4
Monday, August 27, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Crisis mirrors past
But Saddam Hussein's actions should not reflect on Iraqi, Middle East people in U.S., on campus
These references also have been applied to the Middle East military giant that Saddam used to invade Iraq.
Mention Saddam Hussein today at the University of Kansas and the typical reaction is a sneer, references to insanity or comparisons to Adolf Hitler's world-takeover fantasies.
This isn't the first time a country has been personified through its leader's military activities. During the 1980s, Iran became a fanatic, West-hating country under the Ayatollah Khomeini. Japan once was remembered for its Pearl Harbor attack and self-sacrificing kamikaze pilots, as was Germany for its World War II concentration camps.
These personifications and feelings about countries also have been transferred to people. After World War II, Sen. Joseph McCarthy made communism a household word by starting one of the biggest panics in history. Neighbors accused neighbors of infiltrating society with communism. Suspicion abounded, especially against foreigners.
Since the invasion of Kuwait, another panic has developed in the United States. Arab-Americans have reported being subjected to isolated cases of violence.
Albert Mokhiber, director of legal services for the committee, said the 2.5 million U.S. citizens of Arab descent already were being negatively linked to Iraq.
Foreign students make up about 7 percent of the KU student body, and Middle Eastern students make up about 14 percent.
students should not be thought of in the same context as Iraq. They had no role in Saddam's actions.
Saddam took power in Iraq in 1979 after Iraq's former president, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, resigned because of illness. One month after he became president, Saddam arrested many government officials and charged them with plotting to overthrow him. Twenty-one of those officals were killed by a firing squad, and 33 others were sentenced to prison terms for the supposed coup attempt.
Sara Martin, assistant director of the Office of Foreign Student Services, said she did not know whether any Iraqi citizens were enrolled at KU because enrollment figures had not been compiled yet. But the Iraqi crisis affects students from many Middle Eastern countries, she said, because the Iraqi oil fields employ people from surrounding countries.
If the families of Middle Eastern KU students' rely on the Iraqi oil fields for employment, they may have no source of income because Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets have been frozen by the U.S. government.
The University has offered to defer tuition payments for these students. And if the crisis continues, University loans may be offered to the students.
We all should follow KU's lead and offer understanding to Middle Eastern students who are caught in a crisis over which they have no control.
Mary Neubauer for the editorial board
Bush on vacation
President not neglecting crisis in Middle East
Since Iraq's Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, news reports have told of a growing U.S. military presence in the Middle East and of what President Bush is doing in response to the crisis. In one of his latest responses, Bush on Wednesday authorized the call-up of as many as 200,000 military reservists to support U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
Support for this U.S. military opposition to Iraq has soared.
Meanwhile, news media and others have begun to question Bush for leaving Washington two weeks ago for his vacation home in
Kennebunkport, Maine. Critics say the president should stay in the White House as long as the Iraqi situation remains unstable.
If Bush is required to go to his vacation home in Maine to show Hussein that the United States will not bow down, such a retreat is justified.
Bush's leadership, whether from Maine or Washington, has guided troops peacefully thus far in the Middle East. What he does to deal with the crisis, not where he deals with it, is the real issue.
Sally Gibbs for the editorial board
Helpless store pets not given chance for survival of fittest
Recently I was in a pet store, just browsing, when I happened to glance at a certain
...ing, when I lap
opened to glance at a certain
aquarium. Inside the aquarium was
a snake. Beside the snake, huddled
motionless on the rock, was a young
mouse. There was no place in the
hole to hide it. There was a
shelter, no material that could be dug
or burrowed in, nothing for the
mouse to do but wait for the snake to
wake up and notice it.
What could I do?
Simha Ruben
I told the salesperson that I wanted to buy the mouse. He snatched it out of the aquarium and dropped it into a brightly-colored cardboard box with grinning cartoon mice cavoring on the sides: a wonderful, magic box, a box that mystically transformed pet food into pet food.
Of course, the mouse inside the box — the three-dimensional flesh-and-mouse whose face wasn't built for human expressions — was oblivious to its remarkable transformation into a pet or pet, never defined its life by anyone else's purposes. It was just a mouse, as it always had been a
Staff columnist
mouse
I knew the salesperson probably would throw another mouse in with the snake as soon as I left. I told him this was not a "natural" way for a snake to feed. In the wild a snake has to hunt for its own food. It gets only the mure that are either too slow, too weak or too hard to track. Any particular mouse is singled out for doom hours or days before the snake is even hungry.
If the snake is slower, dumber or unlucky than any of the mice, then it's the snake that dies. That's how nature works. And even the mouse that eventually is caught and eaten doesn't know it's going to be caught and eaten until just before it happens. There's a limit to the terror.
So now I have a mouse. In fact, I have two mice. Not having time to
provide adapuctal social stimulation for a mouse, I was obliged to get a second mouse to keep the first one company.
They're cure little critters. Not too bright but definitely full of life. There are beings inside these tiny bodies. There's a someone looking out of each pair of eyes — a someone who can feel pain and fear, a someone who has a personal interest in continuing its own existence.
A snake can't understand this. A predator in the wild doesn't know it's killing something that wants to remain alive.
But humans are capable of this understanding.
How does it happen, then, that under the stewardship of humans — humans who supposedly "care for" or perhaps even "love" animals — the dignity of the predator is destroyed, and the suffering of the prey is magnified beyond all natural limits?
▶ Simha Ruben is a Lawrence graduate student majoring in human development and family living.
Indian policy brings focus on caste system
T the standard recipe for student protests includes two parts idealism, one part outrage and a dash of rah-rah for the under dog.
Most of India's population is Hindu, a religion in
large numbers in the eastern position, or caste,
is characterized in large parts.
But protests now taking place on campuses in India leave a bad taste in the mouth. Students there are reacting to a new state policy that guarantees more than one-half of the new government jobs to the least-advantaged half of the population.
As in years past, about one-fifth of government jobs go to the lowest Hindu groups: the untouchables and tribals. The new plan calls for the next higher caste, or about one-third of the nation's population, to be eligible for another 27 percent of government jobs.
Those people comprise the group called the backward caste. In India, fluency in English reflects social polish. Only students in upper castes learn English, so the backward caste faces a
Rich Cornell
Associate Editorial Editor
disadvantage.
The backward caste members' opposition, the protesting, English-speaking students, are upset because the government long has been their largest potential employer. A shift from favoring the higher castes to improving the lot of the others will cost some of the angry students their jobs.
candidates has been cut
To some, the conflict in India illustrates the weaknesses of affirmative action everywhere. After all, no one can say whether the requirements will allow more qualified but earlier shunned candidates to receive the jobs. If not, the quality of the government will suffer because its choice of
Affirmative action, it seems, convinces each social group that it is the underdog.
But as affirmative action continues trying to change ugly, unspoken rules in the United States, the lesson offered by the new policy in India is not just that it will make us like all other changes, carries its own weaknesses.
Instead, the selfish, defensive protests remind that privileged groups everywhere would fare better and longer if they would volunteer to release their grips from all the goodies on their own. When the underprivileged gain enough voting power to enforce change, as just happened in India, the overprivileged suffer, complain and generally appear silly.
It seems that the upper-caste students, understandably frightened about dimming job prospects, also could stir within themselves a bit of idealism and sympathy for the age-old underdogs. Isn't it time to question the confining caste barriers?
> Rich Cornell is an Olaite senior majoring in journalism and English.
Credit cards invite financial pratfalls for students
As I enjoy the waning moments of my college career, I can't help pondering those days of old when I was young, innocent and not in the financial disaster I am in today. What was it that led to this? Why do I owe everybody money? Who did this to me?
Although I could do the mature thing and take responsibility, I'd rather not. Instead, let's blame it on the large bastion of credit parasites that infest the college campuses of our country.
Consider, for example, fee payment. Immediately before and after we write balloon checks in the Kansas Union, we must shuffle between twin rows of classmates armed with credit applications.
John Strubert
that promise all.
Staff columnist
It is unethical of banks to spend these abundant marketing resources on college students, a group they know are under financial constraints? Are they really going to pay for the new credit and have their parents pay the
deb? Of course not. They would rather have the students pay it themselves through the use of a student loan.
Some people even say that this interest figure
will be higher if it will take four or five
vans to pay the total amount.
If you already are in the "never-never" land of financial destruction, be careful. And if you aren't careful, I hope you are partying your brains out when the bill comes.
Three Imaginary Girls
**▶ John Stubbrut is a St. Louis senior majoring in journalism.**
By Tom Avery
You might forget how much you owe
Other Voices
The fact that some health-care workers are reluctant to take care of patients with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is disturbing. Ten years ago it might have been more understandable, given the lack of knowledge about the disease and the rampant rumors that filled the gap.
But physicians, dentists, nurses and medical specialists should know better than any other Americans the difference between fact and fiction concerning AIDS. Moreover, they have an obligation, by nature of their professions, to be role models in society with AIDS. Otherwise, the first thing they should do is stop calling themselves professionals; it implies considerably more than having academic credits or efficient work habits.
The National AIDS Commission recently reported that too many health specialists are refusing to care for patients with AIDS or the HIV infection. In its third interim report to President Bush, the advisory body established by Congress said health care workers must acquire the expertise to treat the disease instead of using ignorance as a means of HIV education programs be made available for all health care workers.
Those obliged to consider and correct this problem must keep in the
From the Kansas City Star.
As the national commission points out, they deserve to be supported, and their behavior must be reinforced.
front of their minds the fact that most health care workers are treating AIDS patients. Protective measures and clothing are tedious for them; they have worries about the rare chance that something will go wrong and they'll be infected. But they're doing the job they must do anyway.
If I don't get out of Hong Kong by 1967, I'm finished. I know it." The quiet despair in Li Qiang's words over the death of millions of Hong Kong residents
They, like the 42-year-old laborer, are consumed with fear and uncertainty about what will happen when he meets China's Kong to China seven years from now.
The British Nationality Act is woeily inadequate and unfair. Only 4 percent of Hong Kong's 5.8 million residents are eligible to emigrate, but about 3.25 million hold British nationality documents.
Britain alone can't absorb the 3.25 million Hong Kong residents who already have papers. But it has used the entrepreneurial flair and capital to expand the emigration program. From the Indiana Daily Student
KANSAN STAFP
DEREK SCHMIDT
Editor
KJERSTIN GABRIELSON
Managing editor
TOM EBLEN
MARGARET TOWNSEND Business manager
TOM EBLEN General manager, news adviser
Editors
MINDY MORRIS Retail sales manage
JEANNE HINES Sales and marketing adviser
Business staff
News ... Julie Mettenburg
Editorial ... Mary Neuberauer
Planning ... Pam Sollier
Campus ... Holly Lawson
Sports ... Brent Maycock
Photo ... Andrew Morrison
Features ... Stacy Smith
Campus sales mgr ... Campus sales mgr
Regional sales mgr ... Jackie Schmizelner
National sales mgr ... David Price
Co op sales mgr .. Deborah Salzer
Production mgr .. Missy Miller
Production assistant .. Jilie Axellan
Marketing director .. Audra Langford
Creative director .. Gail Embinder
Letters should be typed, double spaced and less than 200 words. They must include the writer's signature, name, address and telephone number. Writers affiliated with the University of Kannan will be notified.
Great columns should be typed, double spaced and fewer than 700 words. The writer will be photocopied.
The Korean missionary the right to object or edit letters, gain columns and cartoons. They can be the answer to the question of who is a saint? The missionary the left to object or edit letters, do and not act, affect the view of the Korean Colonels are the question of the course and do not act.