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Opinion
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Page 4 University Daily Kansan, February 18, 1982
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Peace Corps wanes
This week, on their way to lunch, some KU students stopped at the Peace Corps recruiting table near the Kansas Union cafeteria.
eserve split ams. leats $8 at
Most didn't.
Some probably glanced at the table, and fully intended to stop to talk to the recruiters sometime. But sometime never came. Students were hungry, or late for class, or they had to pick up blue books before that 2:20 afternoon test.
The Peace Corps is now more than 20 years old. At the organization's peak in the
KU students probably aren't any more insensitive than most other Americans. In fact, the number of Peace Corps volunteers has steadily decreased since the first seekers of the New Frontier swelled the organization's ranks in the 60s.
This week, during the Peace Corps' semi-annual visit to the University of Kansas, its recruiting table was often ignored. If the Peace Corps' 1982 recruiting drive is as successful as last year's, only about 20 KU students will apply for the two-year work program.
mid 60s, there were 13,000 volunteers. Now there are 5,400. Then, the Peace Corps operated in 90 African, Asian and Latin American countries. Now it serves 58 countries.
During the Peace Corps' early days, more than twice as many Americans were willing to spend two years of their lives teaching and learning from people in less developed nations.
Times have changed. And the young people who have traditionally been the Corps' most frequent volunteers have changed, too.
Chances are that after spending a few years on the fast track, some young people will find that in some ways, they aren't getting anywhere. They'll find out that after years of taking, there comes a time to give.
Later this year, when the Peace Corps recruiters return to KU, we hope that more students who are hungry or late for class will stop to talk with them. Skip class. Skip lunch.
It could be the best lunch you ever missed.
Will the Bible-Belt beauties resist fame's tempting call?
Huge Hefe sat in the sumptuous offices of his Chicago Play-doh club, chewing a cricadig cicular. In his mahogany desk a chapagne waterfall trickled down a rock wall and into a pool. At pool. At play-doh Bunny lounged with one leaf in the champagne.
"Get out, Bunny," hefer said, grabbing the spotted rabbit by the scruff of the neck. "We've got work to do. Play-doh' wants a ball." He smiled at the woman, and we're going to begin with Kansu.
The bunny blinked its pink eyes. Just then Heifer's secretary entered the office.
"But Huge," she asked, "why go all the way to the Great Plains?" You could find eight big swamps. But I don't know.
Heifer swore and spat his coagst into the champagne pool. "Tawny, 'Big Eight' is a
BEN JONES
collegiate conference. We want to do a picture on the beauties of the Bible Belt. You know—how's that Beach boys' song go. Midwest farmer's daughters?" He cocked his head and hummed a stretch of "California Girls."
"Ever since we did the Ivy League layout a few years ago, women from other collegiate conferences want to show they have just as much brains as the dolls from Cornell," he said.
Tainty's forehead wrinkled. "But Huge, how can a Play-doh picture feature show eight big-brained women? You can't see a person's brain."
Hefer was about to bite off a reply, but stopped his strenuous mouth in the shape of a knife. He fell backward.
... our photographers will ask them to look intelligent.
"And we'll write in the margins that they're intelligent. We'll even give their damned grade-point averages, along with other statistics that will give readers a feel for their well-roundedness. Now no more stupid people. Have someone fuel my Lear for Kansas."
Soon Heifer's leer had arrived in Jayhawk country.
"Excuse me, oldtimer," he said to a stubby-faced man wearing a battered oild straw and hib bib overalls. "Where can I find the University of Kansas?"
"Up ponder thar," the man said, giving a terse not toward Fraser's flags as he stroked his chin and regarded Bunny with a suspicious scout.
As Heifer mounted Oread, he outlined his ideas to Bunny, who was a whop or two behind. "Bunny, what we're looking for at Kansas is a farm with cornsilk hair, hazel freckles and a bushel bust. We want a girl straight from the farm who grew up feeding chickens and washing her hair in a rain barrel." Ah! "he farm is a hawkjayhawk Boulevard," "here comes one now."
"Hello," Heifer said to her, extending a hair hand. "What's your name, miss?"
The girl blinked her blue eyes. "Dorothy, sir," she said.
"I'm Huge Heifer from Play-doh and this is my rabbit, Bunny. We want to take your
thee, that'd be nice?" Dorothy said, "Can I wear the new dress my Amy Em worked me on."
Dorothy blushed as red as an International Harvester. "Is this sexual harrasment? 'Cause we got a policy agin' there at KU, buster."
"Of course not. You have to take your clothes off."
"No, this is sexual exploitation," Heifer said with a disdainful smile.
"Oh," Dorothy said uncertainly. "Well . . I guess it must be all right, then. Auntie Em never did say nothin' 'bout not doin' it, anhow."
"We'll even pay you for it," Heifer said. rubbing his big gold ring with the thumb of the same hand, as he held it up where she could gaze at it.
Again Dorothy face clouded over like a rice wheatfield under a Kansas thunderhead.
don't understand it, and ain't put it before, and ain't put it 'em never thought the need to pay me for it.
"What?" Heifer snapped. "Has Penthouse been here?"
KANSAN
"But why should they want to do that?" Dorothy asked, getting more and more excited.
"Not as I know of," Dorothy said. "But the school photographer took my picture at our studio. I was there, and came to Mercerville, and I was standing by the clowns and got my picture in the town newspaper. But I had clothes on all them times. Why is it you want me out of my room?"
"Why, so people can see what you really look like."
“Oh.” She thought a while. “You never did say why you want to pay me. Seems me people only pay people when they've taken care of your work as a photographer, it was I as paid him, for a copy of the photograph and for his time and trouble to take it for me. But if you're wanting to pay me, then you must be wanting to give you me, then that is if you're wanting me to give mistress.”
"Because people are curious."
Dorothy set her lower lip. "You can't give beauty, mister," she said. "You can give love, but you can only have beauty. Beauty is not love. You love." Scuze me. I have to class to now班.
She smiled and nodded to him, and walked away in her pink print dress with smocking along its yoke. Her shiny hair bounced on her shoulders as she went.
"Why, your beauty," he said, and looked into her eyes.
"I wonder if he knew what I meant by love?" she asked herself. "He probably thought it was something you take a picture of."
Heifer was ready; he had traversed this argument many times before.
Dorothy had not gone far when a thought made her turn and look back.
The University Daily
She shook her head again and went her way.
USPS B5946-60) Published at the University of Kansas daily August through May and Monday and Thursday during June and July except Saturday, Sunday and holidays. Second-class postage issued by Kansas, Kansas Post Office, Muncy, MN. Mail to Kansas Post Office, Muncy, MN, 58137. Students are welcome year round outside the county. Student subscriptions are a 6% session, paid through the student activity point. Postmaster. Send changes of address to the University Daily Kansas Flint Hall. The university of Kansas
Business Manager
Vanessa Herron
Natealine Juille
Managing Editor
Tracee Hamilton
Editorial Editor
Maren Schlauer
Campus Editor
Gene George
Retail Sales Manager
Ann Hornberger
National Sales Manager
Howard Shalinsky
Sales and Marketing Adviser
John Ottertan
General Manager and News Adviser
Rick Musser
Group tries to ease human suffering
We read daily of political prisoners many countries away. But most of us push aside thoughts about their suffering as we push aside the newspaper each morning.
It's understandable that we can be so unfeeling about the frequent headlines of human rights violations. Many occur in countries that don't jog our geographical memories. We've become so accustomed to reading about violations in more recent years, to reports of political prisoners are just old news.
And if an occasional headline moves us enough to feel for those suffering political oppression, we generally fail to helppeace to do anything that affects and those human rights violations seem unreal.
But for a few people in Lawrence, those headlines produce more than frustrated sighs.
For the Lawrence chapter of Amnesty International, the suffering of those prisoners is real. And Amnesty members, in every small way they are able, trv to lessen it.
Amnesty's primary concern is not prominent dissidents, according to Tim Pogacar, a group coordinator. Amnesty tries to help the forgotten dissidents.
"Everybody knows about Sakharov," he says, but so many people are political prisoners who cannot be freed.
Occasionally such efforts get responses from governments or from family members. But the group usually never knows whether its letters are received or when its packages are ever opened by the right person.
The group has had three "adopted" prisoners since the Lawrence chapter was formed in February 1979. The first one was a Pakistani man, who had almost immediately after the group adopted her.
The group's most frequently used tool is letter writing. Monthly, members send a barrage of letters to the police about their "adopted" prisoners. The group also sends money and care packages to family members.
However, since then, the group has been
TERESA
RIORDAN
working to free two adopted prisoners, one from
one of those one from Czechoslovakia, who
remain imprisoned.
Rewards come seladm. But the group keeps writing letters, he meets staff and it keeps supplies on hand.
Most of the group's members, which include students, professors and townpeople, have an international bent. Some are foreign students, some have studied abroad. But some have never even stepped foot in a foreign country. The true common denominator of this group is nothing more than sincerse compassion for human suffering.
"It's more than a pen-pal sort of thing,"
pacificer said. "It's international relations on a
personal level."
For many, the work of Armnest is a well-intentioned but idealistic and futile venture. But however limited the sphere of influence of one chapter may seem, the combined international impact of Armnest cannot be denied. More than 2,500 adoption groups such as the one in, in 40 countries, have contributed to the release of more than 13,000 political prisoners.
And Lawrence's chapter does have a significant local impact because of the international nature of the college community. Amnesty played a behind-the-scenes role in issues such as the Taiwanese spying question last semester.
But perhaps the most important function of Amnesty is that, through its attempts to free prisoners, it keeps the idea of human rights alive in many people's minds.
One member says that effort is sometimes the most frustrating.
"Most people aren't even concerned about the life of their next-door neighbor. How can you expect them to care about lives of people they've never seen," the member said.
But Amnesty keeps trying, keeps writing letters. And with each effort, Amnesty makes it more difficult for us to push those headlines of rights violations and political prisoners out of our minds and easier for us to realize, as Pogacar says, "how small the world really is."
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
'New Wavers' have grounds for complaint
Catherine Beah's Feb. 15 article has given the otherwise *complacen* middle-class "middle-peat." The same argument applies to
Lawrence's progressive musicScene deserves exposure; however, Behan's article is confounded by an ambiguous vacillation between the performance at large and the music performed in Lawrence.
Our "journalist" may well have confused her visit to the Off-the-Wall-Hall (we suspect only one such visit occurred) with her recent viewing of "The Decline of Western Civilization," a film which documents the L.A. punk movement. At the hall, "purple hair" and "Mohawks" do not "pack the dance floor." Behan's cheap sensationalism is not an appreciated.
What may have appeared to Behan as pointless bouncing "up and down," is as are forms of a dance, the bodily expression of subjective feelings aroused by the music. Few of the dancers who frequent the area are so artistically hood-tied that they can merely "bounce."
Behan does admit that Slam dancing in Lawrence is "tame" (read: virtually nonexistent), but she gives the misguided impression that anyone attending a local new wave concert is automatically subject to physical abuse.
Behan tacitly suggests that new wave and punk are primarily aggressive styles of music, while she ignores the most important motivating factor—the desire to dance. She forfeits the idea that Lawrence concert-goers frequent these clubs out of appreciation for progressive music, in favor of a lurid frustration-aggression hypothesis.
Behan needs to control her tendency to overgeneralize about "Lawrence Punk" and to avoid loosely bandying about such subjective classifications.
Define your terms. Catherine.
Jim Stamel,
Lawrence senior, and
Darrel Laham
Wichita junior
Few brief highlights
To the Editor:
I hope all of you listened to the President's State of the Union address last month; there was much anger.
While acknowledging the substantial increase in unemployment, the president pointed out wisely that his administration was not to blame for that. This was the past administration's doing, obviously so, because the present administration's policies have not had time to take effect yet.
The president explained, for instance, how he would increase defense spending, reduce taxes, and while no longer talking about balancing the budget, he made it clear that this would surely reduce government deficits. He did not explain how this was going to work. He probably didn't have time, since his talk was limited to 45 minutes.
Acknowledging that unemployment is a serious probem now, the president made it clear that it has been caused by past administrations' continuous "spending, spending and spending."
On the other hand, he explained, it is obvious that the reduction in the rate of inflation is clearly attributable to the wise policies of his administration.
Now we have certainly been teaching this all wrong in our economics courses here. We have been teaching that increased spending, whatever it may be, is the result of purchases and hence to more production, and therefore to more employment, not unemployment. Obviously this must be all wrong. I'll check it out with my chairman and then change stories on inflation and unemployment accordingly.
In regard to the poor in our country, the president stated unequivocally that in the long
run, his politics would greatly benefit all
inclusions, including the poor and the unemployed.
He forgot to explain what the poor should do in the meantime. Ten years of hunger could perceiveably be bad for their health, especially for the little ones. On second thought, he probably didn't forget to explain it. It surely was once again the time limitation, and the president figures that we can reason it out by ourselves. It's just me who can't figure it out.
Finally, in a step of immense wisdom, the president announced that in the interest of the people some 40 programs will be turned over to the department to contribute to the states to be administered by them.
Such a wonderful plan. An after came the Democrats who said, in a follow-up program, that "this administration is putting the American dream beyond the reach of the vast majority of Americans, preserving for the rich only."
Now anybody can see how this will lead to greater equity and greater justice and equal treatment for all Americans. This will give the poorer states the chance to spend as much money on their welfare cases as the wealthier states, it will enable Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina to put into practice what they have always wanted, namely equal treatment of all, irrespective of skin color—what a great and fair step indeed.
Well surely none of us could possibly go along with this violence.
BARRY G. Shaffer,
Professor of economics
and Soviet and East
European studies.
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. If 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 a staff position. The Kansan reserve the right to edit or reject letters.