Page 4 University Daily Kansan, November 24, 1981
Opinion
THE REAGAN DOLLAR
Publicity given goal stunts fuels fires in small-minded
I've had it with tradition. The behavior at Saturday's KU-MU game by several hundred over-sager KU students was atrocious, and an embarrassment to the University.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that KU won
the game. I don't think they will go to the
Hall of Fame bowl on Dec. 3.
It should also make us realize how far out of our values are we when we condone that kind.
But causing several thousand dollars in damage (the cost of two goalposts), breaking car windows (it's hard to carry a goalpost around campus without breaking something) and turning a great moment into a near riot is not the way to celebrate.
for those of you who don't know by now, several hundred KU students couldn't wait for Saturday's game to end, so they stormed onto the field with just over a minute left and tore down the ball. Then the medium carry one of the posts and screaming something about alumni.
BRIAN LEVINSON
Then, trying to make amends for their riotous behavior, they brought back one of the posts and tried to re-eer it, causing KU to be played. The rest of the team had been played while there were fans on the field.
There are several reasons why fans act like that, the biggest one, next to tradition, being their best friend.
The athletic department should sue the Kansas City Times for the costs of replacing the posts. The Times decided to ensure that all posts were replaced with a story in Saturday's paper that condoned tearing down goalposts. The Times ran a picture with the story, which showed MU fans carping off one of their posts after last week's loss. The Times extremely poor news judgment by the Times.
Not to be outdone by the competition, the Journal-World ran a huge page three picture in Sunday's paper which showed KU students wearing masks with a story describing the horrible incident.
The Kanans, too, has fallen victim to this
paste. He pinned with brushes with a paste one photo of its own year.
That's just what these fans wanted and it only provides them with incentive to do it again. When one group tried to replace the south goalpost they were swarmed by cameramen and photographers. What better way to get your picture in the paper?
There is also the competitive incentive. Having part of a goalpost hanging on your wall is considered a coveted prize. I wonder how coveted it would be if the athletic department sent a bill to the fraternity house that now has part of a post.
Worse though, is that these same students will holder about high ticket prices when next season rolls around. They want to enjoy themselves (they assert that it is their right to tear the goalposts down) but they don't want to pay for their fun.
Unfortunately, there probably will be repercussions because of the incident, but the students didn't bother to think about that before mounting their attack. After all, the students gave their performance in front of Gov. John Carlin, Carlin. Larry Winn Jr. and Tom Barrick, who were also there to honor astronaut Joe Engle and for the alumni center groundbreaking ceremony.
Do we really think legislators are going to listen to students who lobby against tuition increases and yet act so irresponsibly? Do we think alumni are going to be so eager to give money—and we all know it is alumni money that keeps a university going—when they see that students have no qualms about causing several thousand dollars in damage?
Unless we build moats around our playing fields, this type of action is unlikely to stop. However, the rest of the fans, the ones who went just to enjoy the victory, and the players could put pressure on these maniacs and possibly eliminate the thrill. Without thrill or attention they just might leave the goalposts standing the next time.
Head Coach Don Farnbrough best summed up the incident: "It was something you hate to see happen. There's no place for that in college football. I apologize personally for what happened. It takes away from a fine game. It hurts the University of Kansas."
Too bad the student body doesn't think more like Coach Fambrough.
Last weekend, family friends were hunting pheasant through knee-hard, harvested cornstalks on our land, and I thought of words of humor as a prominent pilgrim of Plymouth Colony:
Thanksgiving slides by Puritan ideal
"our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sente four men out fowling that so we might, after a more special manner, rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours."
The resultant first thanks-giving feast, held in late October or early November 360 years ago, lasted three days. Now the event is condensed to a holiday, but it is still the most festive holiday the year.
Distancing itself from the heat and frenzy of the Fourth of July, and providing a pause before the mad rush of Christmas buying. Thanksgiving Day stands serenely deliverable. Its lofty char *is* no doubt influenced by the late November weather. The Fourth of July offers a respite by way of revelry, and that is appropriate to the scorching season it landed in, but it is also drawn from its history of fall and the anticipation of coming winter for its staid manner.
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," Keats summoned of the lady Autumn, and no poet ever called upon a more providential muse. Pairs of pumpkins stand as rustic, dillec gargoyles on every front porch, seeming sentinels for the coming of the first snow. Near, within the house, cider stands in gallen glass jars, giving the season's succulence in a soft atmosphere. Nothing there the fairest atmosphere, save perhaps the opening of an oven door by the mother of the household, half sings, half hums old hyms as she prepares the food.
Perhaps more than any other of our celebrations, Thanksgiving is grounded in the traditional ways of rural America. It is time for taking stock of the passing year, and making stock for the coming winter. It is a time for shouldering the axe to cut the Christmas tree and the winter's supply of wood, of providing for both pleasures and essentials. Providing the essentials pleasurable, it creates pleasures seems essential. It is a time to pause for a breath between swings of the axe, and gaze out over the vast breadth of land beyond your frrest breath.
Thanksgiving is perhaps our healthiest, most wholesome holiday. Whereas the true meaning of Christmas is often obscured amid the shredding of wrapping paper, or lost somewhere down the aisles of a department store, the meaning of Thanksgiving is reinforced by the preparations for it. These preparations are simply for food and good that family and friends you both. Anything that seeks simplicity cannot go far astray. Even the most cosmopolitan of modern Pilgrims gain a touch of homespunness on the fourth Thursday of November.
It is not so curious that such a day of bounty and indolence arrose from Puritan notions of thrift and hard work. The day is a celebration of the benefits of such virtues. Because of this, the
BEN
JONES
holiday is one of reestabilization for our country, and opportunity to bring ourselves back to our nation's roots: the rural and communal Puritan tradition.
Renewal of the rustic virtues necessarily involves giving homage to the land's produce. Thus Thanksgiving is integrally tied to the rhythms of the land. As our society moves away from its traditional interaction with agrarian life, we are bound to lose a full appreciation of Thanksgiving.
Even so, we as students can appreciate the essential mood of the holiday-a rest from labor-because. Thanksgiving break comes in early fall, when the teacher's labors. In the weeks from midterm to Thanksgiving, an academic coprencia of work fills to overflowing. But, having survived the highest pitch of pressure, we make the exodus back to the pleasant, casual associations of
There, we have leisure to sit and content our minds with recording the tickings of a tall, steady grandfather clock. We know the settling comfort of hearing the steam radiator gurgle
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and clink, with its thermostat issuing a faint, bubbly hush. We take comfort in surveying the new-frozen world hushed and caught fresh behind a pane of glass.
As even the stark skyline of the bare timber is wrested by wispish clouds, the world achieves the quality of an old-fashioned spia photograph which is softened by tints of brown, and so shows neither extravagant color nor a harsh black-and-white effect. The season causes us to know the comforts of home. We have arrived at the absolute laziest spot on the calendar.
Too often, though, the very slowness of Thanksgiving lulls us into missing its message, though we catch its spirit. Even the soundest of rituals tend to make thinking unnecessary. There is a purpose behind the drift of Thanksgiving. The giving of thanks requires that a person come to a full stop and think about some good things he can do, such as feeling for getting a break from the grind, we should consider specifically the things we have to be thankful for.
After slowing ourselves enough to take this elementary step, we must then make the logical connection from being thankful for some thing to be thankful to some one. It is not enough to be filled with a vague feeling of placid content. The act of giving thanks must be completed: thanks given in word, but given to no one, are thanks never received. "I thank" is not a sen-
Unless we direct our thanks specifically toward some one or some thing, the holiday lapses into a selfish glutting in the spoils that have accrued to us. Can we, without being blatant hypocrites, follow the Puritan practice of giving thanks and yet reject the Puritan belief in a God to give thanks? To again, let us follow the eduil of Wendell Winlow for a clear perspective;
And whom should we thank for our blessings?
Do we thank the things themselves, for being there? Are we to assume that no one made these things and bestowed them upon us? Shall we thank the farmers? Whom, then, do the farmers thank?
"And although it be not always so plenitous as it was at this time with us, yet, by the goodness of God, we are so far from wante that we often wish you partakers of our plentie."
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
Greek discrimination a reflection of ambient society
As a member of a fraternity, I read with interest the Kansan's series on discrimination in the Greek system. I will admit that there is discrimination among Greeks. Members of my fraternity have said in the past that they would be more sympathetic if we signed a black person. This is a dam shame.
However, any discrimination present in fraternities and sororites is no more than a reflection of society as a whole. We choose our members from a state and a country that is racist. Racism pervades numerous organization such as the University Daily Kansas.
In all of the times I have been in Flint Hall, I have only seen a black person once. How many blacks does the Kansan have on its staff? Is it true that the black student newspaper was created to counter discrimination perpetrated by the Kansan? If the Kansan wants to investigate discrimination, it should start in its own newsroom.
Dan Parelman
Overland Park sophomore
Article miffs source
To the Editor:
After having read the story by Connie Schallau about blacks and whites in the KU Greek system, I feel somewhat cheated. First of all, Miss Schallau is not a very fair reporter. She wrote a statement that was simply untrue. I did not say that blacks were more intelligent because of race-related problems, but that I was tired of all the pranks that I was being subjected to. I believed that although the pranks may have
Secondly, in quoting my statement about not being able to get into the Phi Gamma Delta house, Miss Schallah fragmented and misconstrued the context of my story in what was, for me, a deeply disturbing experience. Phi Gamma Delta house or perhaps the entire Greek system. The story was, in fact, not told in reference to myself, but rather in reference to an acquaintance of mine. His inability to obtain admission into the Phi Gamma Delta house may be particular in the choice of their members.
stemmed from the fact that I was black, many of the pranks were a result of my being a bpledge.
I am sorry that the reporter stooped to such measures to get this story. This story is, in my opinion, one-sided and biased. I thought the job of the press was to report the news from both sides of the argument. Unfortunately, the story seems to put the fraternity system in a bad light.
I wish to apologize to both the Phi Kappa Sigma and Phi Gamma Delta fraternities for the incorrect comments referenced to them in the story.
Michael E. McGlothen Kansas City, Kan., freshman
Thanks, but no thanks
To the Editor:
To the Editor.
Cindy Campbell, you missed the point. It is not the attitudes in "Dressing Sex" that demeanate females. it is yours. Your Nov. 16 book, *A Gift of Love*. Haw. There's more to a woman than sextiness.
No, indeed! Their proper place should not be at the bottom of the heap, as you suggest, or even chasing right after men for status, but rather right alongside men, hand in hand (figuratively, of course). When will people learn that equality means just that, equality?
You almost pull it out and make some sense at the end, though. I'm glad that you "pity the woman who dresses only to arouse the purient interest of men." So do I. But you make the assumption that the norm for women should be likeing like bithering idiots and looking like tramms."
that every woman wants to be a sex object, or that every man wants to assert his "superiority" over a willing female, is preposterous. You can make someone less interesting if you seem to be trying to criticize
As for you, Joe Bartos, thank you for your wonderful cartoon showing that women are nothing more than breasts and crottes. The women in this picture have a tasteless cartoon to draw my attention to it.
And for the Kansan editors, thanks for the attempt at presenting the feminist-equalist viewpoint, but no thanks. This one came off like the back-handed compliment it was.
You state that all women "really contain a savage sexpot waiting to claw its way to the surface" for the benefit of "making macho men nice." Nice alliteration Cindy, but the premise
Roy Leban
Lawrence junior
Library makes effort To the Editor
As spokesperson for the Watson Library renovation, I would like to respond to the letter and headline about inadequate study space in Watson.
The third quarter of the renovation—the two upper floors—is just now being completed. In order to continue, the company will
during the last weeks of the semester, we are pushing ahead, moving the Periodicals Reading Room to fourth floor during the Thanksgiving holiday. We already have set up tables and chairs in the future East Asian library space on fifth floor and opened it as a study area.
The periodicals move is made possible by some library staff giving up chunks of their holiday and by the arrival of a truckload of new books. These materials makes for some inconvenience and disarray.
The public may choose to view it as a damned nuisance or as an entertainment in which furniture, periodicals, people, shelves and so on are made available by the metaphor of Order and Chaos. It is both, but whichever way you view it, you will find that the library staff, given the available resources, makes every effort to provide the materials, with everything appropriate to this academic community.
Carol B. Chittenden Associate Reference librarian
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the letter is to a student, the letter should include the class and home town, or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters.
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