Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, June 28, 1982
Visiting a strange land
SWATTING MOSQUITOS and sweating in the muggy summer heat of Kansas, we may find it difficult to think of the University of Kansas as an international capital. But sweltering right along with us here in Lawrence are hundreds of students from around the world.
Whether an Icelander suffering heat-stroke far from his cold, rocky shores or a Nigerian laughing at the mild Kansas summer, thousands of foreign students have come to KU to get an education and in the process have enriched our stay here, too.
MORE THAN 1600 students from overseas enrolled at KU last spring, 498 from Near East and Southern Asia, 498 from Far East Asia, 375 from the Americas, 137 from Europe and 125 from Africa. One hundred countries are represented at KU, with men outnumbering women 2 to 1 and the population split roughly between graduate and undergraduate studies.
Most come to KU with private financing and study either in business, computer science, engineering or the biological and physical sciences. These students make up close to 70 percent of the foreign population at our school.
Many have come to America in search of a better education in their field than they can receive at home, others have come out of curiosity and a desire to travel, and some have no doubt come here to meet the legendary Dorothy and Toto.
BUT WHATEVER THEIR reason for coming to KU, they are a welcome influence on our campus. Students from overseas bring with them an international perspective on politics and culture that is as informative and enlightening as any college class.
The influx of foreign students has also brought with it many serious and good minds, which have added to the quality of our classes and our studies.
But most of all, foreign students have provided us with interesting friends to make the heat, rain and mosquitos of a Kansas summer a little more bearable.
U.S. shelters Israelis
By SEEMA SIROHI Guest columnist
Another blow was dealt to American diplomacy. While President Reagan was enjoying the European air, busy trying to improve his image as a gun-slinging cowboy, one of America's allies became a victim.
While Reagan talked of world peace, Prime Minister Begin of Israel undertook the task of ridding the world of terrorism. One has to admit that Begin is quite a personality. If he sees an oia of a threat of any conceivable kind to his country, he decides to put his missiles to it. The expansionist tendencies of Israel are no secret to the world.
IN JUNE 1891, Begin used guns on Iraq's nuclear reactor. Why? Because it might have been against Israel one day. According to this flawless logic, one shouldn't stop at anything. In fact, Mr. begin hasn't stopped. He went on to attack last December, and now he is cleaning Lebanon.
Under the pretext of destroying the PLO infrastructure militarily and economically, Israeli soldiers have dealt a death blow to almost 10,000 civilians in Tye, Sidon and Beirut. The bombings have been indiscriminate indeed. It seems that they are being held in almost every nook and corner of Beirut.
Of course the United States looks on quietly. The human rights talk can rest in peace for a while since there are no American hostages in question in this case. The White House has been delivering a consistent barrage of carefully constructed statements deploring the outburst of violence in the Middle East but never condoning them. It is clear that Israel cannot ceasefire but not an Israel withdrawal. And how can they, since Israel is very important in the American sphere of world influence?
FOR ARGENTINA, the U.S. officials bent over backwards to find the closest set of epithets denouncing the seizure of Falklands. There was a debate about understatement or no statement is the policy.
In the United Nations, the United States vetoed 14 yes votes on a resolution that threatened sanctions against Israel. The Arab world did not swallow it very well, and Egypt was very unhappy about the move. One Cairo newspaper editor reportedly called it "a catastrophe, an insult to all Arabs. . . . Whatever Israel does, the United States supports it."
THE TACIT U.S. support is disheartening to many countries, and included are sturaium U.S. allies such as Britain. The one thing that worried the White House very much was that Moscow would use its 1980 friendship treaty with Syria as a pretext to retreat in the crisis, but the Soviets have not shown any willing moves toward Syria. History tells us that the Soviets usually move in when there is very little chance of resistance, as in Afghanistan.
Violence and a show of military superiority as means of negotiation open a new chapter in the movement for world peace. If the Israelis think that military aggression will sound the death knell for the PLO, they are underestimating the problem. There can never be peace until something is done for the millions of uprooted Palestinians in the Middle East.
PLO CHIEF Yasser Arafat declared in a radio speech, "Beirut, the graveyard of the invaders, shall be the Stalingrad of the Arabs," referring to the thousands of Russians who died in Stalingrd while fighting the Nazis in 1942-43. He accused the United States of "shameless declaring unreserved support for one of history's ugliest and most savage aggressions."
Savage it is indeed. More than 150 Israeli and Syrian jets fighters have already clashed. Thanks to the sophisticated U.S. weaponry, the Israelis attacking feature forces two of the finest fighters in the world—the U.S.-built F-15s and F-16s. Electronic countermeasure equipment can electronically "disguise" the F-16 to the Syrian air force, while the F-16's side can guide the war head toward the enemy jet at 1,650 mph, than 95 percent of the planes in the Syrian air force.
Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, nicknamed "the bulldozer" by his colleagues, said in an interview with Time. "What's happening is an immense blow to the Palestinian and international terror movement . . . the bigger the blow against it, the more important the more the Arabs in (the West Bank) and Gaza will be ready to negotiate with us and establish coexistence."
THERE IS CAUSE for the United States to rejoice because their highly advanced fighter planes have reportedly downed 79 Syrian planes with very little harm to the Israel side of the battlefield. The military analysis analyzing the performance of the American military equipment vis-a-vis the Soviet weapons and how much better the U.S. equipment is. The Israeli have improved on their U.S. purchases in the past. They have had ample chance to do so by making improvements encounters with the PLO in Lebanon since 1976.
Not being able to blame the present war on either Communism or the Soviets, Washington sent special envoy Philip Hahn on another trip to Russia. He could not even get a ceasefire out of Begin.
The aim of this aggression, according to Begin, is to push the PLO forces back 25 miles from the border to prevent shelling of the northern settlements. The aim has certainly gone beyond 25 miles. Despite Israeli censorship of reports, Mr. Obama's invasion of the human killings of innocent people and what the Syrian ambassador to the United States referred to as "genocide."
The outcome of this war might again change the geographical boundaries in the Middle East. A peaceful solution for the Moslem and the Christian world to coexist in the region seems to be possible, and peace process apparently does not embrace every problem in that cockpit of global tensions.
EDITOR S NOTE: Seema Sirohi is a graduate student in journalism from India.
Gorsuch grows her polluted garden
By JEFF THOMAS Guest Columnist
After Anne Gorsuch's first year and few odd months as director, the most that can be said today for the Environmental Protection Agency is that it seems to be keeping its promises—with the predictable gentleness of a confessed masochist.
EARLY LAST YEAR, the REA administration's temporary director, who led the EPA briefly before Gorsuch took over, declared that the agency would continue "only those programs which meet our most critical national environmental goals."
According to Gorsuch in fiscal year 1984 the EPA will spend less than half the $1.4 billion budget it spent the year she arrived, a cutback to around $700 million. The reduction means that the EPA will lose about 5,000 of its 11,000 staff positions.
THUS, REAGAN'S EPA pledged not to deliver, and so far Gorsuch has filled the order, that is, if the new lingo means that meeting responsibilities in full only requires delivering in
The words "most critical" pricked my ears as a most puzzling bureaucratic composition, a mating of words that should have been barred by a basic taboo in definition. All three dictionaries within reach from my desk reassured me that, yes, "critical" was reserved to describe situations with "the nature of a crisis," those cases that cannot be ignored.
Seemingly, in the EPA's words it would be dealing with only the worst crises. As for those less crucial environmental disasters—those new kinds of ignorable crises—say, the merely critical and mid-critical, they would be given the protection of the EPA's oversight.
Of course, more than one or two federal agencies have been known to be over staffed in the past and Gorsuch may actually be pruning troublesome overgrowth in her agency. Yet, if she wants to try her hand at administrative gardening, Gorsuch should pull the weeds more selectively than merely uprooting a minimum poundage of greenery, whether crabgrass or carrot tops.
Instead, the director's approach is to sweep the sickle with attention to numbers rather than protection. The number of EPA agents enforcing ventilation and air quality by 36 percent and air-quality enforcers by 36 percent.
THE POLLUTION situation the EPA is supposed to be correcting today looks like this: About 10,000 industrial sources are pumping pollutants directly into streams and rivers, says William Drayton, a former EPA assistant administrator. Even Gorsuch admits that more than 100 chemical waste dumps are posing immediate and serious threats to public health.
Anne Gorsuch's response? Less enforcement. She defends herself—from within a tight circle of advisers who previously worked as industry lobbyists and lawyers—by saying she is only freeing American business from the "paralysis" of heavy-handed regulations. In large part, anion quality regulations dampen the economy more than they benefit the environment, she says.
Actually, Gorsuch would be safer not trying to argue the bottom-line economic effects of anti-pollution efforts. Allowing pollution to damage ecosystems would not actually, accounts for destroyed productive power.
Funds spent on pollution abatement, however, directly create jobs to manufacture, install and service clean-up hardware, in addition to prepare geological elements that would otherwise be lost.
Surely outfitting a factory with clean smokestacks and preserving the health of the neighboring farmland as well as the working and spending residents is more economically sensible than loosening industries to puff and pump away for the moment.
YET, EVEN IF Gorschuld could release industry of every pollution standard, she'd hardly lead a rebirth of American prosperity; total air pollution control accounts for only 2.38 percent of industry's capital expenses on the average, according to the National Commission on Air Quality.
Business arguments aside, Gorsuch seems to have another thought running through her administrative philosophy as well. Last year the EPA was given $96 million beyond the agency's regular budget for toxic-chemical cleanup efforts. Spending the funds meant no additional burden on the chemical industry, yet Gorsuch decided to spend less than half the funds. Her thought: Let the rest flow back into the treasury to help offset the deficit.
Reduce the deficit by $224 million as Gorsch may have done, spread and dilate the effect throughout the economy and no one will noticeably benefit. Spend the same amount to halt and mount a handful of specific leaking chemical systems, increase the numbers of children whose lives would be made safer.
PERHAPS WE HAVE a case of an administrator hoping to score brown points with the White House. At best, the EPA is under the downward-looking leadership of a woman more interested in gouging the agency from within than bolstering the nation's ecosystem. Pain be pleasure for some, but only when it is temporary; poison is toying with damage of a permanent king.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jeff Thomas has a BS in journalism from KU, and is currently a staff member at the New York Times.
Letters to the Editor
Many women obsessed with artificial beauty
To the Editor.
I am writing in response to the letter (June 7) in which John Scarife discusses the feminist's supposed lack of appreciation for "beauty" and those who choose to "admirce" it.
Though the feminist film "Killing Me Softly" may have neglected anti-biometry to Mr. Scarffie, I believe that feminists are trying to distinguish the difference between artificial beauty and natural beauty. Any woman or man who goes to great pains to change her/his appearance, for whatever reason, has a very poor sense of worth. And in the long run, no amount of pride in her looks will help him become admired to change a woman's opinion of herself—except perhaps to make her very self-conscious. Sure it's nice to think that others think I'm attractive. But what Mr. Scarffie fails to realize and/or is lucky enough to be sheltered from, is the fact that many women are OBSESSED with being "pretty." And why? It doesn't really matter how they feel about themselves as long as everyone else approves. They live to please others—everyone else feels special. This extreme that feminists are trying to eliminate through films, lectures, books, organizations and self-awareness education.
Mr. Scarffie says, "The film goes on to imply that women who look pretty behave in a less than human manner and function according to the dictates of the male controlled advertising industry, because these women are 'pretty' rather than 'pretty' models? Or are they the Hustler and Penthouse models? For that matter, is sado-maschism and child pornography 'pretty'? It is the man or the woman who is 'pretty' or is it the image that attracts? Is it the clothes or the ludocratic hygiene ritual that entails depliaries, deodorants, and douches? Is it the clothes or the mascarara, perm, caps or nose that attracts?
Because I am an artist, I live for beauty. I am well aware of the importance of beauty, especially in a world that becomes less beautiful—less liberated—with every centerfold. You see,
there IS a difference between artifice and REAL beauty, between pornography and erotica, between rape/hate/violence and love/understanding/affection.
Though Mr. Scarfie (and family) may be the most sexually liberated, organically grown and naturally born of the literate class, he is just as socially unaware (though, perhaps, not as incarring) as the promoters of artificial beauty. By his implication that the male oversees the "sexual development" of women (though, perhaps, not as incarring), he is indeed a presumptuous egoist! By saying "If women were to stop looking pretty and men were to stop looking at them, an healthy decline in American populations could result," he would have us believe that it is the man's role to initiate the relationship, as if the woman is just waiting to be chosen. He was also aware of the reality, it says, that I cannot wait around for the "already insure male"; of whom Scarfie writes, to initiate a relationship. He is obviously intimidated too easily by a woman with a strong sense of identity, and therefore not my type. Besides, it is an anthropological fact that, in primates, the anatomical structure of a woman allows choosing (and she DOES have a choice) her mate. In other words, the male will mate with most any and many females, "pretty" or not.
And "like it or not" Mr. S scarfie, reproduction is merely instructive and NOT "the best measure of a human's total worth." I would hope that the teacher would achieve the feeling that one finally has control over her own life and how she chooses to live, childless or not. For example, I think it takes a lot more integrity and courage to adopt a child who learns the human being" simply to satisfy a primary need.
If there is one thing worse than an elitist, traditionalist kind of sexism, it's the subtle sexist who cows in the comfort and safety of academe and accepted social institutions (marriage) trying to legitimate his pseudo-liberal ravings by mentioning his Lamaze classes every
chance he gets. You should know better, Mr Scarff!
Barbara J. Weaver State College, Pa.
To the Editor
Feminist too sensitive
The column by Wendi Warner on Monday, June 14, was certainly a fine piece of writing. Her editorial "Women crippled by beauty standards," caused me, and I'm sure many others, to remember the importance placed on physical appearance in our society, not only for women, but for men.
I wonder about something, though. When those two guys ran past her, and one commented on her legs, why would she let something like that ruin her whole evening? Of course, very few women are ever appreciative of some bimbo's cheap and suggestive comments, and that guy could have kept his mouth shut, but was his lack of taste and trading really something worth getting worked up about? She even stopped running and walked home—her evening ruined.
Also, society's standards for female beauty are not quite as rigid as Wendi seems to be.
There are many, many times when I have seen a couple together and one of them looks like a four-bedroom house with legs, but the other one has that perfect body only seen in TV commercials. And this odd pair will be walking in hand, talking and laughing, and there no doubt that they are very much in love. So, despite a lot of advertising display rooms as we build, there are millions of people intelligent enough to look beyond a person's skin into the heart. Plenty of millions. But for those who only see the surface, it's sad, really sad, because they miss so much.
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