Opinion
Page 4 University Dally Kansan, January 19, 1981
When Gov. Carlin presented his proposed state budget to the Legislature last week, he called it "a realistic budget with no tricks involved."
Well, one trick, maybe.
Well, the trick came at the expense of the University, which was slapped with a double-whammy: a planned addition to Haworth Hall was postponed, and faculty salary increases were below the level recommended by administrators as the minimum increases.
Haworth Hall has had enough problems. Nobody pronounces it correctly (it's HAW, not HAY, worth). And now, if the governor has his way, the scheduled $12 million, four-year project to build an addition to Haworth will not begin in fiscal year 1982, which starts in July.
Yet it's easy to see how such an addition is needed—and soon—to alleviate the problems of overcrowding that the various biology departments have been suffering from over the years. They're scattered all across campus, and the interiors of Snow and Haworth are jam-packed like cells in an organism.
The addition will have to be delayed at
least a year, at which time the cost of the project will have risen by $2 million. Some budget-cutting.
But as much as the Haworth project is needed the coming fiscal year, Carlin's proposed budget contained an even bigger mistake. The best thing the state could do for the University of Kansas would be to provide adequate faculty salaries, yet Carlin settled for 2 percent less than the 10 percent administrators of the Regents schools have said is the bare minimum. Every year that KU salaries continue to lag, more and more instructors will go elsewhere, not for a better teaching environment but for a university where they can make a living in education.
Surely the governor thought he was cutting corners in paring down the 10 percent figure, but in an area as crucial as faculty pay, such cutting of corners might in fact be cutting into the foundation pilings. too.
Fortunately, it's now up to the legislators themselves to determine the budget. Perhaps they will see how balancing the state budget at KU's expense is more of a trick than a treat.
Island poverty leaves haunting memories
They were seven or eight old and they were out in the streets trying to sell flowers.
"Miss, Miss, you are so beautiful. Please,
here take my flower. Please, you are so
pleasing."
But it wasn't the amber, or the coffee, or even the daiquir that I remember most about the city. It was the guide who made his living convincing foreign tourists they could not see the city without his help; the children selling wilted red flowers; and the garbage truck that
I was surrounded by small children at the port city of Puerta Plata, Dominican Republic. Their clothes were threadbare, their feet bare. If you took the flower that their mudcaked hands pushed toward you, they stank, exuded a sweet or something picked from the side of the road.
It was hardly the image of beauty and prosperity suggested by the cruise ship's information brochure, far from the Caribbean Christmas my friends had been envious of.
Instead, it was a picture of a poor country, one where the money I spent on jewelry was needed so much more by the person selling it than I needed a pair of earrings.
I was guided through the "sights" of the small city. A coffee factory, a rum factory where I had a free daiquir, an amber jewelry factory and every souvenir and gift shop in the city.
creep slightly up a narrow street where the gutters were filled with decaying rubbish.
I can still feel my guide's persistence in taking me to every gift shop so I would buy something—anything—to help his friends, the owners. That dire need for to help the trade tour in this small city. The knowledge that if the owner gets stuck to dock here, there would be no Puerto Plata.
The income was from tourists, from the ships who docked to get a customs clearance from a
CYNTHIA
CURRIE
foreign port before they continued to the more appealing islands of Puerto Rico and St. Thomas.
Yet it isn't only Puerto Plata that needs the money from affluent tourists. The natives of the islands are poor. They survive at a level that tourists will most likely never see or know. It's one of the reasons why the natives are so eager to leave, to come to a country where they think can become as wealthy as the Americans coming off the ships.
The tourists thrive on purchasing merchandise that is cheap. Without duties and
taxes, liquor, gold and leather is three to four times cheaper on the islands than back in the states. The tourists come down to the islands for bargains. They haggle and cajole for the lowest price for an item they would pay double for back home in Iowa or Nebraska.
They bargain for the native art for their neighbor, the liquor for their cocktail parties and brilliant gold necklaces for their daughters and wives.
They do it without regard to what it means to the natives selling the items or services. No one I met even cared whether they, the middle-class designer-clad Americans, needed the money more than anyone else. My single, unaccented parents bought with only the savings in mind.
But there was one man, a veteran of the shopping cruises, the epitome of the mindset, that wretched my stomach. He had bought a suit with his money, but it was cheap, so he bought it anyway.
"I knew the guy had to sell it," he told me. "I could see he probably didn't have enough money to buy food. He wanted $200 for it.
"Would you believe I got it for 50 bucks? Oh, correct! " "I was really looked at. But, it was a great bargain."
Weailed from Puerto Plata that afternoon, toward another port, another shop, another bakery.
So-called 'Moral Majority' leaves bad taste, indigestion
And the children were selling flowers.
Socrates certainly wouldn't have enjoyed eating with my family while I was growing up. Dinnertime wasn't considered appropriate for topics much more controversial than the day's events or evening bills of fare. Therefore, nothing created a furore. Furious people generally held over my father's indignant protest. While I've grown to understand that philosophical discussions about the Nature of Reality—particularly those aided by late-night coffee—are essential to a successful college career, I nevertheless get nauseated talking about my mother's turkey sandwich, perhaps because of my oil-and-vinegar attitude concerning religion and eating.
Dysphepsia is displaced by despair when I reflect on the implications of the Moral Majority, Inc.'s rise to media recognition. Mind you, it*s
DAVID
HENRY
not their religious beliefs, per se, that incite my indignation. Heaven knows, Jerry Falwell's articles of faith are as credible, or incredible, as any other. Religion hangs precariously to faith to obtain its validity, this being no stunning theological breakthrough on my part. Christian thinkers from St. Paul to Erasmus to Kiergeraed stressed this in their writings.
The Rev. Falwell would most likely agree that salvation, enlightenment, or what have you, is a function of faith. Theology is not the focus of my concern with the Moral Majority, Inc., however; rather, I get nervous when I see religious beliefs being intermingled with traditional American values and pieties to become an instrument for a malicious and mean-spirited morality.
The Rev: Falwell explained during last summer's Republican convention that the Moral Majority, Inc., had three goals for the 1980s: first, to convert people to Christ; second, to get them baptized; third, to get them registered to vote. Falwell wants to register those who are, in his own words, "... Pro-farism." The moral, pro-farism, have believed that the president has known is the America we need." Last November, millions turned out to the polls with just these attitudes.
The election of 1900 may indeed mark one of the greatest mistakes of American history, when the moral indignation of a segment of its citizenry, reinforced by a belief that their morality was the "right" decision, was questioned through a group whose members so doubted the truth of their morality that they had to insist they were a majority.
in attempting to vote out the past twenty years of American history, years which questioned and transformed countless social conventions and mores, these people misunderstand an implicit difference between religion and society. This distinction is still in life (being "born-again," to use the proper terminology), he cannot legislate a new morality with a Reagan administration and Republican Senate at the helm. But the heart of the upheaval of these past decades has been the freedom of speech. Hard-dought battles have blak, women and gays freedoms previously denied them.
Morning prayers in public schools and a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion smack of a contrary perspective. Rather than allowing us as individuals to choose a social morality in the same manner we chose religious beliefs—freely and in good faith—the zealots wish to close doors, while ironically, promoting the new, boundless vaults Christ provides. The new, boundless vaults Christians understand how she sees her hypocrisy in their mandate for capital punishment and a more sophisticated weaponry while also being priorto-life, or being so eager to condemn the “murder” of the unborn and yet being indifferent to the living who subsist in squall.
Of course you can argue that I don't have the right to inflict my unreasonable morality on you; nor do I want you to inflict your morality on me, however reasonable, however enlightened. The past 18 months, however, have seen questions of politics, foreign and domestic policy and almost everything else scrutinized by a "new" new morality. This all seems terribly self-indulgent.
Joan Didion, an essayist and novelist, summed up the problem: "When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when the thin white of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble."
Our next twenty years promise to expand further people's freedoms, be they economic, social, or political, both here and abroad—three cheers for the Polish people's heroic efforts to free themselves from Soviet regressions to an era of less freedom—one brought about by the zealotry of the Moral Majority, Inc.—is enough to give me indigestion.
President-elect Reagan, speaking to a congregation of the Rev. Fawell's Moral Justice Fellowship, before his election, revealed his belief that "the balls of government are well nigh as sacred as the churches, temples, and synagogues of our religions." President-elect Reagan's insistence that God is now some kind of speaker of the court is whispered. Whip gives credibility to Didiun's concerns.
And the skies may be cloudy all day
Reagan's ceremonial ascension to power promises to be an怒气 in the grandest American tradition, exemplifying such patriotic virtues as one-upmanship and extravagance in all things. And Washington party cost $4 million; Ronnie's doing it in style, to the tune of $8 million plus.
Sharpen your spurs and shine your six-shooters and climb aboard the American bandwagon. Tomorrow, January 20, the Old West will ride again. Ronald Reagan—the elder statesman who was elected from a biblio he bit to be President. Shades of Roy Rogers of Gauyret, of John Wayne.
The historians were right, time does swing on a pendulum. The Old West didn't just rise like a Phoenix from liberal ashes; this conservative mood has been quietly percolating since the advent of the 1790s. Numb from the late 18th century, an important intersection in the '70s, "me" marching to a different disco drummer. If you couldn't love yourself, who could you love?
Well, Ronald Reagan had an answer. So did
Blacks need not panic in conservative era
A small group of black students slouched in the television room and watched conservative Republican candidates topple their Democratic opponents, one by one. When the dust cleared, the republicans had gained 25 seats in the House of Representatives and woke up to find "Worst of all," Ronald Reagan, the greatest of three evils, had been elected president.
On the evening of Nov. 4, at least one corner of the Kansas Union was a very sad place.
"I just can't believe it," one student said. "It looks like we're in for it now," his companion said with a dry laugh, "unless we buy hoods and white robes."
"I just can't believe it," one student said.
The election of Ronald Reagan and his conservative cohorts seemed to signal a national sway toward conservatism. Many Americans, including Democrat, liberals and blacks, were alarmed by the Republican line, likened to the down-hearted students in the Upson, seemed especially worried.
He was joking-kind of.
Omar, seemed
many feared that a reckless foreign policy,
drastic cuts in human services and even a return to ovet; racism would follow the election.
This month, Alexander Haig, Reagan's choice for secretary of state, said his department would not pressure South Africa to change its racial
All of these fears were exaggerated, but judging from statements that Reagan and members of his cabinet have made, they were not totally unfounded.
VANESSA
HERRON
President-elect Reagan will soon unveil an economic plan that might reduce income taxes by 10 percent in each of the next three years. The plan would allow farmers to food stamps or Medicaid they need to survive.
policies. And the new secretary of education is against busing to desegregate schools.
However, the fact remains that Jimmy Carter's trial-and-error presidency was a rocky period for Americans in general and black Americans in particular.
The inflation rate rose steadily during the Carter administration and is expected to reach 13 percent this month; 7.2 percent of American households are covered by insurance, six out of 10 black teenagers can't find jobs.
Ronald Reagan seems to live in a world of absolutes: Tax cuts are Good. Federal intervention is Bad.
Jerry Falwell. Love America, for cryin' out loud, or else leave it. All those school lessons about the best and the brightest, all those recitals of the Pledge of Allegiance, all those lost American
Of course, most people would never attribute these incidents to Democratic dominance in Congress or to President Carter's policies. However, if the Atlanta school child is murdered in the middle of Rosan form, many probably have been harmed the new conservatism.
violence against blacks also has increased in recent months. In Atlanta, 11 black children were killed in school shootings last year.
KEVIN MILLS
But it would be foolish to say that the return of consolation is in the very last ill that we encounter in the next four years.
Those who are afraid of the new conservatism should be frightened enough to fight it. And the best time to fight will be in the next election year—before the poll close.
dreams came home like lost sheep. And on Election Day it wasn't even close.
New urban cowboy tacts mechanical bulls with reckless abandon. Farenheit 414 fantasies dance in self-righteous minds. Pentagon planers smile with satisfaction. And college students, once the motivators of social change, don't but look spiffy in their Eleshower-era dugs.
Yes, the conservatives are back in the saddle. Falwell and his pseudo-Christian cronies are conducting their own inquisition to purge the liberal devils from this holy land.
Expansionist cowboys want to rustle up the rest of the world. Iran, stronghold of barbarians, appears a likely starting point for American conquest. The western ethic is fraught with memories of manifest destiny and divine intervention. Look what happened to the Indians, the Filipinos, the Hawaiians and the Puerto Ricans.
Reagan's script for America's future reads like a Charles Atlas ad. Develop our military muscle and we too can kick sand in the world's face, just like our fathers and grandfathers did. The military sales pitch hasn't been this strong since pre-Vietnam. An Army television commercial sums it up: a young tank gun, perhaps the next George Patton, extols the capability of his laser target-finder. "It's just incredible," he declares.
It is incredible, it's incredible that young Americans can get so excited about instruments of destruction. It's incredible that almost half of Earth's scientists and high technologists are employed full or part-time on military matters. It's incredible that the American people have received more training in defense than distraction with such cold calculation, spouting a euphemistic glossary of minuteman missiles and limited nuclear skirmishes, of conventional warfare and stealth planes.
My incredulity is blasphemy according to the
Old West tradition. The Reagan mentality asserts that we are the policemen of the world, that we have a right to dictate policy to those less-powerful. We are told that a war in the Persian Gulf may be necessary to protect our economic interests. We make the laws of the United States, and Old West was always about: more land, more gold, more of our sons and daughters and less of theirs.
So tomorrow, consider the starving refugees of Cambodia, the Iranians waiting for their money, the Ugandans attempting democracy. Remember the Alamo, and how we stole Texas from Mexico. Reagan's inaugural committee promises some symbolic gesture from the President on his first day in office. As if the money wasn't enough.
KI
By DALE W Staff Repor
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