To the Editor:
At Ostmedet's request, the vice president is also preparing to ask the Office of Minority Business to help the bank with a federal grant. But he has refused another request from Ostmedet to imbuicate the dollar value of the currency to get a national charter for the bank.
Mr. Houck is quite misinformed about my stand and my motion in a recent KU Arab Club meeting concerning Palestine. When a prepared resolution was moved to amend it as follows: "This assembly deplores the terrorist activities of the Black September organization and its people." I was moved to speak to people." I was shouted down by most of the members of the KU Arab Club present, I did not even receive a second, and was ruled out of order. Only then I was allowed to move, should offer a support motion instead. The sentiments of the
and that it would be desirable for an appropriate person in the federal government to explore General Olimsted this concept."
Unz Explains Stand
members of the KU Arab Club present were clearly indicated in that direction.
and new housing developments in the Gaza strip. Many more will move out as new housing becomes available. The refugees sites are improving their housing and will soon get electricity, sewage and running water for the first time. All the refugees in the strip are able to obtain Jordanian or Israeli travel documents and to travel abroad if they so wish. The resettlement of the Palestinian refugees in the Gaza strip has been made under way Israel auspices.
H. Unz Professor of Electrical Engineering
Olmsted told us the proposed bank would bring financial benefits to low-income Indians who have been unable to borrow money. He also said his concept of banking for the "little people," he said. A spokesman for the vice president stressed that the bank was precise in the sort of self-help that the son had sought for the Indians.
AGREE CONFLICT!
The vice president added cared for a view of my previous business experience with General Olmsted's group. I do not feel it appropriate for me to become personally involved in this matter. However, I do feel it has sufficient merit to have full and complete consideration by the Federal government."
formed and ten years out of date about other subjects as well. The Arabs in Israel enjoy full rights as Israeli citizens. They vote and are elected to the Israeli religion, speech and press, get free education, join labor unions, study in the universities, have welfare and legal rights, pay taxes, serve in the Army. Unlike the Jewish citizens of Syria, Iraq and Egypt whose travel is restricted, the Arab citizens of Israel can travel freely everywhere in Israel and abroad
like all other Israeli citizens.
Even the 150,000 Arab summer visitors from the Arab countries in the Middle East visit Israel without any permit required.
While the Arab countries have done nothing for the Palestinian refugees during the past 24 years, and the refugees in the Gaza strip were held virtually as prisoners in their camps by the Egyptian administration, certain definite steps have been taken by Israel to refugee problem. Thousands of refugees from the border into Israel every day and work there for Israeli wages. Many of the refugee families have moved out of the refugee camps to available apartments
AGNEWCONFLICT?
"We have done everything we could to assist this project," the spokesman said.
Agnew has taken the lead inside the Nixon Administration in efforts to keep Indians. He has also tried to establish a special counsel, free of the Justice Department's stringent right fight for Indian legal rights.
Footnote: not other government documents, now in Indian hands, confirm our earlier columns that white exploiters have cheated the Indians out of their water rights in arid areas of the West.
Military Pollution
Military Pollution
The Navy was selling restricted pesticide DDT on the pesticide market in Hawaii and the Army was washing dangerous poisons into the soil in California until the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) intervened.
In Hawaii, vacationing EPA inspector Robert Kanehiro and Hawaii state agriculture experts discovered the Navy was selling gassed-gallon pails of surplus DDT. The EPA's regional office in San Francisco and the Navy sheepishly withdrew the highly
And the Lights Went Out
When it became apparent that power would not return in the immediate future, stranded cars were moved into mines minutes were filled to capacity. Cars ran low on gas but service station pumps were frozen without electricity. Commuters looked for alternative means of transport. Some hitched rides on trucks into the suburbs.
Others paid exorbitant prices to taxi drivers for a ride. One man had his wife sail up the Hudson River.
Again, the EPA intervened, and notified Army environmentalists, who issued Sierra cease and desist orders.
Reflective of the spirit of faithfulness that night in New York City was the fact that only one-fourth as many people were arrested as on a normal light. In Boston, an incident at Walpole Prison marred an otherwise peaceful night. Immates rioted, and when police had the situation under control $75,000 in damage had been done.
Ingenuity sparked people deprived of electricity. A woman in Vermont saved a thawing freezer-full of food by putting the food in her winter backyard. A Wall Street executive paid a $15,000 bonus for contributing in return for a supply of wooled candles. Others made do with birthday candles for light. Students at a college in Massachusetts studied by car light. A place or board girder built to save light. Delicate surgical operations were carried out in nightlight, and babies were delivered in the dark.
Police and National Guard troops were mobilized to bring order to the city but volunteers saved New York from chaos. Some directed traffic, others provided candles and supplies and patrolled the streets to prefer looting. Fellow officers replaced the alfondness of daytime encounters.
Without lodgings, those stranded in New York searched for places to sleep for the night. Eight-thousand slept in railroad stations. Thousands slept on church pews. Others slept in the furniture departments of large department stores and churches or stairways or in stalled trains. At Kennedy International Airport, stranded passengers slept in airplanes grounded by the power failure.
Two persons died of causes related to the power failure. One had a heart attack after climbing 10 flights of stairs. Another person fell on a financial losses also accompanied the blackout. The estimate is that $100 million was lost in business and man-hours because of the power failure.
New York City's loss alone was estimated at $2.5 million. Millions of checks piled up in banks when power was cut off from computers that were using the city's mail swamped post offices in the area. All the morning newspapers in New York City except the New York Times failed to reach the streets the morning after the blackout. The Times reported by using the presses of a Newark newspaper.
restricted bug killer from the market.
New York City, Boston, Providence and other cities were robbed of their power supplies during the evening rush hour, when populations were swollen with commuters. In New York City came to an abrupt halt. Hundreds were trapped in the others were suspended in a train on an East River bridge. Below the river, a passenger train stopped midway in a tunnel. Traffic signals no longer functioned. The control tower at Kennedy Airport temporarily unable to transmit instructions to pilots.
Meanwhile, surplus chemicans from the wind-down of the Vietnam war were delivered to the Sierra Army Depot in Hue. Huge trucks brought in load, loaded with diazinon, malathion, parathion, and a hazardous inventory of industrial solvents and other poisons.
Asian officials reportedly refused to use the Army bury the pollutants anywhere in Asia and the Navy objected to dumping
them at sea. So the Army brought vast numbers of drums of surplus poisons home in huge steel boxes. By the time they reached the Sierra depot, some containers or leaking, DDT was slashing an army of poisonous crystalline deposits were caked at the breaks.
in the city were vaguely amused at the blackout. Some chattered, others joked as they waited for the power to return. But five, 10, 30 minutes passed and New York was still cloaked in darkness. Meanwhile traffic was snailed in to allow passengers to travel to the United Nations thought to the Tower of Babel. Most vending machines would not operate. Half-bakeloads of bread, 300,000 of them, wasted in cooling ovens. Half-formed tires wiltened when a production process was implemen- tated, flying over the city saw the lights fade and re-later, "it looked like the end of the world."
Others, who initially saw the blackout as Communist sabotage or Pentagon吊anky-pan, also might have learned a lesson of some value. Mr. McGee's 1970s old boy who tapped an electric pole with a stick just as power failed and ran home in tears in the belief that he had caused the darkness, might be one for man really has come from a time of superstition about electric power was still centuries in the future.
At the depot, Col. Skinner Anderson, the commander, admitted to my associate Les Written that small quantities of DDT and a solvent had been taken into the soil. But he denied that there was any large-scale pollution from the chemicals.
Although the depot is located on porous sand which drains directly into the water table, the Army washed some DDT from the containers into the desert. Some solvents were also buried
A new consciousness of the role of the machine in human life might have developed. The dependency of the region on electricity was illustrated starkly to all who witnessed the power grid break down, knives, toothbrushes, razors, stoves, furnaces, blankets, door belts, garage doors, hair dryers and typewriters became useless and computers, subways and elevators would not run, that dependence with all its implications was perfect. Perpetually in which machines play such a central role.
For each person who made it home, 10 or 20 remained in the city. New York assumed a pagan atmosphere as people lit candles, and carried flashlights to see in the darkness.
At 5:15 p.m., Nov. 9, 1985, a small switch flipped open at Adam Beck Power Plant No. 2 in Canada's Ontario Province. Excess electric current had overloaded the capacity of the plant's generators. Unable to generate power, an eastern United States drew electricity from neighboring states to power grid that extended far into the United States. The additional demand for power quickly overloaded other plants, and within 13 minutes a chain reaction immobilized most generating facilities in the northeastern United States, a chain reaction miles, an area comparable in size to Great Britain, was suddenly without power. Thirty-million people watched the lights go out.
The blackout ended at different times in different areas affected by the power failure. Some areas had power restored in a few hours; in New York, it was finally restored 12 hours after the lights went out.
Copyright, 1972 by United Feature Syndicate, Inc
Now, seven years after the power failure, the significance of the event is probably lost to many who only vaguely recall that dark night in November. The chance that such a power failure will recur is minimal. But for many of the 30 states, it was once common for cities and towns of the northeastern United States, the event is firmly etched in their memories. They recall a new faith in humanity that they acquired when men groped in darkness. They accepted help and gave help in their rescual. Perhaps that ended on Nov. 10 when work resumed, but the feeling might have lingered.
BvSTEVERIEL.
In a nation that numbers more than 1,700 daily newspapers, it is
Permit a moment of shop talk. I am in Charlotte, N.C., sitting in, for old times' sake, upon a few sessions of the National Conference of Editorial Writers I am nudged to say a word about the doughy outfit and the unsung guys and dolls who make it up.
- I HOPE THIS LAYS TO REST ANY NOTION THAT WERE RELATED TO THOSE SAVAGES!/
Editorial Succor Is Self-Inflicted
James J. Kilpatrick
More typically, the editorial page of those days was a hedgepodge of homemade homilies and sponsored fillers. The writer, who is the popular imagination, was an old geezer in a riverboat eyeshade; he lived like a hedgehog in a rollup burrow, but his stories were pronouncements upon Afghanistan, Iran and Peru. Little thought was given to luring readers with a page that was bright and engaging enough to read. The object seemed rather to drive the readers away.
a risky business to generalize about editorial writers and editorial pages. Even so, it is a bit of a joke to report ago, when the NCWE came into being, the American editorial page was limping along with the spavins and heaves. There were more books written there always have been editors, here and there, who could rise above the dustbin grayness of their pages and make their voices heard. They have ever been too few.
it would be saying too much to credit the NCEW with the dramatic changes that have happened in television and postwar challenge of television had a galvanic effect upon newspapers generally. But the NCEW, though it never has numbered its readership, hundred members, has had a catalytic effect upon the nation's editorial pages. Plenty of dull newspapers are not correspondent who travels ideally about the nation, reading
LETTERS POLICY
Letters to the editor and
college presidents, double-
spaceed and exceed 500 words. All let-
ters should provide the name,
condensation, according to space limitations and
distance requirements. Dudes must provide their
name, year in school and
address. Dudes must provide their
name and position; others
must provide their name and address.
--scores of different papers, is bound to be struck by the improvement he sees.
From the earliest years of the NCEW, its annual meetings have included a full day of editorial
critiques. There may be one professional organizations that engage in such salubrious practices, but I examine each other's brief doctors who criticize a colleague's hand with a scalpel—but I have not run across them. These editorial writers go at one rate; they write about what builds ambition while they demolishes ego. Their self-examination sessions are intellectual sauna baths—six hours of sweating and a roll in the sand and they have a tonic effect.
In the nature of things, certain criticisms recur. For all the leavening effect of the NCEW critiques, too many editorial pages still suffer a dumping heaviness. Too many editorials fail to reason with the reader; they preach, or adomish, or
scold. They tread from Point A to Point B on elephant feet, trampling their nuance on the way, and having arrived at Point C, a sentientuous conclusion: The outward alas, "remains to be seen."
There is much less of this soggy fare than there used to be. In my own random observation, I found that a competent job at the important task assigned them—to offer their readers informed opinion on public affairs. They are more, and pronounce less.
They suffer, as a class, from all the usual aches and pains of the writing craft—from broken verbs and sprained ideas—but they learn to write with anonymity. A few papers have gone to bylined editions; a few others carry in their mastheads the names of all resident editorials; and many remain in records. Editors, like recorded messages, go unassigned. I am no longer so certain the practice is wise. If editorsrolled, bearing the hallmark of their quality of writing might improve.
Known or unknown, the editorial writer has few complaints. It's nothing to have ten thousand opinions; every literate fellow has at least ten thousand opinions. But to get paid for setting them forth daily in print is difficult. The slopes of Olympus: The work of the hours are long, and the customers sometimes holler back; but all in all, a mighty pleasant life.
(C) The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
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