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Tuesday, September 12, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Lawrence and Douglas County have endured their fair share of crime during the past two years. A woman was recently discovered dead near Stull. A boy was found mutilated near the Kansas River. But guess what? Crime in Lawrence is down 21 percent compared with last year.
Good judgement can help reduce campus crime rate
This fact from the Lawrence Police Department is misleading when applied to the KU campus' crime rate. KU police said that during 1988, KU students and faculty suffered more thefts than in the previous three years.
Lt. Jeanne Longaker, KU police spokesman, attributed half of last year's reported 569 thefts to Lawrence's location between the two major metropolitan areas of Kansas City and Topeka. She said that the other half of the crimes probably were committed by students.
B. Jake White, student body president, said that Student Senate was continuing to push the University to address the lighting issue on campus. Campus lighting, vital to everyone's safety, must be addressed this year and in years to come. It needs to remain a priority if the crime rate is going to be kept from an annual increase.
The ultimate responsibility of monitoring and enforcing the law must lay in the hands of KU police. Everyone, however, can take the special precautions needed to discourage crime on an individual basis.
Unfortunately, the Midwest and KU campus are not crime-free. We are vulnerable to every potential crime from theft or assault. Use good judgment when walking alone or when leaving your car or living area and remember our University is as susceptible to crime as the rest of the nation.
Thom Clark for the editorial board
Colombia's war also is ours
War has been declared on both sides of the drug border, and battle will be waged in U.S. streets and the Colombian countryside. If the United States can help in the war in Colombia, perhaps it can reduce the amount of blood spilled on the home front.
Colombia is at war with the drug cartel, essentially a drug baron controlled political entity that possesses land and resources. Under emergency measures by President Virgilio Barco, authorities have confiscated millions of dollars and revived an extradition treaty with the United States. The crackdown is believed to have paralyzed cocaine production, but the cartel has launched an offensive of bombings and assassinations.
The Colombian government cannot win the war alone, especially when the United States exists as a lucrative market for the drug lords' product. The Bush administration, as part of the $7.9 billion drug war, has proposed an increase in financial and military support to help Colombia, which produces 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. By 1990, Bush wants to spend $261.2 million in military and law enforcement aid for Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.
Such aid includes military equipment and advisers. To date, it includes five transport helicopters, five C-130 transport planes, eight A37 reconnaissance and attack jets, machine guns, bulletproof vests, grenades, boats and trucks.
This assistance is backing up the rhetoric of the drug war. Critics decry the presence of the U.S. military in Colombia, but the under-financed Colombian police force cannot cope by itself with the drug cartel. Colombia supplies the product of the drug problem, and the United States must help strike at the production source.
The solution is not as easy as sending a few planes to Colombia, however. Equal, if not greater, attention must be paid to reducing the demand for cocaine in the United States. But the United States cannot ignore the production side of the problem. Colombia's war also is our war, and we must help to win it. If the drug lords win in Colombia, the United States will move another step away from winning the war on drugs at home.
Daniel Niemi for the editorial board
News staff
David Stewart...Editor
Ric Brack...Managing editor
Daniel Nieml...News editor
Candy Niemann...Planning editor
Stan Diel...Editorial editor
Jennifer Corser...Campus editor
Elaine Sung...Sports editor
David Hutman...Photo editor
Stephen Kline...Graphics editor
Christine Winner...Arts/Features editor
Tom Eblen...General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Linda Prokop ... Business manager
Debra Martin ... Local advertising sales director
Jerre Madford ... National/regional sales director
Jill Lowe ... Marketing director
Tami Rank ... Production manager
Carrie Staninka ... Assistant production manager
Margaret Townsend ... Corp manager
Katie Highes ... Creative director
Christal Dooll ... Classified manager
Jeff Meeesy ... Tearsares manager
Jeanne Hines ... Sales and marketing adviser
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College females are women,not girls
Why is it when a boy chugs a beer with his dad for the first time, he is suddenly a man, but when a woman has five children, takes care of the home and works as a maid, a coal mine, it is available to her a kid!
She may be called "one of the girls at work" or maybe her husband will say, "My girl will bring a cake to the party."
call it nitpicky or maybe hypersensitive but our society refers to women as girls all too frequently. A girl is not an adult.
When residence hall directors and assistants were asked to call all females living in the halls women, and males men, I thought, "Yeah, that's fair. Here's a good start."
Then I heard the classic argument
A person who is now faceless to me said, (and I quote loosely) "I'm not going to call any little girl who has a bow in her hair, is drunk and can't remember her shoe size a woman."
I guess a bona fide woman never would become intoxicated.
But a man who would come home on the same night stinking drunk is still a man, or perhaps a guv.
Some say they use the word guy more generically than that.
Is it because, pound for pound, women act more immature than men?
I made the unfortunate mistake of calling a group of men and women guys, as in "you guys."
Tiffany N.
Harness
Editorial board
A drunk man told the why that term doesn't really work as a generic term for both sexes.
"Hey, there are girls here, too. Why didn't you say anything to them?" he said, with red flaring in his eyes.
"I'm sorry, I didn't see them," I lied.
When we say guys, we mean it as slang. And most of the people don't use guys for people of both sexes but instead for a group of men.
But females are awarded only two titles, women and girls. There is no feminine equivalent to guys. It could be argued that gals is the American feminine word for guys.
Here is one of the problems with English. On the colloquial level, males can be called men, guys and boys in descending order of age and sometimes maturity.
Besides, we very well can't use guys as a generic term for college-age men and women in research papers or newspaper articles.
But most people from any state north of Texas might find it a little difficult to start using the term gal.
Then there are those who say gal is a derogatory word because it allows men to say hen and gals. Some say the word gal puts women a notch lower
than men.
Putting aside any regional or personal problems with the word gal, the definition for gal is a girl but the definition of a guy is a fellow or a man. So these two words aren't really referring to the same age groups anyway.
Gal just doesn't work.
This leaves English-speaking people with a choice. Most people probably never have thought about the choice he or she makes, and so they don't think about their spoken faux pas.
What do people say? Guys and girls
Eventually, the girl grows up to be a man but the girl remains a girl and is treated accordingly.
This is not to deny that there are other words
that can be used to women. Let's examine what our
alternatives are and what we should do.
We have the standard chicks and babes
Need I know more?
Any female person old enough to attend college should be called a woman. That is what she is.
should be called a woman. That is what she is.
A girl needs guidance and motherly- and fatherly directed discipline. But a woman is able, canable and strong enough to care for herself.
I know, I know. People usually aren't thinking about such implications when they use the English language.
But just because we are unaware of the mistake we are making, it does not make the mistake any less of an error.
> Tiffany N. Harness is a Hutchinson junior major in journalism and African-American studies.
Freedom grows in Eastern Europe
The unimaginable already has occurred in the Soviet empire, and the impossible may take only a little longer. The first free elections in 70 years have been conducted in the Soviet Union and a legal opposition is emerging. Andrei Sakharov speaks out freely and plans are afoot to publish at least some of Alexander Solzenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." There is talk of paying Soviet farmers "real money," or Western currency, instead of rubles. Province after province demands freedom from Soviet domination. One spectacle succeeds another at a dizzying pace, including the installment of a non-communist premier in Poland last week.
Paul Greenberg Syndicated columnist
On the 50th anniversary of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact on August 23, protesters formed a human chain stretching from Tallinn, Estonia through Riga, Latvia to Vilna, Lithuania. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, which is not likely to overestimate the strength of such a demonstration, put the number of demonstrators at 1,200,000. The Baltic republics are suddenly acting like republics. And not a Soviet tank in sight.
What would have been unimaginable a few years ago has become ordinary. The flicker of freedom that was supposed to have been extinguished decades ago grows bright; the long twilight struggle is ending not in darkness, but dawn. Such news is not easy to credit after all these years; there have been too many times when optimism is lost. Now we see a place where freedom may vanish as suddenly as it appeared. Yet it is impossible not to feel the exhilaration.
At the height of the Cold War (a term that already begins to sound like the name of a past era) the Captive Nations Resolution seemed an empty gesture. Congress solely passed it every year, and every year it had less and less meaning. The brave words seemed to make no more sense than the official U.S. position that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were not part of the Soviet Union.
It hasn't been necessary to liberate Eastern Europe, or to stand fast until the evil empire crumbled of its own appalling weight, and history was redressed.'
now, decades later, John Foster Dulles's talk of a "rollback" of Communist power is the stuff of daily headlines. It may not be happening quite the way he had in mind, but it is happening. It hasn't been necessary to liberate Eastern Europe, or to stand fast until the evil empire crumbled of its own appalling weight, and history was redressed. The old alliance between Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin is no longer a non-event; the accords that divided Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres are no longer secret, even in Moscow.
This ritual might be good politics, but who actually thought the Communist grip on Eastern Europe could be loosened?
The Soviets now admit the illegality of that agreement, even if they are not prepared to take the next step and acknowledge that the Baltic states are and should be free and independent. As Lenin liked to repeat, "He who says A must say B." If the acquisition of the Baltic states was illegal, then their retention also must be illegal. It would not be very diplomatic, or very intelligent, for Americans to overemphasize that conclusion just now, nor is it necessary. It is clear enough to
The history of Eastern Europe has not been lost after all; it was only hidden, and now it is being rediscovered by millions without any prompting. The West need only to stand fast and wait for the unimaginable to occur, the impossible to take shape. Once upon a time there was a standard response to those who predicted the coming breakup of the Soviet Union, or its retreat from Eastern Europe, or freedom for Russia itself. Such dreamers were told to grow up, face reality, accept the inevitable. Now they turn out to be the realists and it is Communism that seems all too uncertain. How did it happen? Not easily but simply. The West kept the faith.
The superstition is that power politics considers faith supersition rather than the abiding force it is. The dreamy words of Adalai Stevenson may have seemed only campaign oratory when he uttered them at Hamtramck, Mich., on Sept. 1, 1952, in the midst of the presidential race that year. Yet they provide the best explanation of what is happening in Eastern Europe today, and what will continue to happen tomorrow:
the foreigners are there, and they are not Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.
"Defeat begins in the heart. The peoples of Eastern Europe will never lose heart. They have kept their faith alive before, through long periods of darkness. We too must keep the faith. We must not allow the recklessness of despair to find any lodging in our hearts. With indomitable faith and courage, with unfaltering determination, we must continue to strive for a future in which all peoples will know the joys of liberty."
Stevenson's words are still sound counsel, the kind that makes the cynicism of the "realists" look unreal. Victory, too, begins in the heart.
Paul Greenberg is a syndicated columnist.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Insurance fails in coverage
It is no surprise that the associate director of Watkins Memorial Health Center, Ray Walters, has not heard of any complaints about
last year's insurance coverage.
When I called Watkins to try to find out why the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States was going to pay only $320 for a $1,300 obstetrical bill, I promptly was given G.M. Underwriters Inc.'s 800 number. Upon contacting them, they told me they didn't handle the claims and gave me another number to call. When I reached them, I was told that they merely paid the claims based on the policy. The end result was that nobody paid, nobody would take
responsibility for the policy, and as near as anyone could tell me. Equitable itself was unreachable.
I also was told that the rates paid were based on 1989 California rates, not exactly the "customary and reasonable charges" for our area as described in the insurance pamphlet, James Muir, Overland Park graduate student and graduate student senator, and Walters said they were aware that the policy, in Muir's words, "stinks," but were forced to accept it anyway. Maybe if they had shared this
information, students like myself could have at least shopping around and tried to find something else. The pamphlet certainly did not present the policy accurately, and we as students should not have to look to the master policy to discover that our claims will be paid on the basis of 1969 costs. As far as I'm concerned, Equitable got away with fraud. But just try to find someone to tell it to.
Katie Jacoby
Katie Jacoby Lawrence graduate student
.