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University Dailv Kansan
Opinion
Monday, Oct. 14, 1985
Appropriate technology
Spending more to develop high technology is essential to Kansas' future economy, officials said at a state conference last week at the Adams Alumni Center. Kansas needs to wake up to these voices, for they reflect national trends.
The national economy has changed. Manufacturing is losing its pre-eminence in the job market to information and service industries. Farmers receive only a fraction of the wealth that traders reap from agriculture.
Calls for increased spending meet with little enthusiasm these days. Kansas has had revenue and cash problems for several years, and fiscal 1980 is off to a bad start.
That situation will continue unless Kansans can attract more of the nation's wealth. A tight money situation simply calls for care in how money is spent.
One speaker at the conference said Kansas ranked 46th in how much it spent to develop high technology. But spending enough to advance to 16th wouldn't help automatically, futile efforts to attract Toyota plants or create a Silicon Prairie only would divert money from more realistic projects.
Of course, the problem isn't opposition. It's inertia and priority of spending. At root, the problem is a kind of sleepwalking that has kept Kansas on the slow end of the 20th century.
Proponents of high technology seem to be aware of this. Their ideas regularly include using the research strengths of the state's universities, such as in pharmaceutics or veterinary science.
Today, the question is whether the state will wake up before the 21st century arrives.
Courting the future
The Supreme Court returned the first Monday in October to its ever-increasing case load and to continuing speculation about its future.
Each year brings its eldest justices closer to retirement. Each year brings President Reagan closer to determining the future of judicial opinion for years to come.
No president since Franklin Roosevelt has had the same chance to mold the court's future. And no other president has tried so hard to put his ideological stamp on the court's decisions.
The Reagan administration has made the profession of conservatism a prerequisite for its judicial appointments, down to the lowest federal district judge.
If he succeeds, a Reagan court could force a retreat from previous vigorous defenses of civil liberties. One
appointee could shift the delicate balance on such issues as church-state separation and the rights of crime suspects.
The administration's loyalty tests also threaten the court's constitutional independence. An independent judiciary is crucial to democracy.
Whether the administration succeeds depends, in part, on some of the older justices' abilities to hang on. William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, two of the court's remaining liberals, say they will step down only if a Democrat is in the White House.
Few expect a return to the activist decisions made by the court under former Chief Justice Earl Warren. But it would be tragic to see work in favor of individual rights and civil liberties dismantled by appointees more loyal to political ideology than to constitutional guarantees.
Substance and high style
As the United States and the Soviet Union move closer to next month's summit meeting, the shrewd moves of the Soviet Union signal that they also know how to play the charm game.
In a flamboyant staged visit to France this month, the Soviet first couple attempted to coo, cuddle and charm France into agreeing to separate arms negotiations.
France tastefully declined, and despite the colorful hospitality they offered, they let the Soviets know that they were not interested in making deals under the table.
France delighted in showing off to Mikhail Gorbachev, in his first visit to the West since he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party last March. But they were not lured by Gorbachev's winning smile.
The visit was dubbed Operation Seduction by the French daily newspaper, Le Monde. Gorbachev and his entourage, which included his wife Raisa,
stylishly made a bid for the affection of France.
Attending an opera performance at Versailles, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, visiting the Arc de Triomphe and throwing out the name of Charles de Gaulle from time to time, the Soviets struck the right chords.
However, French President Francois Mitterrand is to be applauded for standing firm in the face of such carefully placed flattery.
By the time Gorbachev's visit came to an end, he had offered the West little of substance. However, he displayed an energetic, open style long absent in Soviet leaders.
In the United States, we're accustomed to political style that often is detached from political substance. With any luck, the style wars will cease by the time the summit starts and and some honest communication between the two superpowers will begin.
Rob Karwath
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COMPARATIVE SPENDING OF THE TWO SUPERPOWERS
MRS. REAGAN
MRS GORBACHEV
©2015 WIMMERS
The doctors gave him some pain
Answering the crash of opportunity
One of these days Tommy is going to be a success. Right now, he's only a flunky messenger at a Chicago law firm. But he's going to rise above that because he has that rare quality: He knows an opportunity when he sees it.
Such as the other morning. Tommy happened to be nearby when a public bus and a truck collided. Nobody was killed, but 18 passengers were banged up.
What did Tommy do? Do he stand there on the cone and gawk, the way most people do when they see an acrobat shrug and go about his business?
You bet he didn't. Tommy went into action. No, he didn't ruih aboard and try to rescue son one or anything like that. The firemen were already there taking care of the injured. What Tommy did was slip into the bus through the side door, flop into a seat and begin groaning as if in excruciating pain.
"We saw him," one of the amused firefighters said later. "He came sneaking in the back while we were taking people off through the front door. He was a pretty good actor, too."
Although they knew he was faking, the firemen treated him as if he really was injured. Tommy moaned and groaned all the way to the hospital.
pills and Tommy took the day off from work and went home to rest and, presumably, ponder the size of his personal injury lawsuit.
When we phoned and told him that the firemen had seen him creeping aboard the bus, he just said:
"Hmmm. It must have been somebody else."
Well, that's possible. As any cop or fireman will tell you, at any big accident involving public transportation, the injury list just keeps growing.
"I remember when I was at a computer train crash a few years ago," a policeman told me. "There were dozens of people jumping from the other platform, trying to get into the wrecked train. I mean, dozens of people trying to get in there. It was an amazing sight.
"Another time, I saw a cab get rear-ended with a couple of little old ladies in it. These ladies were just sitting there waiting for the police to come and make out a report, and then these guys who had been on the sidewalk and saw the cab and started holding their necks and moaning. They almost pushed the old ladies out into the street."
Mike Royko Chicago Tribune
A fireman recalled an accident on the Chicago elevated train system.
"We had a ladder that was kind of hard to maneuver, and I was trying to get it up. There were a few spectators standing there on the sidewalk and I asked them to give me a hand with it.
"So a few of the guys give me hand and I climb up and I go in the train helping some of the people out."
"I'm up there a little while and I see this guy stretched out over the seat like he's close to death. And it's one of the guys who helped me put up the ladder.
"I told him, 'Hey, clown, get out of here.' He gets up and walks out. But he says to me: 'You'll hear from my attorney.'"
But for initiative, you can't beat the crowd that was in a scruffy Chicago tavern the day a car slammed into a bus right in front of the place.
A transportation worker who was there said: "You never saw a tavern clear out like that. They were coming out in droves and trying to get on the bus or lie down in the street. One minute they were all inside, sitting on bar stools and drinking. The next minute they were outside, flat on their backs, holding their necks and
yelling, 'Whiplash, I got whiplash.'
"Another time, I arrived at the scene of an elevated accident and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. People were actually shimming up with a knife to the ground in accident. They could have broken their necks to fake a broken neck."
Is it worth the effort? Well,
somewhere out there is a guy I knew
years ago, when he was having trouble
with his ment. I'm told him to be
a new millionaire.
I was sure he'd do OK the day he showed up wearing a neck brace. He said he'd been sitting in his car, waiting for the light to change, when he glanced in his rear-view mirror and saw a couple in the Cadillac behind him having a quarrel.
He also saw that the car was creeping forward, but the driver, distracted by his conversation, wasn't paying attention.
When the Caddy's bumper touched his bumper, he was ready. His door snapped open and he went flying into the street, writting in agony.
He phoned his brother-in-law, an attorney, from the emergency room and the lawsuit was filed within the week.
I don't know whether that started him on his road to financial success.
But it was an early indication that he had — what shall we call it? — the right stuff, Chicago-style.
Mailbox
Calling names
Victor Goodpasture would do much to improve his credibility as a responsible journalist if he simply would stop wasting so much printed space on his tasteless and infiltrate name-calling of persons who don't agree with his conservative opinions.
Surely there are more substantial issues drawing a conservative viewpoint than mindless drivel about "left- or right-wing" movie critics. I'm sorry, Victor, but I fail to recognize any importance for the senseless violence of Stallone, Norris, et al., or the vomit of Linda Blair.
Thomas J. Berger
Lawrence graduate student
Israel's peace?
The letter in the Sept. 30 Kansan by Rachel Klugman was not lucky enough to find its way through my mind, even though it was written in simple English. It did not because the Israeli war planes could not wait to kill unarmed Tunisians and Palestinian women and children 1,300 miles from the Israeli borders.
How does Israel offer peace to its neighbors? By attacking and occupying the Palestinian homeland and kicking them out in 1948? By attacking Egypt in 1957? By attacking Egypt, Syria and Jordan, then taking Lebanon twice, killing and injuring more than 100,000 Arabs?
During the Israeli attack in Tunisia, they were "peaceful" enough to kill 73 people, and they call that "self-defense"? If an enemy is killed, it is terrorism; if 1000 defenses are killed, it is self-defense.
Is this the peace that Israel offers?
I, as a Palestinian, am telling it to you very simply: We will never
accept losing our homeland; we will never accept spending 3.000 years scattered around the world; we will never accept living under the Israeli occupation.
We are ready to fight more and more, to sacrifice everything we have for the sake of our homeland, Palestine. All of us know that in a matter of time, Israel will give us back our homeland anyway.
If our love for our country is terrorism, please, be my guest to know that we are terrorists, and all of us are terrorists.
Ramzy Harb
Jerusalem junior
Right to distribute
Bonnie Snyder's Oct. 9 Kansan article exemplifies hapazhard, reprehensible reporting. She said "no one seems to know where the eight campus circulation boxes came from or why they're here."
There are four parish.
Last March, in the Streets, the other campus newspaper, requested limited monthly use of the circulation boxes now being used by the Kansan. In other words, Snyder's own superiors know exactly why the boxes were built.
Had Snyder contacted me or anyone on the Kansas Board of advisers, she would have known this "trivial" fact.
The Kanan failed to report to its readers last March that it denied access to their previously built website. The other groups wishing to use them,
The rationale of the Kansan Board: "No, we don't want to share."
This is why Student Senate was forced to spend $4,280 on separate boxes.
The main point is that space was
When one passes Kansan boxes, they are often empty or nearly empty, just like the recently constructed boxes for all other student publications.
Why shouldn't Student Senate be allowed to decide who use property (circulation boxes) of all student-funded organizations? Or is the Kansan, by reason of its enormous budget, above question?
available in the Kansan boxes. And the Kansan Board's provincial, uncompromising attitude was even more ridiculous when you consider that the Kansan is funded for more than $109,000 by Student Senate.
In preserving precedent, the Kansan Board costs Student Senate $4,280.
In Snyder's story, she said Staci Feldman, sponsor of the Senate Box Bill, sent letters to only about 10 student organizations. Feldman, in fact, sent letters describing these eight new boxes to more than 50 student organizations before fall classes began.
Craig Krueger editor, In the Streets
The boxes are here for all student organizations to use, although rules do exist. And In the Streets, with a monthly circulation identical to that of the Kansan, has already used the new boxes for two separate issues. Shouldn't all publications have the same right to distribute their material?
War is not a holiday
I would like to comment on an ad that appeared in the Kansas recently that was run by the Egyptian Student Organization. "In the name of God the Merciful," it invited students "to attend the Sixth of October victory celebration."
I find the "victory celebration" somewhat ironical, for besides the fact that strategically Israel won the war, Egypt has a peace agreement with Israel (the 1978 Camp David peace treaty).
This victory refers to the day the Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and attacked Israel on the most holy of Jewish holidays — Yom Kipur — on October 6, 1973.
It is disconcerting that citizens of a country who says the goal is peace in the Middle East will turn a war — in which thousands of lives were lost on both sides — into a holiday.
My point is this: Celebrating wars and turning military aggression into a cause of its own will not promote peace and trust in the Middle East, or anywhere else.
On a religious level, I would like to add the following thought: During one of the earliest Middle Eastern conflicts, when the children of Israel had crossed the Reed sea (known as the Red Sea) and the Egyptian pharaoh and his army had drowned, the Jewish Talmud tells us that the angels rejoiced. God admonished them: "My handiwork has been destroyed and you rejoice?" It is my personal belief that God the Merciful does not approve of celebrating the destruction of human life.
Like many others, I hope that true peace will come one day between Israel and her neighbors and bloodshed and feeding will end.
Moshe Oppenheimer
Buel-Brak, Israel
graduate student
Kudos to Victor Goodpasture for his enlightening critique of the criticisms of flag-waving, macho American hero action-fantasy films in the Oct. 7 Kansan
Rambomania reply
I can still taste the exhilaration of "Rambo: First Blood Part II." remember the Rambomaniacs leaning forward in their seats to underline each vivacious scene with their pride and patriotism; many commies he killed yet? I last count," and "Whoaooes!"
Truth, justice and the American way. God bless us.
Iowa City, Iowa, sophomore