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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Tuesday, Nov. 26, 1985
Winter will come early to Kansas.
A bitter coid budget
A cold wind blows across the state's bleak financial landscape, and agencies struggle to keep warm in the biting air. To keep people warm next fiscal year, the agencies need money — money that state officials have projected the state won't have.
Earlier this month, Alden Shields, state budget director, told the Board of Regents that Kansas would receive $132.6 million less than expected in revenues over the next two fiscal years.
At the University of Kansas, the cruel wind has passed through loose shutters, giving employees a feeling of what winter will be like. The cottage is cold, and the University will not have enough state-supplied firewood.
The state needs to cut $17 million from the Regents' lowest budget request of almost $182.6 million, Shields said. That request is the "bare bones" request, the minimum KU officials say the University needs. KU workers probably will get no salary increases.
Here and in many other places across the state, hands and feet will be numbed. Movement will be slow. Agencies will try to bundle up.
And finally, Republican leaders in the Kansas Legislature may be moved to do something. There is talk of increasing the sales tax, an attempt to get and give out more firewood.
Republican leaders scoffed when Gov. John Carlin suggested that the Legislature pass a half-cent sales tax increase last session. It was early fall, and they are loath to buy wood when there seems no need for it.
Legislators have heard that the cold front will pass through the state, and perhaps they have been out walking in the wind. Perhaps, too, they will see the logic of a lottery and sin taxes.
Now, perhaps they will learn.
Now that it is winter, legislators should buy the firewood that state agencies need to stay warm. If they do not, the winter will continue to be a long and cruel one.
Because of a scheduling snafu, fans of the Chamber Music Series and Concert Series have been left holding the short end of the ticket stub.
A planning oversight caused two basketball games to be scheduled on the same nights as Tuesday's performance of the Waverly Consort's "A Christmas Story" and the Feb. 11 performance of the Canadian Brass.
Scheduling snafu
Unfortunately, Athletic Department officials didn't realize that the dates of two rescheduled games conflicted with musical performances slated more than six months before.
Because of this communication gap, concert organizers and fans have been inconvenienced. New tickets had to be printed. Season-ticket holders had to be notified of schedule changes.
Jackie Davis, director of the series, had to scramble to salvage the music series schedule.
The Waverly Consort date couldn't be switched. People with tickets to both the concert and the KU-Southern Illinois University game now must choose between the two events.
The Canadian Brass was moved to March 31, the day after Easter. But because there are no classes on that day, fewer patrons may attend the performance.
To prevent similar snafus in the future, several administrators have formed a committee to coordinate the scheduling of University events.
With a little foresight and communication, the campus calendar should be able to accommodate basketball and brass.
Grandparent liability
This law, which makes grandparents liable until their children reach 18, slaps weakly at the teen pregnancy problem.
Wisconsin has devised a new twist in dealing with the problem of teen-age pregnancy: Make the grandparents pay for bringing up baby.
Under a law passed this month, welfare agencies may take parents of minor children who have babies to court and force them to financially support their grandchildren.
A high percentage of teens who have illegitimate babies are from poor families. Making the parents of these minors financially responsible is practically impossible.
The causes of the high teenage pregnancy rate aren't easy to figure. Neither are the solutions.
Wisconsin legislators say the law will encourage discussion between parents and teens. But instead of using financial
threats to encourage dialogue, lawmakers should have spent their time addressing the social problems at the root of teen pregnancy. Poverty and poor education come to mind immediately.
Fortunately, the Wisconsin law includes other provisions. They include allocating $1 million for pregnancy counseling, requiring a girl's consent before a hospital or clinic can notify her parents of an abortion and repealing restrictions on the sale and advertising of contraceptives.
Wisconsin is on the right track with these ideas. But state legislators derail the program by trying to make grandparents financially responsible.
The complex social problem of teen-age pregnancy won't be eradicated with a legal ploy that drags parents into court and forces them to pay for their childrens' mistakes.
Rob Karwath
Editor
Duncan Calhoun
Business manager
John Hanna Michael Totty
Managing editor Editorial editor
Lauretta McMillen
Campus editor
Susanne Shaw
General manager, news adviser
General manager, news adviser
Business manager
Brett McCabe Sue Johnson
Retail sales Campus sales
Megan Burke
National/Co-op sales
John Oberzan
Sales and marketing adviser
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The real history of Thanksgiving
Patriots vs. Redskins
players, people consumed huge amounts of food. One meal seemed to work the best: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, pumpkin pie and a nectar called Budweiser.
The year is 4004. Here is a retrospective of Thanksgiving that traces the holiday's origin and development.
Thanksgiving began sometime near the beginning of the Age of Strength, probably around the year 1945. The holiday commemorates a historic clash between two groups of people, one living in the northeast United States and the other invading the area.
The battle between these groups, who were known at the time as the Washington Redskins and the New England Patriots, was significant because it resulted in peaceful cohabitation for all people. The anniversary of this meeting, Thanksgiving, actually became an elaborate religious service, celebrated on the Thursday after the 10th Sunday of the season of worship.
This day of worship served anyone who had an electronic worship box. Religious leaders of the era instructed the people to enshrine the boxes in their living rooms and to keep them running all the time.
The holiday began with demonstrations known as parades. In these
After the ceremonial feast, people returned to the living room, sipped nectar and watched more Football until everyone fell asleep. As people awoke they would begin to eat leftover food.
Rick
Zaporowski
Staff columnist
events, two deities seemed to be honored more than any others, namely, Bullwinkle and Underdog.
This pattern of binging and napping often lasted several days, until all the relatives had left and all the turkey had been converted into sandwiches and consumed.
The purpose of the parades was to show the stamina of the human body. To do this, people stood in the cold for several hours, while the viewers at home drank eggnog spiked with alcohol.
The parades led up to the holiday's most important religious service that lasted well into the evening. This service was known as Football. The Thanksgiving Football services were special, so worshipers stayed home from work to watch them. Families would travel thousands of miles to share this blessed event with their loved ones.
There were a handful of heretics who immediately tried to resist the Football ceremonies. This group unplugged their worship boxes and
spent the day conversing with relatives and reflecting on their good fortunes.
Historians used to say that these heretics were responsible for the holiday's naming. Of course, we now know that Thanksgiving was named for people's gratitude for the power that kept their worship boxes running.
Little is known about Football, probably because few survived its violent actions. We do know that the participants gathered in an arena that resembled the area in which the Redskins and the Patriots first met.
Football participants, known as players, smashed and kicked one another as the original players had done. They carried and threw a sacred pigskin among themselves, demonstrating its adaptability to adverse circumstances in life.
The players wore costumes that made them look larger than life. The biggest people were selected to participate, and their costumes made them appear almost godlike.
The worshipers at home tried to imitate the Football players. To try to grow as large and as fat as the
The amount of rewards worshippers gained on Thanksgiving depended mostly on the outcome of the Football services. But even if the Thanksgiving Football services did not fulfill the worshippers' religious hunger, they did not get discouraged.
Mailbox
They had the second half of the season of worship to look forward to, and there seemed to be an endless supply of nectar.
An educated response
In his Nov. 22 guest column on the School of Education and the five-year program, Michael Mills makes some solid and accurate statements. However, he also makes some bold and inaccurate assumptions.
First of all, he speaks as if every education major felt as he does, which is not the case. Granted, most of the students have qualms with the setup of the program. Yet to say that the program is "... a mess. Kaput. Silly." is an exaggeration of the situation.
The program is new and has a great deal of revision ahead, but it is designed to deal with a very real problem in our society today. Mills fails to address this problem in his column.
The fact of the matter is that universities are turning out teachers who cannot teach. KU originally designed this new program to develop more educated teachers to try to alleviate this problem.
The changes that need to be made will occur only when students instigate them, and that is happening now within the School of Education. However, to go back to four years, to cut professional experience in half and to cut the number of professional classes will succeed in doing nothing but putting the KU education department back with many other institutions that seem to be producing substandard educators.
We suggest that anyone in that much of a hurry to get out should transfer to an institution with a four-year program. We will stay here and work through and try to change the rough spots in this program.
In our opinion, as far as being an educator goes, better overprepared than underprepared.
Merdith Mpam, Topeka junior
Teresa Tulipana, Pampton Lake,
Riverside
Mary Agnew, Lawrence graduate student
Halley's Comet
Palestinian propaganda in display booth
As I was walking to the library to do some homework Sunday afternoon, I was shocked to notice a libelous and graphic display of distasteful propaganda put in the display booth in front of StaufferFlint Hall.
Posters were up depicting supposed Israeli soldiers chasing supposedly innocent Palestinians. Bodies were depicted strewn about the landscape in a fashion that would indicate that they had been slaughtered in a military invasion. Senseless rhetoric was posted, inferring that Israel is a doomed society that can't meet its debts.
Courtain to the display, none of what is depicted is true. Israel does not kill innocent Palestinians, only those like the ones that killed American tourist Leon Klinghofer. How do we know that the dead people depicted were not killed by other Palestinians?
As far as ISrael not paying its debts, it has been so good at paying back its debts that it has been granted free trade with the United States — the first country to be able to claim this status.
Some historical background seems appropriate. It was not until after 1948 – the birth of Israel as a nation – that the Palestinian Arabs wanted this part of Palestine. Yes, I said *part*. Most people don't know it, but Jordan is 80 percent of Palestine and its people are 75 percent Palestinian.
The reason the Palestinians wanted contol of this part of Palestine after 1948 is that before then they thought the land was not able to be farmed. After the Israelis proved the land could be farmed, and after the desert that had been there for centuries all of a sudden became an oasis, they claimed it.
One of the reasons for the recent influx of Jews from other countries is the mistreatment of Jews in
As far as the Jewish population is concerned, there has never been a period during history when there has not been a Jewish population in the land that is now Israel. The European Jews who came beginning in the mid-1800s were descendants of the Jews who were forced out by Arabs and Crusaders.
Arab countries, a treatment far worse than anything dealt to the Palestinians in Israel. In 1948, for example, more than 450,000 Jews lived in Syria; there are now less than 4,000.
Even before the 1967 war, Jews in Syria were terrorized by night arrest, imprisonment, interrogations and torture. After the war their situation worsened. In Iraq, the Jewish population of 1948 was more than 125,000; now it is less than 300.
There may be-isolated cases of discrimination in the state of Israel, but it hardly can compare to the calculable sufferings the Jews have had to endure throughout history at the hands of Arab madmen.
while pictures of pathetic looking supposedly Palestinian children may stir the emotions of the uninformed, the bottom line is a phrase that was on one of the signs: "They (Palestinians) will always be ready to fight."
When are you going to be ready to talk, guys?
Michael A. Geller St. Louis senior
The Kansan's selective speech coverage
If a speaker visits the University of Kansas, but the Kansan didn't cover the speech, did it happen?
The immediate answer would be yes, but after careful thought, maybe not. If no written record is kept of the speech, then as far as history is concerned it never happened.
It only happened in the minds of those who were there. But anyone, in later years, who goes through the Kansan archives, will read about the many events that took place on campus — but not about that speaker.
Was the speaker of any importance?
You be the judge of that.
Charles Wiley, a journalist for more than 25 years, spoke at the Kansas Union Thursday night and to a journalism class Thursday morning. His articles and photographs have been in magazines such as Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report and in newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post. He has also reported for national radio networks and foreign newspapers.
Wiley covered the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam War, and is working on an in-depth investigation of the AIDS epidemic. He has been arrested and detained by the KGB and the Cuban secret police several times. He has covered 10 wars.
Incredibly, the Kansan didn't
Victor Goodpasture Staff columnist
cover either speech he gave. Why?
On Thursday, the Kansan was busy covering Student Senate elections, the paper's editors said. Its staff of 15 campus reporters can cover only so many stories on a given day, and editors had decided that the speech wasn't as newsworthy as other events taking place that day.
That answer may have to do with what Wiley came to talk about -- selective journalism. Selective journalism is exactly what the Kansan did even before he gave his speeches.
Besides being a journalist, Wiley is a critic of the media. The Kansan editors selectively chose not to cover him, even though they knew he was here. That action was a grave disservice to KU students and a violation of their trust in the paper.
However, the Kansan is not alone when it comes to selective journalism.
Wiley said journalists selectively advocate certain points in a story, which gives readers a distorted view of reality. "They set the agenda," he
'However, the Kansan is not alone when it comes to selective journalism.'
said. "They become the final authority."
But that's not what the American people were told. Wiley said the press was very anti-war, so naturally they did not report the full story. In other words, the press lied to the American people.
He said that when the press covered the 1968 Tet Offensive, it turned a total victory by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces into a total defeat.
Wiley said that during the media's coverage of the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II, figures of the number of dead from the first atomic bomb ranged from 100,000 to 300,000. The actual figure was 70,000, according to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.
But the most incredible occurrence of gross negligence by the media was its failure to report on a massive Vietnam veterans' parade on March 31, 1973, the official day all American
prisoners of war were supposed to have been released by North Vietnam. More than 150,000 people, many of them veterans, marched down Broadway and through Square in New York City. At least that many watched the four-hour parade.
The New York Times gave it frontpage coverage in its Sunday edition: "Bands thundered, haggis skirled, forests of American flags waved wildly, and large sidewalk crowds roared their approval yesterday as tens of thousands of marchers paraded up Broadway in an outpouring tribute to the men who served the nation in Southeast Asia during the war in Vietnam."
NBC and CBS didn't cover the parade at all.它 gave it less than one minute on all its Saturday evening news program — and it had been a slow news day. The New York papers covered the parade, but the rest of the nation never knew it happened.
Then 12 years later, the media has the gall to ask why there never was a parade for the Vietnam veterans. Because as far as history is concerned, that parade never happened — except to those who read the New York papers.
This is the kind of selective journalism that Wiley was talking about. It goes on everyday, all over the world, in Central America, South Africa, and even in Lawrence.