Page 4 University Daily Kansan, March 26, 1982
Opinion
Building on tradition
To many KU students, the annual Rock Chalk Reveal is as traditional as Jayhawk football or beer on Friday afternoons.
The musical variety show, a fund raiser for KU-Y, has been a rite of spring on campus since 1949.
Rock Chalk is not only a popular tradition, but also a profitable one, often netting as much as $9,000 for KU-Y.
Recently, some of the students who put on the show have begun to question the use of the money it raises and the cost of participation.
They are concerned because the groups who invest time and money in the show have no say about how its profits are used.
Another concern is that $1,000 or more, has limited a group's access to the show. Rock Chalk is open to all student living groups, but has traditionally been dominated by Greek living organizations.
These concerns have prompted the Board of Class Officers to develop an alternative show, modeled after Rock Chalk.
BOCO's plan is to let the student body vote on a charity that would receive 50 percent of the money raised by the new show.
The other 10 percent would be used in the fall to help groups interested in performing in the show cover their initial costs.
Forty percent of the profits would be returned to the groups who participated, easing the financial burden and potentially opening the show to more living groups.
Finding a worthy charity would be no problem. Several community service organizations have been devastated by federal budget cuts and desperately need donations. Another possibility would be donating the money to the University's United Fund drive.
And the large reimbursement could make participation in the show more attractive to living groups who are worried about the financial drain.
BOCO's alternative show is not an attack on tradition. It is an attempt to strengthen the show by inviting more student participation in every aspect of the production.
Letters to the Editor
Petition could launch trend
To the Editor:
Ding! Dong!
"Good evening. I chase Zlotys. I have a petition I'd like you to sign."
"A petition? What for?"
"You mean you don't know? Everyone
know."
"I'm sorry. We've been out of town for some time."
"It's a petition to recall City Commissioner Geoffrey Fitsenwalter."
"I see, Well, what has he done wrong?"
"He sneezed in the city commission meeting. Just up and let go a great big sneeze."
it up and let go a great big sneeze.
"Well. He sneezed? So..."
"Isn't it a bit unusual? Recalling a commissioner for sneezing?"
"Sir, I represent the Committee for a Healthier Lawrence. That man Fenwalenter has to go. We can't have a man representing the people sneeze right out in public like that."
"You think so, mister? You think so? What about Randolf Righte? The Citizens for Neighborhood and Friendship got him recalled last month for snubbing a man at the ribbon ceremony of the town hall. We care that Righte is needed as an aid. They got up a petition and got him recalled—outa there."
"Boy, things have really happened since I've been away."
"You think so, mister! How about Glumy Tropindip. The Committee for God and Country got him recalled five months ago. I carried petitions for that one too."
"What did he do wrong?"
"Disrespectful. Absolutely disrespectful. He blinked his eyes during the playing of the National Anthem at a KU football game. I must admit we were laying for him. We knew he was going to be in a long training on him. Got a photo of him blinking. Big as life. We recalled him, no sweat."
"You're darn tootin', mister. And we'll get him too."
"And now you want to recall Mr. Fitsenwalter for sneezing."
"That's all right. If you don't care about a Healthier Lawrence, that's your problem. Good night."
"Well, I'm sorry, but..."
"Good night."
Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.
"Yes. Hello."
"Good evening, sir, I'm Marianna Corazon-Blanda. I represent the Committee for Clean Hair and Fingernails. I have a recall petition here for..."
Larry Dav.
Larry Day,
professor of journalism
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters.
Letters Policy
ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN.
Pot Shots
Freedom.
Oh, what a vitally important word in our society.
We Americans take great pride in having the right to freely express our viewpoints, either by ourselves or through the press. We will also proudly点位 to our right to a fair hearing of any complaint against liberty and property. Let's not forget the bitterly controversial "right to bear arms."
This is one right I believe in. However, a
town in Georgia went a bit too far when they passed an ordinance last week that requires every household to own a gun and ammunition.
One of the city councilmen justified the ordinance by saying, "In our opinion, for any city or county to take away the rights of their citizens to bear arms is ludicrous." But it is even more ludicrous to force the residents who do not want a gun in their household to have one.
The town's police chief said it all when he said, "If we were a criminal, I wouldn't come to the store."
I can see it now. A retired couple own a jail because they couldn't afford a gun on their Social Security money, a child shooting himself after discovering the gun was loaded, or a wife shooting her husband after she mistakes him for a prowler.
Dashboard icons and bumper-sticker theology are bad enough, but Lawrence has a new candidate for the tickiest kind of tacky around.
How many needles deaths will this city ordinance cause in the name of freedom?
The laudromat at 19th and Louisiana Streets, a junk food depot for Lawrence High schoolers, is giving commercialism a crudely renamed "it's been renamed the 'jester' laudromat."
A white sign complete with an accompanying fish symbol proclaims this. The
Laundromats are quite unremarkable
acces; so was this one, which used to be
calling them.
county clerk's office reports no change in ownership but somebody must have gotten
The new sign, however, is intrusive, loud and in bad taste. It shouts evangelism to drivers at the four-way stop, to teen-age loiterers, to harried young mothers and impatient undergrads. Like a blue flourescent cross outside a cinder-block sanctuary, the sign creates an off-key counterpoint between tech and teaching.
It also links the divine to profit. Perhaps there are lots of coin-op customers who we've waited for a laundromat they could be using, or they're just down town to put their quarters in the right place.
So far the laudromat and sign haven't made any claims about results. But obviously the logical next step is announcements that these washers and dryers have something over the competition. Hasn't everyone been looking for a way to get whites really white?
I was wandering around the department store the other day, sliding in between Ma and Pa Kansas to check out the moisturizers for my too-long-insoid skin. Ma was looking at her hand — "plain old Jerdens" to rub out the dust bowl history clinging to the lines in Pa's face.
Suddenly, while I was scrutinizing the oils and funky chemicals in small print on the back of a favorite potion, a thin waft of coconut-dored air, spiced intermittently
with subtle perfume, wrapped itself around me.
Then, what appeared in front of me was . . . it was alien. It had bikini clothes, and its skin was golden brown. There was a thin layer of beading moisture wherever the skin was. I thought it was cold and tedious contraction about its head softly saying "we got the heat . . . we got the heat."
The beast smiled and the light—
the breeze too much. Pa down—
Mia drove for cover.
"Hi, I'm Vacation Lady," it said, the sandy
swiftie and tropical urge of vacation still
outhern.
"Great," I said, as it grabbed the most expensive lotion in the mirror bottle.
Ma, up on the floor, grabbed the Jergens
Pa and walked away. I grabbed the
Jergens Pa.
Then I stopped, went back down the aisle, and switched for the stuff Vacation Lady used.
Reagan's civil defense dream unattainable goal
Under Ronald Reagan's direction, our country is spending more today on the ability to wipe out the men and women, industry, and political and cultural institutions of other countries than at any time in our history. Last year, the President issued his record-making $208 billion military budget for 1984, fiscal 1983, the administration wants that amount again plus $8 billion more.
Yet along with those boggling sums, Reagan's spending for protecting Americans at home can tell us something about how the administration views the possibility of war, a nuclear one.
Reagan wants to spend more on circling the wagons, civil defense, than any predecessor in U.S. history. He could double federal spending on civil defense next year, from $134 million to $252 million in fiscal 1983.
Already, in Plattsburgh, N.Y., a city of about 23,000 near an air force base maintaining nuclear weapons, the federal hand has pushed evacuation planning into advanced stages. The local phone book includes several pages of emergency directions. Plattsburgh is one of 380 "high risk" areas in the country designated for special protection.
After some careful thought, the concept of defending the population against a nuclear exchange becomes about as conceivable as Reagan giving the Statue of Liberty his umbrella and expecting the lady to stay dry in a thunderstorm.
Reagan can spend billions on bombs and be certain of their power to incinerate. Yet, he can't spend millions on civil defense with any certainly as well as the economy, the government or American lives.
Civil defense, evacuating cities and retraining to bomb shellers, is creature crippled on at least the level of the American war effort, wouldn't be able to take precautions soon enough, and for those who somehow managed to
survive the attack, there would be no livable world to return to.
Those seem to be the expectations coming consistently within the past three years from the National Academy of Sciences, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, several cabinet level departments and other groups.
The first problem: Missiles fly faster than people take cover. Soviet submarines maintained in waters several hundred miles from our continental shores can deliver their nuclear warheads to any of their inland targets within 15 minutes after the missiles are fired.
Meanwhile, our government is counting on at least a week's warning to evacuate before an
JEFF THOMAS
Unless the foe gives us a gentlemanly week's advance notice of a coming attack, our citizens simply will not have the time to put civil defense measures to work. At best, we'd have just a few extra seconds or minutes to consider our helplessness.
attack begins. Of course, evacuation only means moving people to areas that are less likely targets, not to guaranteed havens. Merely warning a substantial minority of Americans could take at least 15 minutes, not counting time for the people who take a step toward protection.
To make the point, pretend that millions somehow were evacuated and others made their way into shelters. Assume the attacker didn't know about the situation or had evacuation sites and that fallout on the
evaluation areas simply didn't happen. Of course, both are fantasies.
At this point, the questions in civil defense become much larger. Would the world that evacuates returned to and the buried living scurried up to be habitable? Can all that is survived by our people, survive a man-made boiling furnace, a brush with the sun's hell fire fallen to earth?
In a 10,000 megaton attack, a conceivable assault from the Soviets, the fallout alone would release at least 500 megatons of explosive energy. That's the freeing of 40,000 times the radioactive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. That radioactivity, in chunks, bits, dust and smaller particles, would float throughout the continent's wars and on into the global air system, sifting through land who knows where. A nuclear exchange could only become a global contamination.
In the imagined Soviet attack, as much as 70 percent of the ozone layer above the Northern Hemisphere could be erased. With the layer's protection from the sun's lethal ultraviolet radiation wiped away, "life as currently known could not exist except possible in the oceans." Susan Stalustine and Philip J. Dolan write in their 1976 book, "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons."
The bottom line is that nature—arable land, plants, reservoirs, animals, perhaps all but the most hardy insects—cannot be defended in cases in which civil defense would be used. There is no bunker big enough for the Earth. Man cannot put aside the planet.
Yet Reagan jacks up civil defense as a national priority. He could have at least two purposes in
Evacuation is only delay, the choice to move on into the next world from another place in this one. Closing the shelter door is backing into a room where the same door as an exit, just another delay.
mind. As the compassionate person we would hope to have for a president, he should want to protect American lives, and human lives in general, whenever he can. But after a nod to that sympathy, he's also probably more vigorously pursuing the policy for strategic reasons.
In the administration's view, the greater preparedness for a nuclear attack could be a multi-million dollar message to the Soviets: "If you push the button, the Yankees can run and hide to come out again. Against America will survive to respond and defeat you."
Civil defense was once thought to be only a shield to be used in battle. Now a second purpose has emerged: to use civil defense as an element of deterrence.
so soon as the concepts of survival and nuclear war merge, the war becomes more thinkable.
We're left with civil defense looking like little more than propaganda, actions to convince our foes and those here at home that Uncle Sam can take care of his own in the ultimate emergency. And as with other propaganda, the danger arises that civil defense may loosen our peoples' and our leaders' hold on reality. As soon as the concepts of survival and must
Of course, as long as the Soviets know they can lob their nuclear fire faster than we can respond, civil defense is an empty message. As long as eco-systems can't be wrapped in concrete and nuclear holocaust still will be more than enough to erase anything that resembles our society.
As our commitment to civil defense grows, we should see it as a symptom of a deeper misconception on the move, the idea that this country can fight a nuclear war and again see the dawn of the day. Civil defense becomes not only hopeless and even pathetic in many respects, but also an indication of a new danger from within.
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