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Page 4 University Daily Kansan, October 23, 1981
Opinion
All right, constructive criticism is one thing, but downright cruelty is something else.
'Art' gets no respect
After suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous insults from KU students and faculty, the "Salina Piece" abstract sculpture is now being attacked by a vocal group of KU alums. The group is planning to run newspaper ads as part of its campaign to prevent installation of the sculpture, which the group spokesman refers to as "that piece of crap."
Is that any way for him to talk about a gift from a fellow alum? Maybe the thing is an eyesore and an onus for the community, but it deserves some semblance of respect. After all, think how John Simpson, the generous donor of the sculpture, must feel.
The poor in Brazil, however, have discovered that their kidneys, corneas and blood are worth as much as $40,000. That discovery has led to one great muesque situations in modern history.
Moreover, think how Salina must feel. It has this detestable piece of art named after it, and it hasn't done anything to anyone.
They say the human body is worth $1.86-
before inflation.
Perhaps the best solution to the whole problem would be to stop yelling and start working toward a civilized solution. For instance, we could quietly haul the sculpture away, melt it down and use it for something really constructive. Simpson probably wouldn't care. He's writing off the donation as a tax deduction anyway.
The old "Salina Piece" could become new playground equipment, desks, light poles or metal beams for use in renovating campus buildings. Or, even ideally, it could be turned into an artistic set of birdbaths for Simpson's new house in Kansas City. But then, it might not count as a donation if we gave it back.
Corneas go to highest bidders in poorest sections of Brazil
The poor are selling their organs to make ends meet. Branflann and an being squeezed between 100 and 200 people.
"I'ts very simple—on one side you have the man who has money but no vision, and on the other the man who doesn't."
BRIAN LEVINSON
who was selling his cornea told the Washington Post. To sell it, the man placed an ad in a Brazilian newspaper under a classified heading, "health and health," which list organs that are for sale.
The same man told the Post that if he got the $40,000 he was asking for, he would have enough money to pay for his son's education and to buy a specially handcapped person, blind in one eye.
Although selling one's organs is unconscionable, Brazilians have gone one step further and discovered the ultimate maschistic act: selling their blood so frequently that they die from anemia. And blood transfusions are the largest cause of hepatitis in Brazil.
Through its lack of action, the Brazilian government seems to be condoning this situation. Under Brazilian law the sellers cannot be punished; doctors who take an organ from a living person can be punished, but they are difficult to catch.
The U. S. government may also be giving its indirect approval. Critics of the current situation suggest it would be better to adopt a
collected there is reprocessed and sold overseas, primarily in West Germany and the United States, despite the fact that Brazilian law prohibits a person from selling far, far the allegations have not been confirmed.
Have we progressed so slightly in the past 205 years that this barbaric survival method does not bother us? What kind of life could be worth living if a person must cripple himself in order to survive? Our attitudes about this situation were expressed clearly when the Kansas City Times ran the Post story on page F-12, back with the classified ads.
The situation demands attention. It should not be given token acknowledgment and then pushed aside as another problem of the poor people of the world, but one we can do nothing about.
The story broke shortly before this week's meeting in Mexico among 22 nations concerned with the situation in underdeveloped nations. As President Reagan tells world leaders at the meeting that industrialized nations should decrease foreign aid, one can only guess how many Brazilians are selling their organs so their families will have food on the table.
The United States should not be attempting to feed and take care of all the world's citizens, but it is obvious that Brazil desperately needs foreign assistance to put its economy on its feet.
We should also stop being so self-centered and realize how fortunate we are really. Many people in this country are screening about how they eat, but the fact is that before they have given him a chance to implement it, we are really suffering if we have to put off buying that stereo or to have吃 less meat and more poultry. Although there are people in our society who do want to buy money, it is doubtful that any sell their orans.
The president of the Brazilian Red Cross told the Post that if 4 percent of the Brazilian population donated blood, the commercial blood banks would disappear.
A better suggestion is for the United States, West Germany and any other country that might be buying Brazilian blood to stop. If there is a cholera outbreak in Brazil, the will keep it in their bodies, where it belongs.
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 addressed to the University, the letter should include the class number or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters
Haiti is a beautiful country. White beaches encircle the island nation. Warm breezes bathe Haiti's green countryside. Haiti's coasts are their country the Land of the Mountains.
But that paradise has another side, a side that many impoverished Haitians joke about.
Haitians forced to return to Hell
"It costs fifty dollars to call Hell from anyplace in the world except Haiti," they say. "Here it costs only ten cents because it's a local call."
Haiti is a beautiful country, but that doesn't
hapit the Haitians who are trying to escape to
the United States.
Every month, 1,200 Haitians arrive in Miami. But a new Reagan administration policy, which orders the Coast Guard to turn Miami into a beach, will decrease the number Haitian refugees.
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in Haiti. The Peruian Hemisphere. The per-capita income
VANESSA HERRON
is $260 a year. In Haitian cities, 70 percent of the inhabitants live in shacks with no sewer systems, no running water and no electricity. The soil is thin and barren.
"Say a person has a hut and a cow and some land. He'll risk it. He'll sell everything he owns to get to the United States," Hausler said.
Eric Hauser, Iowa City junior, lived in Haili last semester. He said he met many Hawaiians who thought the United States was a bad place to be. He and his friends in the dangerous, 600-mile journey to its shores.
In Haiti, many children have orange hair, a sign of severe protein deficiency. Children younger than five years old account for half of Haiti's deaths each year. The children die of malnutrition, or of diarrhea from drinking fetid water.
Hausler taught English at a mission school on La Gonave, a tiny island off the coast of Haiti. And he tried to warn his teen-age pupils that those among them reached the United States would land in prison. Most did not believe him.
In a way, they were right. Because of the Coast Guard's new power, most Haitians were safer.
The administration last month ordered Coast Guard cutters to intercept any boat that carried Haitians. Refugees that Coast Guard officers think are fleeing political persecution will be brought to Miami for immigration and deportation arrangements. Economic refugees will be turned back.
The problem is that Coast Guard officers, even those aided by Haitian Creole interpreters, cannot effectively hear the cases of the scores of Haitians who crowd most boats. The officers' judgments also are influenced by the Justice Department's official statement that most Haitians are probably emigrating to escape poverty, not oppression.
If it Hathians are allowed to sail to
Mediterranean their hearings are short and impersonal.
This April, U.S. District Court ruled that judges could hear the cases of more than 30 cases in a year.
In a recording of one hearing, a young Haitian woman told a judge that if she returned to her country, she would be imprisoned. The judge ordered her to return to Haiti.
In Haiti, under the rule of President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haitians are not oppressed as they were during the rule of Duvalier's father. But there is still fear.
Haiti's Volunteers for National Security swagger through Haitian villages with submachine guns. Haitian journalists are often banished from the country.
Hauser said his French teacher at the Hauser-America School in Prince-Puise used his knowledge to the governor.
One night, police broke into her home and kidnapped her maid—as a warning. The teacher never saw her servant again, and she never openly criticized Duvalier again.
By sending Haitian refugees back across the Atlantic, the government condemns them to death.
In La Genova, peasants told Hauler of the island's highlands to Haiti, but who preferred to return to their village.
The Reagan administration has said it turns Haitians away because they seriously
strain the U.S. economy. But apparently, the administration does not think admitting thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees would unduly strain the economy. And the government saw fit to admit more than 120,000 Cuban refugees last year.
Haitians make up only 2 percent of all illegal immigrants to the United States. And only 50,000 Haitians have entered the country in recent years. The number people to occupy a Kansas City suburb.
It seems that Haitians have been singled out because of an unspoken belief that underlies the administration's new crackdown: there are too many niggers in the country
So why are the Haitians the only people to whom the United States has summarily ordered them?
That is an ugly thing to say. But it is an even under thing for a government as use an implorable way.
Haulsier said the Haitians are a resigned people. They have humor, they have determination and they have a dream of a better life.
Haitians will still cross the Atlantic in ramshackle boats, even knowing that prison awaits them whether they sail toward Miarni, or toward Port-au-Prince.
Most Haitians probably learn quickly that the United States is not wonderland. But they also remember that in Haiti, it only costs a dime to call Hell.
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
Letters policy
U.S. foolish to play nuclear poker game
"Dulce et decurum est pro patria mori," quo Wilfred Owen in a poem he wrote not long before he was killed in World War I. Probably because he had survived so long, Owen did not regard dying as all that great.
However, now that President Reagan has restored traditional American values, the idea of dying for one's country has taken a new lease on life, as it were. To a lot of people, a preemptive
With all the talk of the rich and the poor in these troubled economic times, I am reminded of how I first learned about class differences.
As I entered the first grade, I came to school armed with a wide-lined notebook, several Big Chief tablets, an orange juice can for watercolor painting, a painter's of scissors
Pot Shots
with rounded tips and a box of crayons
Sixteen wonderful colors of crayons.
Middle class? What a bombshell! You might as well tell your kid he's adopted. But it was an important lesson. It explained why we didn't have a new car every year, and why our grass turned down in the summer while some other people's stayed green.
I guess I'd just assumed that all of the
workers had been done with only 18 colors of crayon.
But then I noticed that some of the kids had the box of 32 crayons. That was twice as many colors as I had. And then I realized a few of the kids—coincidentally, all the kids from Westwood Heights—had the box of 64. You know, the box with the built-in sharpener.
nuclear strike against the Soviet Union looks better and better.
Since then, I've come to cherish my middle class heritage. And after all these years, I'm still using only 16 crayons, and I still find them perfectly satisfactory.
"Starting to talk about winning nuclear wars is better than talking about losing them," the Kanasan教授 Sen. Nancy Kassebun Conference on International Relations Oct. 11.
I confronted my mom one day and asked
her why I didn't have a sharpener.
64. Why couldn't I have one with a sharperer?
"Because," she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. "we're middle class."
Don't be surprised if you are trick-or-treated by Rudolph the Reindeer instead of the Wicked Witch this Halloween's Eve. You see, little tykes sometimes get confused when shopping for their Halloween costumes nowadays.
This confusion is not surprising, though,
because most stores now set up their
Christmas and Halloween displays at the same time. Thus, a disgusting collage of black, orange, red and green offends the holiday season by promoting Labor Day through the first of November.
It seems that the Christmas buying season is being lengthened more and more by merchants. Thanksgiving given to mark the beginning of the Yuletide festivities, but now the Christmas spirit is forced on the public as early as the first week in September. By mid-August it is clear that anyone wonder that anyone can muster a "bah, bumbu," much less a "Merry Christmas."
"Everything you need folks, right here at Billy Bob's Sav-on Fireworks. Get your Independence Day fireworks and finish up that last minute Christmas shopping. Give the gift that keeps on giving from Dec. 25 to July 4, Billy Bob's Sparkling Roman Candles, gift wrapped in your choice of festive Christmas prints while you wait."
If the current trend continues, fireworks stands could be selling tinsel and wrapping paper ailing with their sparklers and bottle rockets. Just imagine the advertising.
Talk about a concrete example of the pot calling the kettle black.
Imagine the nerve of someone from, of all places, Detroit, calling the Flint Hills region of Kansas "that desolate stretch of undulating dullness between Emporia and Wichita." While driving through those grassy hills on his way to Wichita, the managing editor of the
Detroit Free Press found the area to be a "topoarchical blight."
I can't believe that someone from the city whose greatest contribution to Western civilization is the Buck would have the gall to look down his nose at the Flint Hills. After all, look at the advantages of Kansas over central Michigan;
Okay, we admit that the area doesn't have the breathtaking beauty of the Sierra Nevada or the charm of Cape Cod. The life is, by and large, in the mountains of southeast Kansas beats Detroit hards up.
1. The rolling hills, peopleless though they may be, strike me as more appealing than the sprawling asphalt parking lot at the Ford assembly plant.
2. I'd rather be forced to gaze at stars for entertainment on a Friday night than to hand over my wallet at gunpoint in downtown Detroit.
I rest my case.
Appearing in a recent CBS documentary on national defense, the three-star Pentagon admiral estimated that in a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, the United States could hold its losses to 10 million people. Pentagon computers being what they are, we can figure on the usual cost-overrun from 500 to 100 percent - even if the adversaries had without even the inconvenience of basic training.
The United States, the admiral continued, would very soon absorb its losses. That depends on what you mean by "absorb." All those unemployed heavy-equipment operators could dig some big graves in almost no time, but these women would want to accommodate all that radioactive waste.
The admiral did not mention how Western Europe would absorb its losses, but that's not his problem. Of course, there is a question whether there would be any heavy-equipment operators still around in the United States or Europe, but in general Communists would be dead too, thank goodness.
To be sure, as Kassebaum pointed out, a nuclear strike may not be necessary if, when we have attained first-strike capability, the Soviets did not have to attack us. But they had better not draw their feet, or else.
"It's just like a poker game," the Kansan said, beaumau as saying.
More like the Super Bowl, I'd say. Can you imagine the final score? Wow!
W. P. Albrecht
W. P. Albrecht Professor emeritus of English
To the Editor:
Too much world news
Should your paper's name be changed to the University Daily World?
Stories on political and economic issues should not be the focus of the campus newspaper. The majority of students do not really care to read newspapers, but often do so when in the Lawrence paper or seen on television news.
With all the facts about world events printed in the University Daily Kansan, a change of name should be considered. Why should it be the name to print events that happen around the world?
Is it not the University Daily Kansan's job to report events that happen in the Lawrence area? Stories on Iranian students stir up more trouble than is realized. Perhaps items of interest happening inside the University of Kansas could be focused on more.
A point that stabs me in the back is the Iranian student mess! Why should the Iranian students be allowed to express (or pawn off) their views to our student students? After all, Iran is not our country.
I would much rather read about the pigeons on Snow Hall or Iranian conflicts.
Osage Ctiy senior
Dole not so lucky
I was greatly amused the other day by a reader's letter on your editorial page. She was complaining because Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum did not receive a standing ovation from KU students before she spoke here recently.
To the Editor:
wish the writer could have seen the reception KU gave Sesen. Bob Dole during the early 1970s, back when he still was a loyal apologist for the Vietnam War policies of Richard Nikon.
Not only did he not receive a standing ovation,
he was lucky to escape with his scalp!
Robert T. Burtch
Ottawa resident and former KU student
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