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Opinion
University Daily Kansan, April 2, 1982
A natural response
Lawrence residents may soon have a chance to join the growing national opposition to the nuclear arms build up.
This week, the Lawrence City Commission agreed to discuss the possibility of including a nuclear freeze referendum on the May 11 special election ballot.
Six state legislatures and hundreds of towns and cities across the country have already approved similar proposals, calling for a U.S.-Soviet moratorium on nuclear weapons.
One commissioner, Don Binnis, opposed the idea, calling it a waste of time. He said such action was under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
Binns is partly right. National defense is the responsibility of the federal government.
But no law requires the federal government to insulate itself from the opinion of
people in towns, cities or states. And nothing prohibits those people from relaying that opinion to federal officials.
The referendum movement has already made an impact on Washington. Congressmen are beginning to respond to the steadily increasing call for nuclear weapons control.
Earlier this week, Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., said, "I think the remarkable thing is that the American people have taken up the debate and we have followed."
Remarkable, yes, and certainly not a waste of time.
Politicians and policymakers would not be the only ones affected by nuclear destruction. It is only natural that Americans should join together to voice their opposition to the threat posed by nuclear proliferation.
Purpose of blue jeans day to increase understanding
Students who wrapped, zipped and snapped the dem smug around their hind-ends this morning may receive a few curious glances they aren't expecting. Blue jeans are going to bring attention today, extra notice many people may not want. Today has been declared "Wear blue jeans if you're gay" by Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas.
The blue jeans theme is the fifth daily part of Gay Awareness Week, a project that may be GLSOK's most responsibly organized series of events in several years. A well-publicized jeans day hasn't been held on KU's campus since 1977.
Tonight, GLSOK will sponsor a woman's dance at the Satellite Union. Earlier in the week, GLSOK sponsored events such as a lecture on gay people and religion, a free, documentary film on prejudice against homosexuals, a panel of student speakers and an entertainment package of dinner and dancine downtown.
A picnic with free beer is scheduled for tomorrow, and on Sunday, a car pool will travel to services at the Metropolitan Community Center (MCN) in a denomination that is supportive of gray people.
GLSOK, a group that funds itself without money from student fees, can quietly offer its
JEFF THOMAS
"We're trying to promote the understanding and acceptance of gay people," with Gay Awareness Week, Joe Baldwin, a GLSOK co-director, said.
movies and speakers on campus at night and only a smattering of students will notice. Today, however, something else is happening. Tagging blue jeans with labels that say "gay" is bound to catch the attention of a great number of students—and anger many.
Yet cuffing the week with a blue jeans day might have exactly the opposite influence. Forcing students to associate the campus uniform with homosexuality might jeopardize any progress GLSOK has made this week. Many surprised students may not have discovered the new meaning of their jeans until they arrived on campus today, dressed as women they may have different tastes. Then taken on the roles they differed in both groups are probably complaining that it's wrong for gay people to force others to change how they dress.
When interviewed earlier this week, GLSOK leaders easily admitted that the blue jeans day would upset students. In any effort like Awareness Week, "There's no way we can wear blue jeans," said a member of the GLSLOK board of directors, said. "The whole point is to get a reaction."
And as far as finances would allow, GLSOK bought the promotion for the strongest possible campus reaction. Advertisements appeared daily in the University Daily Kansen this week. About 400 filers describing the week's activities were distributed on jeans day alone were distributed on campus.
The first priority for jeans day seems to be to
There is reason behind GLSOK's emotional strategy. The group has a hope for KU students, and a core working group of about 15 students helped the success of a month's preparation on it.
spark intense, personal emotions, even if those are feelings against a rude people.
The students who are irritated with jeans day are upset by more than just being uncomfortable in their usual clothes. Much of them are scared from the fear of others thinking they are day.
And that's exactly the feeling jeans day is supposed to arouse.
A first step to gaining an understanding of people who are different from ourselves is to try on their positions in life for awhile. If we could slip into the skin of another race, be the passenger in a body of the opposite sex, or try to live in an inner-city ghetto, we'd return to life more often or come up with deeper changed—and probably treat people differently in the future.
Jeans day is an effort to let us sample someone else's feelings, to make their paranoia ours. Today we're supposed to be ticked-off, in classes helplessly trusted at the chance of being fired. We feel the need of all us for something out of our control. Feel the part of the suspect and feel jilted.
Fortunately, the discomfort for straight students will end today after they leave campus. Yet other students won't be able to drop their anger in the hamster tone. As long as people are not numbered of straight people burn, gay people are going to be made to feel that they are less.
So goes a central meaning of blue jeans day. It might be a long line of thought to ask neterosexuals, some who have never yet given homosexuality deliberate thought, to go to school and may be forced to expect many students to think beyond their first "negative reactions."
Apparently, GLSOK is a group with more than usual faith in KU students as thinking creatures. As a first, GLSOK expects the gut reactions. But the group is also betting that their straight classmates will cool and think about their feelings.
"We're hoping that they might stop to think about what it must be like for others to love with us."
KU's gay leaders know their plan is hardly guaranteed to succeed with our student body. If GLSOK loses the gamble, the organization could set back the image of gay people further with a single day's activity than the other six days could have advanced student sympathy.
As University students, we're often told that we should be able to think on our own. But how often does a student organization risk its success on the assumption that students behave as intellectual beings? Examples don't flood the mind.
KANSAN
GLSOK's methods today may not be the most courteous ones. But inconvenience is too limp of an excuse to postpone working a bit on our compassion. And, in some sense, the gay organization's strategy pays us a compliment. Thanks to some KU students—who happen to have compassion—we are feeling our emotions with reason, we are being offered support for a day. And, perhaps, some people will even wear a suit of enlightened thinking for some time to come.
The University Daily
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Pot Shots
Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, 89, died of a heart attack last Saturday night.
Not everyone will recognize her name, but most people have heard of her series of Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Bobsbey Twins and Tom Swift Jr. books.
It used to be a sign of distinction among the
girls in my neighborhood to have the most Nancy Drew books. I had 59
Even in grade-school, I knew they weren't good literature. But they were grown-up.
One of the best moments so far this spring was walking by Wescoe Hall and hearing "Let's Groove" by Earth, Wind and Fire out of a big portable radio. It was a sunny, cloudless day, and the music was a wonderful accompaniment.
"You're old enough for these, now," she said, pointing out their yellow spines in a book.
The big portabt radios—often so large they
Nancy was an exciting role-model for little girls from the 1930s to the present, a super sleuth who chased and caught crooks, and a teacher who helped for a girl to be so intelligent and adventurous.
Although there were no set rules for when you became too old for the books, one by one my friends grew up and sold or gave away collections to littler girls in the neighborhood.
I held onto mine until high school, when I boxed them up and gave them to a little girl I baby-sat for, repeating the magic words to "Here, you're old enough for these, now."
I'm having problems coping with what right now seems like a foreign concept.
That is—the fact that spring break has ended.
Sure, I've been in Lawrence for nearly two weeks now, but I'm doing little more than a few minutes.
Dan Terelia
could double as coffee tables—are very nice!
spill-resistant devices with handles,
spiral players with headphones.
Both got their start in New York, where both are appropriate. The big radios perfectly match the city's pulse. The headsets are salvation when the subway's brakes screech so intensely that you think your head is splitting.
But what is appropriate in New York can be ludicrous in Lawrence.
The headphone sets are narcissistic. Plug in and tune out. The MeGeneration extended.
The big box is OK. Although it can be the pits if a person plays something you hate, at least it doesn't hurt.
It is a shame to miss out on spring's sounds—the winds blowing, birds chirping, evangelists exherting. Besides, you just might hear a good tune as you walk to class.
last two weeks have been everything short of productive. (If you don't believe me, ask my help.)
Being unproductive is scary. At first, I feel tremendous guilt as all the responsibilities of a job are overwhelming.
But somehow, as the evenings drag on and I pass time in a local pub poised in front of a building with a sign that says
I've also become very defensive about this sudden affection. As I continue to be questioned about my recent lifestyle, I find myself snapping back in two ways; either with a resounding "I'm still on vacation," or an indignant "Go to hell world, I'm a senior."
But I think I have finally come to face reality and hereby declare that my vacation
Well, let me qualify that. It's over after this weekend!
Sun religion inspired by space study
One cannot help but feel proud and special at the sight of the shuttle and its spider arm, a floating Star Wars-like space carriage, as it tends to its tasks of experimentation. We can watch it right there on the TV, in living color, as above us man extends himself further, pushing into this huge frontier we are responsible for called space exploration.
I grew up with space. I plastered my bedroom with NASA posters and I built mod rockets.
W.J. ANDREWS
bought enough balsa wood in my five-year fad to build a raft that could float you to Guam.
I remember a summer vacation when I was the only one who didn't get sunburned because I was glued to the boob tube inside, watching the first lunar landing.
But I could glance on the screened porch door and see the ever present globe over the ocean. And Florida was the farthest I had ever been to. Florida was not a world, but a world world was, and just as suddenly it not smaller.
It was July 20, 1989, and I was watching the Vietnam war on the news, and then, right after, 21 diagonal inches of Neal Armstrong walking on the Moon.
Armstrong's comment upon his first lunar star, "... a giant leap for mankind," was not kibbits. Population experts predict drastic overpopulation as early as 1955, and unless growth reduces, it appears our destiny will have to face the solar system—barring nuclear destruction.
In fact, contemporary philosophers have recently outlined a cosmology that reinterprets the standard Copernican principle—which asserts that the earth is not the center of the universe. But as we learned from our universe is not the reason behind our existence, but that we are the reason there is a universe.
"Sav what?"
Let me put it this way; it's similar to the old one if we falling in, makes any sound if no one is there.
To understand this principle, the anthropic principle, you first must know about the cosmological and perfect cosmological principles. The former adds to the Copernican theory the stipulation that no position in the universe holds privileged status, and the perfect principle applies homogeneity to the universe-establishing uniformity in both time and space.
The anthropic principle goes even further and theorizes the universe as a labyrinth of waveforms in which the only reality is that which is subject to observation.
The philosophy suggests that whenever an event need take place, the event that will contribute most to the delivery of an observer will occur.
The first event was the evolution of an isotropic universe with small scale clustering. An isotropic universe is one in which the escape and recessional velocities are equal, the only design that would allow the small scale star clustering needed to give birth to our unique sun.
Our sun is a main sequence star, the best kind. These stars are the stable burning type, where the energy liberated by thermonuclear fission is balanced with the forces of gravitational attraction.
Within the main sequence group, our sun sits amazingly in the balance between the short-lived
and hot, blue giants, and the long-living but cool, red dwarfs. Only our rare form of sun exhibits both adequate longevity and heat to support a habitable region.
In these unique circumstances, conditions allow water to take its liquid state. And we all know that we'd be sunk without water. Another event favoring the observer.
This also says much about the evolution of life. For its possible the motivations behind the physical evolution of the universe are also behind the biological evolution of man.
The anthropic philosophers want to take the next step and suggest a close contact respon-
sibility.
The universe continually chooses in favor of an observer so that it can take on reality—reality being that which is observed—and the observer being what is not observed—i.e. hence giving it reality. A symbolism of essence.
With this in mind it is no surprise to hear that quite a few forecasters are predicting a new religion to develop around the end of the century, in which the central belief is in our unique sun.
And as the world gets bigger and bigger, and thereby smaller, maybe our necessity to branch out to space in search of habitual regions, will make us appreciate our sun more.
For many of us may find ourselves in future shuttles, rock-hopping around the solar system. We will have a new home on some remodeled asteroid, living that we dreamed of, pushing out the new frontier.
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