Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, February 8 1982
Not just for Poland
Last week, the KU Friends of Solidarity asked all organized living groups to skip one meal and donate the savings to ease the food shortage in Poland.
The group's efforts are admirable. It saw a problem and quickly acted to relieve it.
Many KU living groups already have chosen to comply with the "Have a Heart For Poland" program, and the money they donate will be used to buy CARE packages that should reach Poland in three weeks.
The program seems effective, but its very effectiveness raises a difficult question:
Why did we respond so quickly to Poland's problems? And why do we respond so slowly to other problems?
The food drive for Poland is a safe, presentable charity, like the move to adopt those cute Italian orphans after World War II, or the charity functions that civic groups stage for non-disfiguring diseases.
The news reports that trickle out of Poland indicate that the Polish people are suffering. They are held under martial law. Meat is scarce and they do not eat as well as they used to. The children cry because they cannot have candy.
But few in Poland are starving.
In many African and South American villages children wake up hungry every day of their lives. Their stomachs are distended and empty. They die young.
In Haiti, many are forced to drink the fetid water that collects in ditches. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, but it receives less U.S. aid than any country but Guyana.
The people who organized the "Have a Heart" program are in earnest; they are concerned; and they are to be commended.
And in the United States, 25 million people have incomes that fall below the poverty level. Many live and die without hope.
But for many others the program seems to be a kind of charity-of-the-week. Skip a meal and ease your mind.
The program is a good first step, but its success only underscores the fact that when we confront most human suffering—especially the suffering of non-white humans—we are blind and deaf.
Have a heart for Pc' and this month. But don't forget the rest of the world.
Small-town KU students find that most labels mean nothing
Students come to the University of Kansas from all over the world and soon crash into ideas radically different from the ones they were brought up with.
The convenience of labeling people—as foreign, rich, atheistic, gay—gives students from crashing too hard. It's easy to disregard them and leave them alone, simply, if you already know you don't like guys.
This attitude comes from the same source as any prejudice: lack of familiarity with what lies beneath the labels that we slap on people different from ourselves.
Heterosexuals have a biased view of homosexuals. Many are determined to remain heterosexual.
LISA BOLTON
arched brows and nervous frowns. Many have never met a homosexual when they come to college.
Most students hadn't heard much about gays in their small, Midwestern towns. But as reports of increasingly vocal homosexuals infiltrated the news, the word "fagot" creet in the vocabulary of dirty words that elementary school children sbut across playgrounds.
Parents and school administrators in one small Kansas town stumbled onto a potential scandal when they hired two women--who were not teachers. The gym classes at the junior high and high schools.
The fact that both were husky women with short haircuts did nothing to dispel their stereotypical image. The women lived together, were very smart and had friends, pets, and they did not volunteer the information.
But the girls in the 7th-grade gym class knew,
that they ate it about daily in tones of
faginaded disgust.
The girls dressed quickly after class, sure that they were being observed by the teacher as she stood, one leg hoisted on a bench checking the clothes from the roster attached to her clipboard.
After a few years, the two women resigned and moved away. The next coach wore a diamond necklace.
Nationwide, however, the emergence of homosexuals from their closets was not so easily dismissed. They united; they organized; they went to their own bars in the face of vocal opposition from such representatives of traditional morality as Anita Bryant.
The mass entertainment industry struggled with a new stock character. Hollywood alter-egoes like "Gatsby" and "Marnie"
from AI Pacino and the leather-and-chains gay bar scene in "Cruising" to limp-wristed, silver-voiced Jack Ritter on television's "Three's Company."
Leading the gay movement in the Midwest was the University of Kansas, where homosexuals in the early 1970s could not be ignored. They united and won office space in the Kansas Union; they sponsored dances; they organized support groups.
At KU, a refuge for liberals in an old-fashioned state, homosexuals are now invited to represent their version of the loving relationship in a class offered by the psychology department. Mental health services offer gay counseling along with their other services.
And society as a whole has reshuffled to accommodate its homosexual members.
But the attitudes of many heterosexual individual still range from indifference to dislike.
Those stamped with the gay label are seen as walking stereotypes rather than as real people. Some suspect them of being homosexual just by the effects. Gays seem too foreign to be taken
People harbor these feelings—despite the exposure homosexuals have had in the press and on the KU campus—because they don't know any homosexuals well. Certainly none of their friends are homosexual; none, at least, that they know of.
When friendship between two people precedes the revelation that one of the two is homosexual, the "straight" friend often is forced to reconsider his opinion of homosexuals.
Situations like this happen more often as homosexuals stop hiding their sexual feelings.
At the end of the semester, having never dared to actually speak to him, she found herself alone with him in a deserted hallway after they had finished their final exams. Embarrassed by the silence as they walked toward the door together, she finally asked about his plans for Christmas break. She was acutely aware that she was not talking to a classmate but to A Homosexual.
One woman came to KU as a freshman with an attitude of distance toward homosexuality. She spent one of her first-semester classes secretly observing a homosexual member of the class.
He told her that his parents were getting divorced. As he talked about the breakup of his family, she saw tears in his eyes and felt sad for him. He was no longer just a Homosexual.
This isn't a made-for-television movie. There is no moving story to tell of the deep friendship that grew from a chance encounter between a homosexual man and a small-town girl.
But the incident underlines the fact that a current current of humanity flows beneath all labels—including that of "homosexual."
She never saw him again.
KANSAN
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Haitians languish in forgotten camps
By ROBERT L. BERSTEIN New York Times Special Features
New York Times Special Features
One returns from a recent visit to Fort Allen, the former Army camp in Puerto Rico where 800 of the 2,500 Haitian refugees who have reached our shores are confined, with the distinct impression that the Haitians have become hostages to deter future arrivals.
Perhaps our government hopes that those who return to Haiti will spread the word of how bad things are in the United States so that others will not come.
There are guards at the gate—not American soldiers but private guards hired by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The raftans are kept in a compound on a stretch of hard-baked ground perhaps 290-yards long without a tree or blade of grass. It is surrounded by rocks, and its tops tipped over with water, one within the other.
It was very cold. The Haitians were sitting and standing around listless. I spoke with three young Haitians who were brought to me. They said that life in the camp was unpleasant, that most felt depressed and, as a result, ate and drank little. They said they would return to Haiti except for the danger to their lives.
Inside, the women's compound is separated from the men's by yet another fence, covered with plywood to prevent contact. The immigration officer in charge told me that this is done because it is impossible to document legal marriages.
They said they were willing to work hard but did not understand why they were only paid $1 a day. The amiable public relations
officer accompanying us did not get much response when he interjected that the camp provided activities such as soccer and dominoes.
The man who did most of the talking had left Haiti in a small boat in June and arrived in Florida after 21 days at sea. He left Haiti because he belonged to a club that had been beaten by some members of the club had been beaten; others had disappeared or been killed.
The Haitian said there was no indication of when they might be released. The immigration officer told me that the refugees had been detained for varying periods—up to six months—and that they were always offered the opportunity to return to Haiti. Oh, and they gave back four, were deported. Many were up in litigation and could not be returned.
I told the immigration officer that I had heard boredom was the biggest problem. He replied that there were some classes in carpentry that provided tables for the mess halls. Palm fronds were bought for weaving although the price of fronds had gone up steeply since the government 100 Haitians were engaged in some sort of job training or work although the programs had been slow to start.
Carlos Garcia, a Puerto Rican civil rights lawyer who was trying to act on the Haitians' behalf, asked me to assure a group of them in the compound that they had not been killed or beaten. They were killed, and he was having trouble convincing them that any hopeful action was in prospect.
Garcia said Washington was doing everything possible to detain the refugees in
the camp and to obstruct their admission to the United States as political refugees.
The previous evening, I had met with Jean Claude Bajoux, a Haitian who is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Bajoux, who is actively involved in refugee affairs thinks that if the refugees are forced to return to Haiti, the authorities would leave them alone for two or three months. Once it is certain that the United States had forgotten them, however, the secret police would beat or kill them.
In Bajex's judgment, it is imperative that the United States cut off all financial support for the Haitian government, because practically none of it reaches the people. He said that the United States and the country by the President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier amounts to $600 million.
A few conclusions are in order:
First, the Haitian refugees are being isolated indefinitely. Conditions at Fort Allen and other detention camps in the United States persist. A recent riot and desperate attempts at escape
Second, Washington is trying to make it very difficult for Haitians to obtain official refugee status. Third, we run a huge moral crisis among Haitians to return to the country they have fled.
The solution to the immigration problem is not simple but it is hard to believe that imprisoning Haitians in camps like Fort Allen is the best this nation can do.
(Robert L. Bernstein is chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, which monitors domestic and international compliance with human rights provisions for the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Bernstein is also a founding member of the new America Watch.)
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
In response to Debbie Seusey's Jan. 25 article covering the pro-life and pro-choice rallies in Lawrence, I ask the readers to view the issue in a different light.
Abortion clearly a question of human rights
Pro-choice supporters, in most cases, have good reason to believe that pre-lifers have made a religious and political issue of abortion. The issue of abortion is a political matter. It is plainly a human rights issue.
The question remains: Whose human right is being violated—the woman's, or that of the prenatal child?
Pro-choices think a woman should not be denied a choice concerning her own body. Pro-liers believe her choice to relieve emotional or physical suffering denies the prenatal child of life—un fair trade-off. Plainly, the main point of controversy is deciding when viability, or the presence of a unique human being protected by his or her own human rights, occurs.
As a human rights activist, I found it personally necessary to act in terms with the issue and take a stand. Most individuals are aware of the emotional arguments. My knowledge of the issue, based solely on emotions from the left, left me standing in the middle of the road.
On the one hand, I claimed that I could never receive an abortion. Yet, at the same time, I sympathized with unwed teenagers who were victims of their own mistakes and, on rare occurrences,
However, after careful analysis of the following facts, my prolonged indecision was resolved. At conception, sex, eye color and many other characteristics are determined, proving the uniqueness of the individual. Eighteen days after conception, the child has a heartbeat. Twenty-seven days later he has brain waves. At nine weeks, the infant is responsive to pain, gets hiccups and sucks his thumb—all taking place within the first trimester.
What's more, many aborted babies have survived the "medical procedure," living proof that they are separate human beings, not mere anemonees of their mothers' bodies.
perlages of their mother.
I urge pro-choicers to re-evaluate the facts and
Y
answer the question: Does relief of suffering justify taking away a human's life?
If the public allows doctors to kill prenatal children merely because the act cannot be seen, the law enforcers and judiciary system must also permit the murdering of honest citizens.
Sondy Stoan
Leawood sophomore
At the same time, I appeal to pro-lifers to avoid side issues of religion and politics and address the abortion controversy for what it is—a human rights issue. **Sandy Sloan**
Student judges good
The University Daily Kansas's Feb. 2 editorial attack decrys the proposed nourishment hourly fees for student judges who serve on the Parking and Traffic Board was self-righteous and refutes a lack of knowledge of the appellate court referred by the University to traffic violators.
To the Editor
First of all, the facts—noticeably absent from both our conversation and the page one story — Ann Arbor is a city.
The Kansan aducatively questions the motives of these student judges for their desire to receive
Traffic court is available to those students who choose to appeal their parking violations rather than pay them. First-year law students serve as prosecutors, who represent the University, and the district attorney, who represents the Students who serve as prosecutors first semester serve as defense attorneys second semester and vice versa. Student attorneys who win the most cases are asked to serve as judges the next year. Other defendants are asked by aspiring litigators who are rated by the judges on the effectiveness of their presentations.
Is it not logical that second-year law students would serve in the capacity of judges just as members of the Kansas staff supervision reporters student making their debout on the campus paper?
This brings me to my second point. The Kansan is irresponsible when it chides these law students for not wanting to serve simply for the benefit of the country and the opportunity to serve fellow students."
prts
The Kansan says that valuable experience the judge gain should be sufficient compensation.
It should be noted that each person listed on the Kansas masstheat receives $alary.
Would Vanessa Herron, the editor, forsake her $100 salary for the honor of serving as editor of the Kansan? The paper is considered to be one of the best campus dailies in the country.
Shouldn't Herron and her colleagues be willing to work for free in return for that prized addition to their resumes—member of the staff of the University Daily Kansan.
So shouldn't Heron and her staff donate their time to the mere opportunity to serve their own needs?
rest assured Kanasan staffers. We know you aren't in it for the money. But then, neither are you.
Rachel C. Lipman,
Rachel C. Lipman,
Lawrence first-year law student
Student judges bad
I am delighted to hear that five of the so-called "justices" are resigning from their administrative duties on the traffic board, and only that the cry bakes resign from the board as well.
To the Editor:
What silliness to drape these kids with titles such as “presiding judge” and “associate chief
I heap contempt on all of those associated with the parking service—whose function it is to transfer money from students and others to the parking agency coffers.
I wish them ill, and suggest their next board meeting be held on Potter's Lake.
Lawrence graduate student