Page 4 University Daily Kansan, April 1, 1982
Opinion
New understanding
Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas is an active group. This week, it is sponsoring several of a host of Gay Awareness Week events.
But in the old days, many gay KU students were bona fide activists.
In the early 70s, the students published a voters guide that listed state and local candidate's stands on issues related to homosexuality. They pickeded a Lawrence real estate company that refused to rent an apartment to a gay couple. And they demanded that the University of Kansas officially recognize their organization.
When the administration refused, the students appealed their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. They lost that battle, and eventually, they lost some of their fight.
Today, KU's gay students aren't the rabble-rouser that they were in the '70s. But then, are any of us?
GLSOK is now devoted to the quieter tasks of giving gay students emotional support and educating non-gay students.
It is much harder for people to hate and fear those that they understand. But in recent years, such understanding has faded.
Magazines report that in Utah, "gay bashing," the beating of homosexuals, is a frequent past-time for bored young men on their nights out. In Washington, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is sponsoring the Family Protection Act, which among other things, condemns "deviant" sexual behavior.
But now, it is not unusual for students to treat gay people as amusing anomalies. One worker at the KU Information Center often fields questions about gays like this one:
Lawrence traditionally has been an oasis of liberalism in Kansas ("Compared to Salina, this is heaven," one gay student said a few years ago.)
"Which ear do They wear an earing in?" After the worker answered, she heard snickers in the background.
Some would say that such questions are all in good fun. But the questions also reveal a core of insensitivity.
College towns like Lawrence bring people with very different attitudes into close quarters with each other. And in the process, the groups learn to understand each other.
With events like Gay Awareness Week, maybe we can make sure that the learning comes sooner—not later.
Spring breezes conjure up days on town ball diamond
Thirty years ago, Preacher Were a caget pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers who threw outaweed spitball and never got caught at it. Rowe grew up on the Missouri-Akansas border and still lives there. When Roger Kahn was writing "The Boys of Summer," Preacher took him down a dirt road to a clearing in oak woods to show him where he learned the game.
"This was my real home field," Preacher said. "Old backstapk gone now. There's some stones come up. Native flint rock. And as you see, it's all overgrown. Let a field be and the sage takes
All of us who loved to play baseball have a field like that hidden away in our mind's eye, going to sage with every passing year. Each spring when allying breezes return, the umbrella of grasses of
BEN JONES
"Can you imagine it?" Kahn asks. "Can you make it come alive?"
that remembered place come alive and whisper in the wind. We listen for the faint recollections and strain to see the dim images in faded sunshine.
"All of it," Preacher says, "one thing makes a feller sad is knowin' that behind, and what's wrong with him is nothing that giving back twenty years wouldn't cure." Cure they don't do that, do they? Say, we had some pretty good days."
The town where I grew up had a ball diamond at its east end. It was known as Christener Field during the days when Horton had a town team, but no one calls it that anymore. A white, half-breasted chicken with a scream of chicken wire stretched high on poles which supported a corrugated-tin roof. The roof sloped down and away from the field, so pop fouls that bounced off of it landed behind the stands, and kids would scramble after them, stand and set balls at the concession stand, and set a narter.
A fence of slim, wood slats held by twisted wire bounded the outfield. The field was set on good bottom ground, and on the other side of the fence a cornfield covered the outlying ground to the nearby creek. Mornings, the cornfield would sparkle with dew, and the willows lining the winding creek would stir slightly under the oicerine blue sky.
For years, I spent Saturday mornings shuffling the yellow dirt of the infield around with my sneaker, as I waited between pitches for a ball to hit. With my foot in the air and always the same: you smoothed arcs in the dirt
like those a wiper clears on a muddy windshell, and you studied the imprints your sole made. Then you crouched and went up on your toes as the pitcher released the ball.
Now and then you grabbed a handful of the
flowers, and slipped it through your fingers to
be thrown on the wind.
That feeling of release was the key, the source of baseball's magic. You felt it each time you slipped skinny young arms through a short-sleeved cotton jersey. The grey-wall jersey was loose on your limbs, and your skin tingled as you moved the air circulating through the pores of the fabrics.
You found the release when you hit the ball so sweetly it felt as though you had swung right through it. Then you saw the centerflereturn and race toward the fence, and just for a moment, your tongue fell to the side of your mouth as you watched the ball soar and forgot to run. The feeling was one of effortless weightlessness.
And, you felt the release also as you gloved a grounder at the start of the outfield grass. As you transferred the ball to your throwing hand, you took a couple of side steps, like a coli pulling up suddenly into a canter. Then you side-armed the ball to first, and it rolled off of your finger tips with a slow spin. The first baseman squeezed it in his mitt, and the runner was out by half a step.
There is something entirely graceful about the game of baseball, which harnesses the body in a supple rhythm that gathers the muscles and releases them smoothly. And in the feeling of release is pleasure. It's all in letting go, and feeling how.
There is an art to letting go, whether of a baseball or a friend, or a university. If the release happens with gathered smoothness, it makes you feel relaxed and free. Thinking involved; you just see the ball coming, and once it is in your glove, you don't watch it anymore, or think what to do. You feel for it and grip it across the seams instinctively, and then move on. It keeps going. You remember the feeling for a long time.
"The sun was lowering toward a line of oaks,"
Kram wrote. "Before we stuccured a wilde, bright
tree in the woods."
"How come that field's overgrown?" Kahn asked. "Where do the Ozark kids play baseball
"Don't, 'Preecher said. 'We got little league and school ball, course, but the old town teams is gone. We got all these new roads. And tourist business. People are eating better. But the young musicians are in pitching, drive over to Memphis, in three hours, and spend time listening to rock music.
"They tell me it's good for the region, but look at that field." The pale-green sage shivered in the wind. "Funny, isn't it?" Roe said. "Same thing in these woods as where ebbets Field was in Brooklyn. There'll never be a ball game here again."
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182 Boston 906
Week focuses on nuclear nightmares
By SUSAN AHERN MARUSCO Guest Columnist
It is May 9, 1982 and the sun rises routinely,
luminously over Mount Oread.
KU students from around the globe are breakfasting on pancakes and eggs in McColum Hall as other students sprinkled in apartments across Lawrence prepare for classes. At 8:30 Watson Library is busier than usual; finals have descended on KU.
Meanwhile, the farmland in East Douglas County, often peaceful and postcard-dreamy when viewed from the top of Frazier Hall, begins to vibrate.
A test tape depicting a Russian missile attack has been accidentally inserted into the Midwestern Air Defense Command's warning system. Although it is quickly jerked out, the tape ejects one of the United States' 9,480 nuclear warheads from a hidden silo designed to keep enemies guessing where the one megaton hydrogen bomb is burrowed.
Because of the inconsistent, weak launching signal, the six-ion mass of uranium and metal climbs out of the ground with only one thousandth of its normal speed. Instead of circular half the globe, the inter-continental Titan missile cruises five miles to Lawrence and detonates at 700 feet above The Wheel unleashing a million tons of TNT.
An iridescent white light pales the brilliant morning sunshine. Gamma waves, the dreaded initial radiation, burst on their mission to capture creatures from Clinton Lake to Leavenworth.
But those closest to The Wheel don't have time to worry about lethal radiation. A colossal magenta and red fireball instantly descends on the Wheel incinerating everything from Massachusetts Street to Hawk's Crossing and to 19th Street in the other direction. A pony-sophomore walking up 14th Street contemning her calculus final is vaporized into dust.
This heat wave, called the thermonuclear pulse, charms everyone for two-and-one-half hours.
The fireball swells, business students studying accounting in 403 Summerfield Hill are hit by a tornado.
And then, as horror lights up their eyes, the students' arms, legs, clothes and even eyes burst into flames. Soon after, the glass panel walls of Summerfield melt on professors and students passing through corridors. Fire trucks and stop signs drip metal as if they were in firefighters' ill cuddles. Ever-mountable is consumed by purple/yellow quivering flames.
living beings from Palmyra County in one direction to Lecompton County in another.
But the nightmarish visions of "Dante's Inferno" have become a reality even before the mass killer has struck. Immediately following the excruciating 10-second thermonuclear pulse, a shock wave blasts out as the blinding fireball bloats. Moving in all the 18-inch-an-hour lead column of air crushes forms, school buildings and levels "The Hill."
Sorry Chancellor Budig, this New York Times four-star-rated University will never become one of the top 10 schools in the country. A barren wasteland is more likely.
Everything happens so fast. In less than twenty seconds, Brian, a hard-working architecture student, is blown apart without a trace left. His mother won't know about it for hours. She is shrouded from the news, because electricity waves of electricity that burned out power lines, antennae and communication systems all over Kansas.
Remember Grandma over in Eudora, the one you never visited? Well you don't have to worry about her being lonely anymore. High Kansas winds blew gamma waves farther than projected for a one megaton bomb. Yes, Grandma's been radiated. She's not wearing a bracelet and her hair is falling out in clumps. Thank God she won't wake up in the morning.
As a final touch to the awesome power that annihilated Lawrence, a sooty gray mushroom cloud ascends heavenward. Tomorrow this cloud will hang over Kansas and spew highly radioactive debris into backyards and cow pastures.
Maybe all this is too horrifying to imagine.
But students will be reminded of such possible smoldering scenarios during KU's Ground Zero Week. Anril 5-11.
As part of a national nuclear-armawareness week, the KU political science department is sponsoring a teach-in on the prevention of nuclear war and a 16-panel meeting with experts in nuclear science and the devastating consequences of nuclear war also will be shown throughout the week.
Jonathan Schell, a nuclear disarmament proponent, thinks that people should be familiar with the grizzly aftermath of a nuclear conflagration. In his book, "The Fate of the World," Schell details the sorid and predictable stages of a one megaton bomb detonation.
Only by realizing the full horror of nuclear war, Schell says, will people understand how outdated the notion of winning a nuclear war has become.
Unfortunately, America has lagged behind
Europe in realizing this. But the European obsession with nuclear disarmament is spreading to America, and much of this new preoccupation with disarmament can be attributed to President Reagan's war-monger rhetoric. It can also be attributed to Reagan's plan to produce 380 more nuclear warheads than planned for by the Carter administration.
More bombs not only increase the chance of a nuclear accident occurring, but they also increase the possibility of resorting to nuclear weapons. America's 'vital interests' are tempered with.
The actions of a theatrical administration have not assuaged America's fear of nuclear war, either. An administration that stages public realitions events and that glibly entertains the possibility of a limited nuclear war, arouses suspicion that the deployment of nuclear arsenals may only be a flashy show of power.
It is no wonder, then, that Americans worry whether this actor-turned-president will be guided by the old histrionic maxim, which is: If there's a gun on the mantlepiece in the first act—you can bet it'll be fired before the final curtain goes down.
This concern that Reagan may be moving the country toward nuclear war has frightened Americans into debating nuclear freezes and disarmament on a local level.
In Vermont and Massachusetts, local governments recently approved non-binding resolutions to freeze the deployment of nuclear missiles. Also, according to Time magazine, a grassroots nuclear freeze campaign called the California governor lobby President Reagan and pressure him to stop stockpiling Minutene and Titan missiles. Time reports that such freeze resolutions have been passed in 257 town meetings in New England, in 31 city councils and six state legislatures. Lawrence is calling for the November election.
Helen Caldicott, initiator of a nuclear disarmment organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility, thinks Americans should continue discussing nuclear war on a local level. And like Schell, she thinks Americans should know exactly what would happen to them if a nuclear bomb detonated in their town.
Caldicott said in Time that a freeze was not enough to deter nuclear war.
"No one has the answers," she said. "But the issue of nuclear war will reach a critical mass and from that will emerge a solution. We must stirring the pot, for the issue is survival."
(Susan Ahern Marusco) is a staff reporter for the University Daily Kansan.)
Letters to the Editor
Campers careless with campus environment
To the Editor:
Those students braved cold and windy nights on the lawn in front of Watson Library. At times the wind reached such a pitch that large rocks, about 50 of it in all, were needed as anchors for all of the pamphlets and petitions available at the vigil.
It has been almost a week since several students here at the University of Kansas set upon a three-day campign vigil to remind us all about the disaster at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant and the environmental impact of nuclear power in general.
Although the vigil is over now, those students behind a part of their cause as a memorial: The Jews.
When I think back to my first issue of Ranger Rick's Camping Tips, I remember that Rick always said to leave a campfire cleaner than it was when you arrived. Maybe that principle does not apply here. What is a little dead grass when it is the environment that we are concerned about?
My thanks to FO.
The whole point is moot now, anyway.
Facilities Operations, as always, cleaned up those grass killing rocks early Tuesday morning. It is nice to know that someone is concerned about the ecology of this campus. With such weighty issues as the environment to shoulder, we do not have the time to clean up after ourselves. James Watt would be proud of us.
Daniel Dugan research assistant department of human development
A biblical view
To the Editor:
Homosexuals, be aware that:
It has come to my attention that this week has been designated "Gay Awareness Week." This is very timely indeed, since there are many people on the planet who mind when the issue of homosexuality arises.
Here are eight points that homosexuals need to be aware of.
2. Nineveh was indefolient because 'the people were women in their midst' and as a
3. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because their people "inugled in gross imposition" (Namgol, 1948).
1. Homosexuality is an abination in the Lord God of Leviticus 18:22, I Kings 14:23.
    2. Homoeroticism is an abination in the Lord God of Leviticus 18:22, I Kings 14:23.
4. The unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor killers, nor sinners, nor inherit the kingdom of God (I Corinthians 6:9).
5. If you are honest, *with yourself*, you would
that your present *lifestyle* is not natural, it
lend favor to you.
6. There is hope of salvation through Jesus Christ. He stripped himself of glory and came to earth in the appearance of man. He never surrendered to anything, and their lives are like, could be brought back to God.
7. Jesus Christ carried your homosexuality to the cross so that it could be forgiven of your if you were not born with it.
8. When we have given all of our life to Jesus,
cast, all things become new and the old things
pass away.
Many of you believe that you are homosexual because God made you that way. As a result, you feel that there is no hope and that you will remain one all your life.
This is simply not the case. God made man and woman to be together and to go forth and multiply. Nowhere in Scripture does God condone homosexuality. As a matter of fact, homosexuality is always associated with sin and turning away from God's commandments.
However, Jesus' death was sufficient in God's eyes to cover that sin, as all other sins. If you will acknowledge it as sin and believe that by his presence you will be forgiven, he will have eternal life. Jerry Leeer,
Lincoln, Neb., sophomore
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