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University Daily Kansan, November 24, 1980
Opinion
Marriage can be tough for the handicapped
Disabled persons—no matter how impossible it may seem—have the desire and need to choose a mate somebody just as the normal person does. With this in mind, the issue is not whether severely handicapped persons should enter the realm of matrimony. Instead, the issue is the problems that the disabled and his or her partner will face.
The family as a social group and marriage as an individual relationship have not been given proper recognition in the field of rehabilitation. It is time that two things happen in this regard.
First, those who counsel and advise the disabled, such as rehabilitation counselors, psychologists, social workers, and, yes, even physicians in some cases, need to recognize the significance of marital and family relationships to the disabled, especially the more severely handicapped such as those with cerebral palsy or with spinal cord injury.
Sex is equally important to the paraplegic.
Also those who are disabled should demand that their problems of mental and family adjustment
Practically nothing, however, has been written concerning problems of sexual adjustment of disabled individuals and the role that the rehabilitation counselors and others may play in helping to bring about such adjustment. The interrelationship between problems of disability and problems of marriage demand the attention of the helping profession.
In fact, it is doubtful that a person can truly be rehabilitated until the more intimate, personal, and sexual-emotional components of his marital and sexual situation have been resolved successfully.
one of these days, an "X"-rated lecture will be needed for the person aiding in the sexual adjustment of the disabled. This lecture should be aimed at both the counselor and the client in order to ensure that the disabled person will receive the help that he or she vitally needs.
The dynamics of marriage and family living involve a complicated range of delicate, complex, and ambiguous factors in the joint process of the non-disabled. Marital and family adjustment is difficult enough with
the non-disabled. When one adds a disability, one has all the problems of a non-disabled family, plus all those imposed by the disability itself, and considering skews the problem out of proportion.
There are certain aspects of the marital relationship that have meaning for rehabilitation
FRED MARKHAM
personnel and will have meaning for all those engaged in counseling the disabled. The family is the most basic of all of our institutional structures. It has never been destroyed in the past, despite numerous attempts. This may be true because the family meets the fundamental needs of the general regulation of sex desires, and acts as a haven for the training and basic education of the young.
Security attracts a family in many ways. It affects all individuals as individuals who make up the family group, and no aspect may be immune. Social aspects can change quickly as children grow older. Family members visiting patterns between friends are changed, due to insurmountable architectural barriers.
Children also have problems adapting to the physical disability of a parent, especially as curious schoolmates learn that Dad is a paraplegic. This knowledge is often followed by their playmates expressing regret and sympathy. Accepting pity for themselves and their families does not set lightly with proudness. The economic life may be altered so that mother may be forced to become the breadwinner and financial resources are depleted.
Disability may affect the family's interactions and its social and psychological cohesion. It is important to consider the problems of disability and its effect on body image of a husband and a father and to consider the blow to masculinity and femininity imposed by severe disability.
Disability may create role ambiguity and role reversal in which the husband is forced to stay at home and become the homemaker while the wife works and becomes the breadwinner.
In another situation, the young son with tears in his eyes says to his father, "It's too bad you're hurt, Daddy, 'cause now you can' catch play and hit the ball with me, and we won't be able to go camping any more, will we?" In this situation, the injury to the father has forced a unique relationship with his son, instead of the injured father playing hit-and-run with his young son, as he did with his older son, with whom he also went fishing, shot archery, and lifted weights. Another unique relationship could be developed between father and son, with Dad still acting as fan and sometimes as coach to baseball and football games.
Disability may be so severe that it produces a "traumatized" home. The forces of stability in the home may be so disrupted by the disability that certain family members face a shock situation which could threaten the continuity of the marriage.
Psychologically, disability may produce ego damage, personality damage, insecurity, fears, and guilt that greatly affect the ability of an individual to function adequately, irrespective of their personality. Psychologically, the husband-wife relationship and especially change the nature of sexual adjustment.
Studies have shown that seriously handicapped males are said to report that complete absence of heterosexual association, or even its prospect, is more difficult to bear and more damaging to the self-image than any other problem.
"When you put sex back into rehabilitation, the status of rehabilitation will have matured into something worthwhile," one disabled adult male is reported to have said.
Also, George W. Hohmann conducted a study in Los Angeles of 25 veteran outpatients of the spinal cord injury service at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Long Beach, Calif. The report showed the following results in the area of feeling sexual excitement: all subjects had
experienced petting or lovemaking since injury; all had had the opportunity for intercourse; although 18 remained capable of erection on own request (with consent) had had complete intercourse since injury.
The main thing is that the subjects were pleasing someone they cared about. It is a mental kind of thing rather than a physical drive.
It should be remembered that sexual
achievement is not specifically a biological, physiological or medical problem. There are many emotional overtues, problems of social acceptance and alternate sexual patterns, threats to masculinity-femininity attitudes, and ego insuperate. These are the areas in which a competent counselor can help with family and marital problems. He can attempt to get the disabled person to talk openly about his problems.
Letters to the Editor . . .
To the editor:
I would like to correct some errors and omissions that occurred in a recent article concerning my course, the Psychology of Satisfaction, and the spurious conclusions these errors and omissions created. The activity "killing for sport" was not a class activity and involved a small percentage of the class for a small percentage of their grade.
The Psychology of Satisfaction is possibly the most computerized psychology course in the world capable of accepting large enrollments. Consequently, the evaluation (and obviously feedback) is now more complex, more detailed and in some ways more realistic than in any large course in the soft sciences of which I am aware. I believe, in fact, that more persons fail this course than fail any comparable-level psychology course, although I scarcely consider that to be a desirable feature of the course.
The computer has made it possible to evaluate and give feedback on tasks that were previously essentially beyond credible assessment if a faculty member is willing to devote the necessary time and effort to it. It has taken myself and my assistants more than four years of programming efforts to reach the present primitive (by the standards of what is possible) state of development for my course.
I have included in my course a variety of activities that can be engaged by students to assist in learning the ideas of the course, much as a laboratory is used in chemistry or biology. Computer programs are also included in this place. My set of programs do not include evaluations of what is learned during the type of activity described in the article.
Therefore, during the present semester, it was the activity of only a single discussion section headed by an undergraduate. Because he was directing it, it took on a flavor I usually avoided when I had used such an activity in the past. I emphasized the "act" implicit in this lesson, for most of the "assassins." My only goal was to permit the student to experience, in a very minor way, how his or her life might be altered in a violent world.
There is more than a remote possibility that we may experience periods of intense violence and terrorism in this nation. Some former terrorists consider the United States to be a suitable environment for terrorism. Police forces are declining in size, and their salaries are declining at least relative to the increased dangers they might have to face.
For a long-duration emergency it is not clear that an army drawen heavily from America's underclasses would be unsupervised devoted to protecting the peace of mind and property of middle- and upper-class America. I had used the idea of getting students to apply the ideas of the course to one aspect of a period of intense violence.
Up until the last half decade, circumstances permitted the teaching of many "purely academic" courses. This time has passed. We, as a university, have the accelerating need to prepare students for both a highly specialized course and to believe that no student should be graduated from KU who has not learned to write simple programs for a computer.
At a time when 5 million Russian high school students may be receiving two years of calculus, no science major, whether in the soft, fleshy or hard sciences, should graduate without having one year of calculus. Nor should students leave KU without being better prepared to cope with a disturbed world. With regard to the latter, I am not sure what should be done, but I am exploring some possibilities.
Maynard W. Shelly Professor of psychology
A free China
To the editor
The Nov. 3 column, "Taiwan tyranny hides behind U.S. friendship," provided readers the false analogy of the Republic of China as a tyrannical country. To sketch President Chiang Ching-Kuo as an Idi Amin-type character is just as imprudent as to depict the tyranny of China. Women to see violence as a sympathetic force makes any country a tyrannical one.
Demonstration is absolutely acceptable, following the same order as we usually see in front of the White House. This being the case, Kang Ling-Hsiang, moderate reformer among nine leading dissidents, was not brought in the Kaohsiung case. But the magazine Formosa was banned because it was reduced to a medium of the radical movements as opposed to its functions agreed upon.
The facts given in the article are deceptive. In an attempt to persuade readers that the government did oppress the opposition candidates in the election, the article wrongly reported that the postponement of the election followed the demonstration.
In fact, the former was announced within two weeks after the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Dec. 10, whereas the latter happened on Dec. 10, 1979.
Another misleading passage: "In retaliation for Taiwan's actions against its opposition, the World Bank Group bounced Taiwan from their membership." Actually, this was another political sound intended for Red China's membership.
Interference with other countries' internal affairs makes this world more confused than ever. The article said Freedom House declared that Taiwan had lost its liberty. For this, we would like Ted Lickieit to send questionnaires to 167 Chinese students at KU as his witnesses. The column added that U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said of the arrest, "This decision is a political act, not the act of a court of law." The pronounced judgment acts like running hundreds of tanks across the border of another country.
Lickeigh claimed that college professors in Taiwan were used by the government to make a petition for the cease of the so-called 'Bloomberg tax' petition to the government if it was in abberation?
Frankly, we have become quite familiar with this and others since our country was
the statement "The Kuomintang . . . holds 94 percent of the seats in the National Assembly" turns out invalid because of the mortality of the old members of the 1940s and the fusion of the new generation born in the native land.
political prisoners are sometimes not allowed to sleep for four or five days at a time, subjected to electric shocks, severe beatings and extraction of fingernails," is not the exact story written by those American reporters who were sent to Taiwan to observe the trial of the dissidents. The physical torture, if any, would be likely to be detected.
The vivid description, "The Taiwanese
The existence of martial law and the ban of the Great Epoch were talked about, but not elaborated where they were appropriate for the whole society.
It implies that the Republic of China is economically subordinated to the U.S. Thus, we are always at the mercy of a possible economic sanction. In fact, the rosy picture "cheap labor for the U.S. industry" will no longer exist due to an entry into the capital-intensive industry. Great strides will be made within the coming decade.
Meanwhile, as requested by the U.S., our government has taken some necessary measures to narrow the trade gap, such as lowering the import duty on some American commodities and sending "Buy American" missions to the U.S. Trade between the two countries will reach $11 billion this year. An economic sanction, Lickieig?
Jen-Yen P. Su
Taiwan graduate student
Chang-UF-Chiang
Taiwan graduate student
Ien.Ven P. Sn
Muslims disturbing
Because one such organized and disruptive group showed up at a lecture scheduled on Nov. 12 (Ehud Goi, Israeli Consul for Information), I moved the lecture off campus to a private home. I did this not only out of concern for our guest speaker, but also for those in the audience who came to engage in a rational discussion. Unfortunately, in the process of moving the lecture, we lost many interested people.
Our events are always open to all KU students and members of the Lawrence community. We welcome everyone to participate in our discussions. In the recent past our welcome has not been reciprocated by some groups on campus. When we have had lectures and discussions concerning the state of Israel, our meetings have been disrupted by shouts, chants, insults, placard waving and organized demonstrations.
Hillel, the Jewish student organization at the University of Kansas, is firmly wedded to the principles of free speech and inquiry.
Despite our concern for maintaining peace, Hillel does not intend to be run off campus. We intend to hold future meetings and discussions about Israel and any other topic we choose. We intend to work with the administration in the hopes that they will take appropriate measures to guard against potential threats readily available to all other student organizations on campus.
We feel confident that our fellow American students, no matter what their religions or political beliefs will support us in this basic American right.
Single-issue politics
Critic editor
Political parties are becoming increasingly concerned about the political impact of
single-issue groups. The zealous members of these groups do not care about society as a whole, or they believe they have the one key to solving the nation's problems.
Politicians, and the voting public should see politics as a cohesive whole where the platform is broad-based, covering both bread- and butter issues as well as the great issues of economic management, defense, unemployment, health care, education and so on. But for the single-issue fanatic, these issues are irrelevant.
If only whales were saved, or nuclear power plants were shut down, or abortion was outlawed, or women were given equal rights, all would be well. Important though these issues are, so are others. Single-issue politics, championed by the fandoms who limit their single cause, are perhaps the greatest threat to the democratic process in America.
Thirty years ago there were fewer than 2,000 lobbyists in Washington. Now there are 15,000 of them spending $2 billion a year and threatening to undermine the federal government and threaten politicians into supporting them.
One result of the lobbies' activity is that the traditional party structures have been increasingly broken down, a great many of them being delegates and very existence to the single-issue groups.
These groups do not have a monopoly on conscience. Certain lobbyists during the last national election campaign chose to oppose candidates solely because they were at variance over one issue. What will happen to these candidates if elections become narrowed down to contests based on a handful of single issues?
If politicians are to be honest to themselves and their convictions, they will have to resist the pressures of hostile single-issue groups. They have to hope that the public becomes as concerned as they are about groups that take a particular interest in the public, there is a need to make a conscious effort not to vote on a single issue, but to consider the totality of what the parties offer.
Single-issue politics are not new. Nor are all single-issue groups necessarily bad for the political system. Those groups that apply to a minority group are often the ones are of immense value to the democratic process. They provide expertise, commitment to a cause, and offer a significant alternative view to that offered by the bureaucrats to the politicians. But when these groups are opposed, they are the politicians who oppose them, they pose a real threat to the whole political process.
Peter Somerville Lawrence graduate student
Muslims oppressed
To the editor:
In reference to Elizabeth Morgan's article on "Muslim Demonstrators Disrupt Presentation by Israeli Consul" in the Kansas issue of Nov. 13, I would like to say that the story was biased and imprecise for the following reasons:
The headline accuses the Muslim demonstrators of disrupting the consul's presentation, although he did not deliver his speech. So how could they disrupt it?
Putting the story on the front page with
patting the story against antagonists and
antagonises the reader against Muslims.
Newspaper reporters must be scholarly minded to have a good story. Morgan should have investigated all the facts before passing them down to the readers; she wrote that KU police department suggested the cancellation, Perman said when he was presenting the present whether they suggested or not? Perhaps, David Pearlman was lying to her.
Furthermore, Morgan was in such a hurry that she wasn't patient enough to wait until the Palestinian speaker finished his statement and ask him to state his position and to get his name down. So, she asked some of the audience about the speech he didn't reveal his name, she offered them to relate the quotations to her, but they relected.
Newspaper reports must be precise, too. Morgan wrote that "Several gave speeches." It is possible that she couldn't count the two speakers? Or, is it deception of the reader? Or, is it to attend the show's presentation came spontaneously without any previous planning.
If Morgan was objective in her report, she would have discovered that the audience consisted of people who had affiliation with almost all Mideast, Southeast, African and South American campus organizations. I am a member of the group, I know the whole story on The Liberation of Palestine. If there were any planning of any kind, I would be the first to know.
I many, I would like to express my admiration of the sense of justice of the American people, but my condemnation of the hypocrisy and prejudice that the Zionist influenced people have. Muslims and Arabs are well-mannered and civilized people.
Reg
Although Nazi-like Zionism drove four million of my people out of their forefathers' homeland, we attended the lecture of the Haifa University professor last spring. We listened to his lecture without the slightest disruption. But in the question-and-answer session, Mr. Garnier answered any questions He answered one question of a blue-eyed person for 30 minutes.
Legislative considers
Why did he avoid us? Why did they escape that night?
But Fri Robert B SAC deci proposal t
Because the imperialist aggrievable cannot stand the power of the truth. After 40 years of misleading the American public, people must accept the side of the story—the story of the oppressed.
Tosh s plan at i present m member
Hussein Salah Oddien Palestine junior
THE D chance E president meeting.
Colei informal the SAC committe organiza campus
At Fr action o money t ployees.
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