Page 4 University Daily Kansan, February 2, 1982
Opinion
Setting bad precedents
There was a time, not too long ago, when students had to fight for a voice in University governance.
Now students are represented on almost all of the University of Kansas' committees and boards.
But one group of students doesn't think this is enough.
The students—justices on the KU Board of Parking and Traffic Appeals—think that the honor of being appointed to the board, the opportunity to serve their fellow students and the valuable practical experience they gain is not sufficient compensation for their time.
following a suggestion by one of the justices, the Parking and Traffic Board recommended that the 15 student justices, who are appointed by the University Senate executive committee, be paid for the time they spend on the board.
SenEx decided last Friday to advise the Parking and Traffic Board against this decision.
According to Laurence Rose, SenEx member and professor of law, appointment to the board is an honor for the law students.
What is more important, SenEx agreed that paying members of University
No other members of University governance committees or boards, students and faculty alike, are paid for their service on these groups.
governance groups would set a bad precedent.
The justices argued that if they did not spend time on the appeals board, they would be able to find law-related jobs that would pay them at least $4 an hour.
But the students and faculty members who serve on SenEx, the University Council, the Student Health Advisory Board, the University Events Committee and dozens of other governance groups could make the same argument. Certainly, they could all find more personally profitable ways to spend the time they put in on University work.
The justices need to realize that anyone who volunteers for University committee work is asking for a job that is often thankless and unrewarding.
As trite as it may sound, rewards must be derived from the chance to serve and improve the University.
If the appeals board justices don't understand this, they should take their $4-an-hour jobs and let others gain the experience of University work.
The "rhythms" is just a coinage for that inevitable repeat of history that continues to recycle through the 'play' function of the material motion that it all happens over and over again.
Ken Kesey was a victim of the rhythms.
Kesey's 'Cuckoo's Nest' hatched era
The rhythms of the age.
I hope it's true. If it is, there are stepping-
backs for me and being tied across at this momen-
t at this moment.
Twenty years ago yesterday a psychedelic-painted bus of "Merry Pranksters" showed up at Viking Press in New York for the publication of their hero's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The Pranksters were known for hops and jesters, acid-yed and hit on him.
The whole crew loaded Kesey's bubble-topped bus with book-advance-built hi-fi equipment, movie gear, and a small refrigerator. The cabin is—Kool-Aid fitted with Owlsy made LSD-25.
They—including Kesey-buddies Neal Cassady and Ken Babbs, and Tom Wolf to chronicle the whole thing for "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"—drove from California to New York, baffling the public, awing the cops, and enlightening themselves.
See, this was 1962. And in some rural areas it was still 1954. It's just a bizarre busull of too-hip kids careening down the street with the Grateful Dead being bull-horned to the world. But inside the Prankster bus it was 1969. Stoningstones.
honed innocently by government drug experimenters near Standard, where Kesey was a creative writing fellow. Kesey volunteered and they turned him on to LSD.
The cutting edge of Kesey's insight was
Ken capped a few tabs and turned on his fellow residents back at the famed Perry Lane cottages. Soon he was working at the police station, and he went on perimetering with various drugs and punching
W.J. ANDREWS
out the first drafts of "Cuckoo's Nest." Chief Bromden came alive there.
But Kesey had been a jock, a championship wrestler as an undergraduate at Oregon. Who could say he was disposed to genius. Who could say he'd be ditching the feds down Mexico way, wearing a striped shirt in Marin County, or hanging out with Hells' angels.
And who could guess he'd squeeze a retreat to La Honda in there to write his best book,
“Notion” is something else. “A work of the new consciousness,” said Charles Reich. It is an interweaving, mystical myth of the decaying American dream and the spirit of America. It is also Kesey's prose. The acid-prompted neural narrative stretches to grasp it all. It is a
dialectic of America's breadth and depth. At the time, maybe state of the art.
But then Kesey wasn't heard from. He went to Oregon to grow carrots. He's had an article here and there, one on the Grateful Dead in Egypt and another remembering John Lennon. And a friend of mine saw him speak at an arts seminar in Chicago.
My friend said Kesey was definitely not all there, he kept skipping off to anecdotes that seemed unrelated. At the end he was just standing in the heights and stepped down when his time was up.
If but he had said something, would it have been intriguing or relevant? isn't that the case with Beethoven? With Beethoven?
Isn't that the trouble with being the first to reach a stepping stone to an age? You have to stop and turn to the others and say "C'mon, let me go!" You have to say that great" and you stay there and escort the others into that era's cultural nuance—discovered by you—and you get left on that stone. You get trapped into history. Even if you want to leave you out, you get manhandled by time.
Cassady and Jack Kerouac didn't last the trip, but Kesey may have been saved for another day.
For Devin Deboree must be waiting around somewhere, his funny-filled head bursting with excitement, waiting around somewhere to meet her or lead him 'round to our next steppingstone.'
'New federalism' just shifts burden
Few Americans needed the President's address last week to determine the state of the union—economically, it's lousy, as anyone who occasionally reads a newspaper will
Federal deficits, Ronald Reagan's chief campaign concern, are expected to rise drastically, even if the President's plans are enacted to the letter. By his own admission, Reagan can, at best, hope to keep the deficit for fiscal 1982 below $100 billion; anything approaching that amount will set a new single-year record.
Also, nearly ten million people are out of work. They don't read newspapers, they don't even without reading newspapers.
I take the time to point these outs only because Reagan seemed healtent to do so in
He was much more eager to discuss the high times ahead for the nation's governmental structure under what has come to be known as the "new federalism." The term
TOM
BONTRAGER
was not used in the speech but was bandied about earlier by Reagarites who hailed it as the bombshield the president would drop on Washington.
Where the crucial question of intent is concerned, however, there is nothing novel about what Reagan is proposing. The emphasis on cutting federal programs, particularly in the area of aid to the fortunate, is an essential characteristic of the political philosophy Reagan is determined to carry out, no matter what the cost.
the crux of the "new federalism" is to make states responsible for the allotment of welfare checks and food stamps. The federal government would pick up the tab for Medicaid, which is now financed partly by state and local money.
There you have the heart of what Reagan hopes will keep Americans' minds off their economic woes. But the "new federalism" is far from placatory.
Our foremost criterion in assessing the proposed change should be, of course, human
President Reagan?" we ask, "How, in unemployed, will the poor and unemployed be better able to make ends meet as a result of your 'new federalism'?
One drawback is the time it will take to become effective. The administration has already let it be known that it will not submit legislation on the matter until spring. Rep. James Jones, D-Okla., chairman of the House Budget Committee, said he foresaw no significant response to Reagan's proposals this year.
"Surely your plan is more than a rote enactment of GOP dogma?"
Even if these questions can be answered satisfactorily, there remain the many diffi- culties involved.
There are no quick fixes, but neither has Reagan demonstrated the plausibility of the "new federalism" in either the short or the long term.
The House of Representatives will not consider a huge package deal of the sort that proved so convenient during Reagan's first year in office, according to House Speaker Thomas O'Nell Jr., D-Mass. That means the "new federalism" could succumb to paralysis by analysis; dissection and eventual stoppage of its constituent hills in committee.
The question of delay itself presupposes that Reagan's policies could be implemented in accordance with his policies.
Let's suppose, though, that all "neofederalist" legislation passes. What is the outcome? Quite simply, the states will have taken over the welfare and food stamp
programs. Why should that be more effective?
For that matter, why is it more appropriate? Poverty is, after all, a problem common to all sections of the nation. Wouldn't it be wiser to administer aid to the poor uniformly, through a centralized source? If geographical, cost-of-living or other adjustments are needed in determining what recipients are to be paid, it would seem a
simple matter to make them on the federal level, rather than to overhaul the system.
The Reagan Administration's panacea has always been, "Give government back to the people." Reagan, in heaping responsibility for social aid upon the states, rather than doing the people a favor, could be merely shifting an important burden from one level of government to another less qualified to bear it.
I had a friend named Shaheen.
He was actually a friend of my best friend's. Their families knew each other.
Shaheen came into our lives in 1978, when his uncle brought him from Iran to be treated for cancer at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
Karen, my best friend, and I tolerated Shaheen as older sisters tolerate a little brother who tags along everywhere. Whenever we planned to go someplace, Karen's parents would inevitably say 'Oh, that sounds like fun. Why don't you take Shaheen.' We didn't have a choice.
So, all during the summer of 1976, Shaheen followed us everywhere. Whenever we went out to play, she would tell me what we were doing.
JoLYNNE WALZ
use park to play frisbee, whenever we went for a ride, Shabee was there.
I never knew him well, though. He didn't talk much.
Karen knew him because her family and his were Baha's, members of a religion that spilt off from Islam in the 19th century in Iran. There he was Baha's in Kansas City, so the group is very close.
When Karen first told me she was a Baha'i, my reaction was 'A what?'
I'd heard of Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Bahá'ís, even Zoroastrians, but I didn't hear them.
Karen told me that the founder of her religion, Bahu'a lhah', claimed to be the latest incarnation of God in a series of incarnations that included Isaiah, Bahh, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
Baha u'lah taught that each of these incarnations appeared on earth to bring people to a higher plane of spirituality and human development. He was kind of a space age prophet, since he said he was sent to prepare us spiritually for the scientific era, the space age.
Baha's believe in world unity and sexual equality. All their marriages are civil because they have no clergy, and because women are equals, they don't wear veils. In Iran, where the Baha'i faith originated, a woman without a veil is a prostitute.
Government officials in Iran, where government and religion are inexplicably interwoven, started to distrust Baha's, especially because Baha'u'lillah taught that Baha's is should establish a theocracy, a state ruled by leaders of the Baha'i religion.
Officially, Iran has a policy of tolerance for
They were no real threat because their numbers were so small, but their members tended to be well educated and held responsible and visible positions.
religious minorities such as Jews and Christians, but the Baha'is were an off-shoot of Islam, the government religion, preaching against the Iranian government.
Following the Iranian revolution, which catapulted the Ayatollah Ruhul Khomein from exile to power, Iranian officials started firing Baha's from their jobs and seizing their property. Then they started arresting, torturing and killing Baha's.
The charges against them included "belonging to a proscribed religion" and "spreading prosecution." They are even charged, "Zionism" and "Judaism" because one of their schools is in Israel.
The persecution was just beginning when Shaheen's cancer went into remission. He was well enough to go home, back to Iran, but his doctor said that if he returned, he would be drafted or killed.
We lost track of him five years ago.
One day Karen came to school and told me that Shaheen's uncle had sent him to South America. The last we heard, Shaheen was living with relatives in Great Britain. However, he was always in danger of having his vasa revoked and having to return to Iran.
Since then, filled size articles have been regularly appearing, burried in the back pages of newspapers. They are repetitive. Always reporting that more Baha is have been executed in some small village in Iran. Nobody knows exactly how many have died, because statistics
Whenever Karen or I notice one of these articles, we always talk about it.
"Have you heard anymore about Shaheen?" I always ask her then. We harbor a small fear in our stomachs that he or members of his family are killed by thousands of Baba is who have died in Iran.
But six million Jews died before the end of the Nazi holocaust. Many Americans denied early reports of that tragedy. That many people just can't be dead. It's unreal. But people have to face reality, and it's easier to feel a tragedy if it touches you personally.
When one of those articles about the execution of Baba's in Iran appears in the paper, Karen and I know that whoever happens to read it will ask the same question that I asked six years ago.
Tousands of people. That's such a large number that we won't seem possible that they all die beil.
"What's a Raha'i?"
A Baha'i is Shaheen. A Baha'i is Karen.
Baha'is are people, and thousands of people can't just die and be burried in the back pages of newspapers.
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