Page 4
University Daily Kansan, March 2 1982
Opinion
Actions belie words
President Reagan and his aides apparently do not think the American public can distinguish between what his administration says and what it actually does.
Last Friday the Reagan administration decided to ease trade restrictions on the sale of some commodities and low-level technology to security forces in South Africa.
But administration officials were quick to point out that the relaxation of the restrictions did not mean that Reagan and his administration supported South Africa's apartheid policies.
President Carter imposed the trade restrictions in 1978 to put pressure on the
South African government to abandon its cruel policy of racial segregation.
The Reagan administration still will maintain restrictions on the export of high-level technology and military equipment, but it will lift restrictions on other goods to be sold to the police and military in South Africa.
Any relaxation of the trade restrictions must be viewed as at least a tacit gesture of support for the South African government.
If this is the course the Reagan administration chooses to follow, it at least has a duty to forget the political doublepeak and be honest with the American public about its decision.
Saying that something is so does not necessarily make it so.
Time to look at America in a broader,world context
In one picture, a group of Young Pioneers wore red kerbies over white shirts. The Soviet magazine's photo essay on that nation's youth was based on the hardy and resolute future of the U.S.S.R.
So it seemed to the teen in the junior high library periodicals room. Obviously, the Russians were manipulating minds: their kids' and ours. Yellowed images of the Nazi Youth appeared comparable, and one breathed a relieved sigh that it wasn't like that here.
But the browser lacked a mirror of his understanding. Without an awareness of how his culture, his nation or his thought looked and felt from a different point of view, he couldn't begin to absorb the material in any world perspective. Instead, it was, "Look what the Russians do."
"Look what the Russians do," says Al Haig.
SCOTT FAUST
The president is glad to chime in, too. "See the Soviet subjurehere there, there, everywhere."
Condemnation is in both instances joined by a sort of vigorous, exhilarating chest-thumping. Our way is the Good way. We wouldn't soil the national consciousness with such privations as covert intelligence or meddling where we don't belong.
Suppose, however, that we acknowledge the similarities between our policy and the behavior of the British or Soviet colonialists. The word "imperialism" sounds harsh spoken by Latin American Solidarity on Jayhawk Boulevard, but honestly, without the vitral, it fits.
We need only take a contemplative step or two back from the precipice.
Those Young Pioneers? America has its school children daily pledge their allegiance—verbally and spiritually.
Washington's monuments form a pantheon for pilgrims who flock to democracy's repositories and bow heads before wise Mr. Lincoln. At Leon's burb, they wait in line.
As for Soviet aggression nearby, they are indeed plying some in Central America with weapons and Castro handshakes. But we too are coddling our buddies there, who face the job of stemming public rejection, now radicalized, of authoritarianism and gross poverty.
The Soviets and Jaruzelski have been busy capping another rejection of totalitarianism in Poland. Freedom-loving Americans are rightfully angry about this brutal silencing of people. Also important, however, is an understanding of the Soviets' absolute commitment to controlling what they consider an invasion corridor.
The American government holds just as firm a line in Central America, where it says the people are safe.
you know the U.S. stance. Grab some salt and listen to Castro, speaking about this nation at last year's party Congress in Moscow.
'Now the Yankee imperialists are trying to identify the movement for national liberation and the people's struggles for social change with terrorism. (As far as they are concerned, all fighters for democracy are terrorists.) With such fallacies and lies, they can lead to the loss of human rights and again saemlessly themselves the world's gendarmes.'
The Cuban paints us the villain for our "arrogant unleashing of forces," just as we paint him so. The Soviets beg, borrow and steal in their wars, but we do it in the Middle and in the Third World.
becoming aware of our nation's actions does not necessarily dictate that we stop what we're doing, or that we stop condemning what "They" are doing (though at times it ought to).
Rather the fresh perspective blends with one-way ideology to provide a sense of self as part of the whole. To say that the Soviets' arms build-up is "unprecedented," while ours is a matter of survival, is to ignore the whole. Better to ignore the Soviets' stockpiles as a collective threat to all men.
A concept of America's meaning in the world is also required outside the perilous conflict with the U.S.S.R. For example, word of a Japanese proposal for $10 billion in aid to bolster the U.S. economy gave us a strange glimpse in the mirror of understanding.
We, the "great, white aid-givers," had to consider what other nations feel when U.S. economic or military aid, largely self-serving, pours across their borders. There's nothing quite like a visit from the welfare worker to remind one of his predicament.
©1982MIAMI NEWS
The irony in the aid proposal reports, later denied by the Japanese government, was their re-verbal. But truly, today's U.S. world stance isn't that of 1948, or even 1960. Our oil economy and the gradual political awakening of Russia have been key factors in Soviet power, why scrapecled the post-war order.
And American attitudes have not kept up. We got a war president, saying Cold War things were over.
When expanded to an international scale, the pretense of respect for what's different vanishes, and so do the advantages of cultural self-awareness. Instead, the American breed of nationalism teaches the propriety of our "isms" with a pilgrim's stern tenacity.
Within this society, we're asked to accept those different from ourselves—or we risk being tagged ethnocentric. Not everyone adheres to the melting-pot ideal, but it's never, nevertheless, the norm.
America's great resources, great power and historical naivete make us a prideful lot. But we must be able to embrace the world and our place through it so that to do so would be pathetic, and possibly tragic.
Roaches stir after long winter's nap and develop more resistant varieties
The night should not be as dark as it is, but the clouds cover the full moon, and its light barely penetrates.
Long before daybreak, the student who inhabs that apartment awakens for some unknown reason and stumbles to the kitchen for a drink of water, her feet scuffing across the counter. And she does so other sound even the wind is still, and thin fingers hang still over a cracked-open window.
The student's senses are still muffled by sleep, her eyes cracked only slightly, as she gropes about the cupboard over the sink until her fingers feel a cool glass. She fills it with water and raises it to her lips. As she tits her head back to drink, she casually rests one hand on the counter—then gasps and jerks her hand back.
The scattling, antennaed presence she felt on the counter scurrences on its six feet at 25 steps a second, and the scene shifts to the basement, where thousands of brown creatures wave their antennae and rustle their exoskeletons as they awaken from their winter-long hibernation.
Because cockroaches are most comfortable in small, closed places where walls are touching them on all sides, they promptly moved into houses and found an abundance of crevices to call home. Besides, houses were constant and constant sources of food and water.
Cockroaches, the scourge of student housing,
are awakening and starting to breed again, as
they do whenever the temperature rises to 51
degrees.
Grout breeding is one of the reasons why cockroaches have existed for 350 million years, thriving and diversifying into 3,500 species. Some are bright green, some orange, some brown, some translucent. Some are as small as fleas, and others are as large as mice. Most are found in tropical areas.
Although cocoachroos live only six months, each female lays about one egg every month she is alive, and every egg that hatches contains about 32 baby cocoachroos, called females, the lifetime of an average female cocoachroo, her descendants may number 400,000.
Scientists believe the German cockroach and the American cockroach, two of the most prolific cockroach pests in the United States, originally entered this country by stowing aboard sailing ships docked in tropical seaports.
However, if food and water are cut off,
cockroaches aren't finicky. They will eat
anything, including wallpaper, toothpaste
and other cockroaches.
Another reason why cockroaches have been so successful is because if no males are available, females can breed parthenogenically—without sex.
Nevertheless, scientists are trying to breed
JOLYNNE
WALZ
sterile male cockroaches in the laboratory, with the hope that releasing them will at least cut down the cockroach breeding rate, even if it won't stop it. So far, the laboratory efforts look successful, and sterile males seem to pursue females more persistently than fertile males.
In other efforts to limit cockroach populations, scientists are experimenting with sex scent signals sent out by cockroaches. They are cultivated, and the chemicals used as bait for traps.
William Bell, KU professor of ontology and of physiology and cell biology, is one of the scientists experimenting with scent signals, and the research will be on the market within the year.
unfortunately, such traps are most effective over short distances, and further research is needed to develop traps to lure cockroaches from far away.
Insect traps are traditionally baited with pesticides, but cockroachs haven't existed for 350 million years for nothing. They quickly become resistant to new poisons. When
cockroaches are exposed to them, some die,
but harder individuals live and continue
breeding. Soon, all the baby cockroaches are
resistant to the poison.
About the only poison still effective against the little beasties is boric acid, which may be poured in minute quantities into cockroach cracks and crevasses. The insects step in it, and the toxin penetrates. They self-selves clean, thereby ingesting the acid, which attacks their stomachs and nervous systems.
Sanitation, though, seems to be the best defense against cockroaches, which are attracted by cluttered living spaces where food and water are left standing.
For a long time, health experts believed cockroaches, besides being creepy pests, were unsanitary and carried dysentery, typhoid, even plague. Recent evidence seems to contradict that belief, although it is still widely held.
Perhaps it is for the best if cockroaches are cleaner than people give them credit for being, because they show no signs of disappearing or decreasing in number. Actually, their numbers are rapidly increasing, and they are becoming more resistant.
In one public housing area in Baltimore, a new strain of cocochares has been discovered that is resistant to virtually all poisons. Unlike other cocochares, which at least must be grown in controlled populations exposed resistance to it, these new cocochares are born resistant to everything.
Maybe it's time, then, for Americans to stop gasping with fear and disgust whenever they spy a cockroach. They're here to stay, unlovable though they may be.
They have it measured the number of you, but there's nothing short of the atom bomb to stop them. Come to think of it, even the atom bomb probably wouldn't stop them, because cockroaches seem to be resistant to radiation, too.
In some areas of the world, cockroaches are actually regarded as a delicacy, a high-protein treat. But Americans probably aren't ready for chocolate-covered cockroaches, yet.
Letters to the Editor
Cannot separate religious, secular issues
To the Editor:
Tom Bontrager's Feb. 23 column was clear evidence that newspaper writers need to study the news industry.
When a scientist chooses a phenomenon to study, collects data and organizes and interprets data, he is working from some kind of religious or philosophical reasoning that affects his reasoning in all of these steps.
Obviously, he's never taken a course in philosophy of science, nor thought through questions of human rights or politics to their origins.
What is a "secular issue?" Anything you choose for a topic of study is chosen based on values, which ultimately stem from your world and your understanding of the universe, your religion.
And the idea of a Creator is incredibly important in terms of prediction of future occurrences. An understanding of the nature of the Creator gives one an understanding of the problems in the world, both in physical nature and society.
Human rights and laws protecting these are religious issues. Laws are based on an idea of what society should be like and on an idea of the nature of society. These questions ultimately religious and philosophical questions.
So yes, issues like discrimination are legal in the United States and elsewhere. The religious questions at the heart of the issue.
What makes the individual worth protecting? Why should there be limits on our power to control one another? Why do we have to be protected from each other in the first place?
Timothy Goring Merriam graduate student
I agree with Bontrager about the dangers of propagating injustice in the name of religion, but I don't know what it means.
Timothy Goring,
Not to 'tuck away'
Although Tom Bontrager's article, "Religious fervor clouds secular issues," was mistaken on more than one issue, there is one overriding theme in the book: "religion" is a convenient idea that "relation" is just one part of life.
To the Editor:
This is not the case. Christianity is not a philosophy, belief system or even a religion. Christianity is but a name given to the all-encompassing reality that has as its foundation the idea of God and therefore only creates all things. God—Jesus Christ—made not only you and I, but everything we see.
Many today think that Christianity is like a foldaway bed—you get it out every once in a while when someone needs support or comfort, and sometimes it should be "neatly tucked a way," in the closer.
The implication here is important. Jesus
Christ-God—ought to have first place in all that's done, said and thought. Unfortunately, it's evident that he doesn't have this place in many lives. Yet, for those of us who say He does—Christians. He should have. He should be our psychology, our philosophy, our everything. It was Paul who said, "For me to live is Christ, to die is pain" (Philippians 1:21).
It's time we become acquainted with the scientific, political and even economic aspects of the truth we seek to live by. Having done this, we believers will be able "both to exhort in sound doctrine, and to refute those who contradict" (Titus 1:9). Eric Wynkoop
Eric Wynkoop
Wichita senior
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