UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of the editor.
October 3.1979
Carlin helps elderly
Elderly people often are taken advantage of by our society, and their rights as fellow human beings repeatedly are ignored. They are a frequently forgotten minority that has to live with inadequate social care programs and a government seemingly aloof to their problems.
But in recent years, some government officials are becoming more aware of the plight of old citizens and young people; they might fire under various agencies.
Last week, Gov. John Carlin lit up those fires. Charging the state government with ineffective government demanded dramatic policy changes.
"FOR TOO many years, the state agency charged with regulating the nursing home industry (the Department of Health and Environment) has taken a tenient posture in carrying out this responsibility," Carlin said.
"The state has failed to use the statutory tools already available to improve the quality of care provided our elderly in nursing homes."
Carlin outlined a five-point plan of fines, non-renewal of operating licenses and withdrawal of state
financial aid for nursing homes which violate state codes.
BUT THE MOST important point in the governor's plan is possibly the proposed and badly needed strengthening of the Department of Health and Environment's power over nursing homes.
The agency is marked by a weakness rooted in its time-consuming paperwork and bureaucratic regulation.
The governor said he wanted new laws passed by the Legislature to make it easier for the state to fine owners of substandard nursing homes and to give the agency more power in the issuance of permits and licenses.
These changes, if effectively implemented, could mean safer and more humane living conditions for elderly people who are at the mercy of nursing home owners for their safety and well-being.
Carlin's action is to be applauded, not only for its potential benefit for older citizens, but also for the governor's ability to see the state's ineffectiveness in fulfilling its responsibilities to all citizens. Rather than ignoring that ineffectiveness, Carlin quickly stepped in and made demands that could quickly help our deprived elderly.
A friend returned recently from a visit to his home in update New York. He was sad and a little bit angry about what was happening at the Olympics games in February.
"It brings a lot of money into an area that has been economically depressed for a long time," he observed. "But I question who is going to benefit it by."
"It it sure isn't going to be the ordinary people who live and work there."
Olympics may churn Lake Placid
While the haveves double or triple their assets with the millions of dollars that will be spent in the area, the havezs will find that they can keep up with the ensuing expenses.
HE WAS talking about something a lot of people in Lake Placid have already discovered--that those who have the least stand to lose the most.
stany have already felt the pinch, as landlords harden their hearts at the prospect of the dollars they can make.
Two women living in a $250 - month Lakes
Placid apartment were given notice—the
landlord had found someone willing to pay
$4,000 for the month of February.
THE OWNER of a photo supply store on the town's main street was told to pack up his inventory—he couldn't afford the sky-rocking rent.
Two young women, living in a cabin 50 miles from Lake Pleacid, decided to move after the landlord suddenly jacked up the rent by $100 per month and expected to expect an annual rate in January.
Part of the problem, ironically, is the $49 million complex that was built to house the Olympic athletes.
Faced with a Congress that balked at the idea of spending millions on a building that would be useless after the Olympics, Lake Pleich promoted workers out a com
THE OLYMPIC Village would be designed to be a minimum security prison after the games, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons would foot the bill.
But the white elephant that Congress tried so hard to avoid has become almost that
Soviet meddling in Afghanistan represents a no-win situation
It sounds like a very familiar story.
A corrupt dictatorship is battling for its life against a popular rebellion. The guerrillas are wily and tough. They control most of the countryside. Nothing moves on them.
But the dictatorship is the client state of a superpower. That superpower wants to see the present government remain in office for another decade, with amounts of troops and weapons into the country.
BUT THE army is inep and morale is bad. The guerrillas keep gaining ground. They move up the army and show them how to suppress the revolt. Then the advisers start getting killed in action and the revolution starts sent in, and more weapons. They are still not enough. Finally, combat troops go in, and the guerrillas mired in a bloody, vicious guerrilla war.
Vietnam and the United States? No, the revolution is in Afghanistan and the super-power is the Soviet Union.
John COLUMNIST logan
THE GOVERNMENT of Afghanistan has used ruller force in attempting to crush the revolt, including the use of machine gunning and machine gunning of villagers
For more than a year, Moslim rebels in the country have been fighting against the government. So popular is their support that they controlled half the country within a week.
thought to have rebel sympathies. Those tactics are thought to be inspired by the Russian advisers.
But the tactics have backfired, almost all of the populace now supports the guerilla tactics; they have also been insured by the defenses of some units of the Afghanistan army. An entire brigade went over on the rebel side last month, but not before it murdered its Russo-Turkish allies.
Already more than 100 of these advisers have died in the fighting, some reportedly skinned alive or hung on meat hooks. And the revolution is still gaining ground.
SOME ANALYSTS now believe the Russians are willing to send in combat troops to crush the revolt. Already the Russian-backed forces have airbase near the Africanian capital, Kabul, and it is reported that Russians plot most of the country's bombers and helicopter
Russia cannot afford to let the Afghan-
istian regime go under. If it does, it would establish another Islamic republic. Mr. Putin fears that the 30 million Moslems now living in Soviet Central Asia might start their own insurgency if they saw the success of Islamic uprising in Afghanistan.
THE KREMLIN also has its prestige on the line. It has committed itself to support to the beleganted Khalsa (People's Party) in power and to promote the second-in-command of the government gunned down the leader last month to take over the government, the Soviets didn't want to leave the country, but that to do so might topple the new government. Instead, President Leonid Breshnev and Premier Alexei Kosygin sent a telephone message to their congratulations on his "election."
success for the Russians would prevent the United States from using that country as a listening post to watch Soviet military and nuclear arms activity. The United States has been searching for such stations in a monitoring station in Iran last year.
At the same time, the Soviets have very little to gain. Afghanistan might be used as a base for insurgent operations against Islamic State and locked-in nation holds little strategic value.
But Kremmlest preage would be seriously damaged if it had to send combat troops into a third world nation, much as the reputation of the United States was. The war in Afghanistan, like other bat troops appears to be the only way of saving the present government.
lynn COLUMNIST byczynski
even before the games have started. No one wants to stay there for three weeks. And quite a few nations' Olympic committees are moving into town to find other accommodations.
The Norwegian committee has rented two houses for $30,000 for its three-week stay. The Swedish committee has found four houses, at a rate of $22,000. And on so.
ONE CAN hardly balance the athletes for exercise, so they are designed to hold 500 pounds except expected to house 1,400 athletes. The rooms are 10-foot by 7-foot, with bank beds and 15-25-foot stairs.
The Olympic Village, many nations have cried. is an insult to the athletes.
But the games will be brief, and the competitors' discomfort will be minimal, compared to the problems the prison will cause for the lower-class people it will
It will be the young first-offenders housed at the prison who will suffer for the strings that were pulled in Congress to get funding for the Olympic housing complex.
MOST OF the prisoners in the minimum-security program will be from New York, Boston and Philadelphia. They will be urban perversed by rural whites—another Atlasite.
But, worst of all, the prisoners will be a夹
home-from-about 300 miles. And for them they
friends, 300 miles is a long way to travel for
a visit—especially on the one bus a day that
will take them to work.
Lake Flack booster are, nevertheless,
smiling in delight, pointing to the 200 jobs
that construction of the prison and the
Olympic facilities has brought to the town.
FOR LAKE PLACID, that is a big deal—it brings the town's usual 20 percent unemployment rate down to national levels.
But what happens when the games are over and the building boom dies? The jobs will be back at square one, except that the 'ingering inflation may leave them in worse condition.'
Lake Piacak may enjoy a revival as a playground for the Northeast's well-to-do. That what 56 percent of the town's people did when they voted in 1970 to host the names.
It was a big gamble, for even the rich. For those who don't have any chips to lay on the table, the gross commercial spectacle of the Olympics is sure to be a losing game.
Youth culture denies joy of aging
Rv ALLEN M. WIDEM
N. Y. Times Special Features
WEST HARTFORD, Conn.—We all like the feel of a brand new dollar bill, the smell of a fresh-minted penny, the look of a just-delivered car, the sharpness in styling of a newly-arrived jet. We smile宜 watching a toddler seek to balance an ice cream cone amid a proliferation of clutter. We're "newness" oriented as we learn to interact with like men everywhere, we loathe to talk of illness, of pending death.
There's something uncontrollable, to the average person, of the sidelining effect of illness, and there's a saddening sense of permanence in death, and we seek to think young, talk young, whenever. Wherever we'll cheer space exploration, watching entrained at 12-inch, black-and-white suits or a super-deluxe floor, we'll see humans as anxious to look ahead, at least look ahead to the immediate future.
WE DON'T want to hear of the grim days of the 1930s Depression and "Brother, can you spare a dime?" But we grasp the antics of the international social set, dutifully chronicled in the media. The grief was shared with an unspoken satisfaction and does not like to talk of illness, of pending death.
" our country's entire marketing process, as designed and developed by the so-called 'Mad Ave.' (and Madison Avenue is not "mad"—as its cynics may contend but, rather, sales-oriented, and if selling means implying youth, youth, youth in lipstick, in clothes, what have you and what say you, why, then, so be it), can indeed "move" products at a pace never envisioned by America's fledgling marketing apparatus down through the centuries, its to-be-lauded credit—and commendation-of the marketing process.
Cults spring up, magically, almost overnight in the demise of a James Dean, a Marilyn Monroe, a Rudolph Valentino.
W ASSUME lifelong habits as we achieve maturity and we seek to pay our bills, cloth and feed our families, knowing the while that each passing day brings us more understanding, more comfort, more assurance. We listen, we listen more, because no one has all the answers all the time.
Our children are growing in an enormously technical world, where data processing is a fixed component of the economy, and mention of a Studekadeber or a Hudson gives a faint glimmer of hope. We have already seen that great glories, respect the present, and gaze with awaive into the future.
We'll watch a television news anchorman, immaculate in garb, careful in pronunciation, and come to the conclusion that if we speak in English with confidence, we're another youngish man, immaculate, precise in speech, and there's a frightening atmosphere of a never-never land that gives serious consideration to what I believe, William Powell or some other person. You can probably live there, living in California: "Someday you'll wake up and you're 75."
BUT NONE of us wants to be 75, or even 65. We want to be pre-middle-aged, earning a handsome salary, enjoying a brisly paced lifestyle, forever. We don't want to think of the aging process—it's supposed to happen to the other guy, remember? And we don't want to read of terminal illness or anything that'll disturb our process because of our ingrained worship of the youth syndrome.
We can quote the pundits, can re-read the humor, but deep down, we think of the clock ticking on and the need to understand, if not accept, the lifelong count of happiness that is tempered with the harshness of the everyday court.
Allen M. Widem, who was amusements editor of the Hartford,
Conn, Times for 28 years, is a writer.
Meters in O-zone raise questions
To the Editor:
This letter concerns the placement of parking meters on the O-Zone parking lot. A few questions need to be answered regardi- c this move.
1. Who authorized the placing of meters in O-Zone?
2. Were any groups outside traffic and security consulted and when?
3. Was the placement of parking meters announced in advance? If so, where?
9. If you pay 20 cents for one parking cost 80 percent, from 40 to 70 cents a day, for people who work at the University?
As a student paper, the Kansan should look into this matter closely. It would be a service we all would apreciate.
Sorority football story self-indulgent folly
Ronald DeSoignie
Topeka graduate student
and 12 others
To the Editor:
I think the story wouldn't be so bad by itself—and, it being a personal account, it's
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
But I just wanted to see some pictures of what but-actually-petite netman, the hard work that goes into it. (I'll go with "and" (especially) the never-a-hair-out-of place quartackhurt that were all so intriguing.)
appropriate for her to picture herself. Once.
May be twice. But as the main point of
interest in all five photographs? I think it
would be great if someone else decided to
do a story on her - but for her to decide to
a story on herself. And what about the other
story? What would she do if her
sorority had lost the game? What then?
Would Anv have written a story?
Harrisburg accident leaving effects now
I'm sure her house is pleased with the light spotlight camera that she uses to show the faces of her fellow students who are beloved pride. And she certainly has some nice photographs for her scrapbook (good work) and for her class.
We're talkin' you know what I mean?
Phil Thompson
Topeka senior
We're talkin' you know what I mean?
To the Editor:
The current debate regarding nuclear power, which is being held through the University Daly Kansas and in much of this country, involves both facts, and its pseudo-science.
I wonder how many people who spout off with this information have actually talked with people in Harrisburg as I have done. There were people hurt. Five women in an apartment building, two of whom menstruated off cycle during the first days following the "accident." I have a friend in Harrisburg whose hair is falling out, whose sperm count is getting lower and who is suffering from the first spontaneous nose bleeds of his life—all of this since March 20.
supposedly scientific understanding of the issue.
tanner is experiencing swelling, which had not occurred before March 28. A friend tells me that many people are in psychological counseling and result of their recent traumas concerning Three Mile Island. Many of these people are involved in psychological counseling at the clinic where he is employed. But perhaps the most mind are not to be considered as hurt.
For instance, we have those who say that on our own part during the Three Mills incident, they were going on as there is still melting of the core—and we have those folks who say that in their own part there is not melting.
I am experiencing trauma concerning the Wolf Creek plant. The documents spelling out the safety violations there fill three thick piles of concrete. You can assure you that if that plant ever goes on
line, I will have to leave Kansas, just as 120,000 persons left the Harrisburg area out of fear, according to the Pennsylvania State Police.
Do any of you know that there is no quality control for the ultimate heat sink at Wolf Creek, nor has there ever been? That question may be one of the mind are not to be considered as hurt.
Lawrence graduate student
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