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Tuesday, November 11, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
Opinions
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
A sleeping electorate
A mere 38.3 percent of registered voters turned up at the polls last week. A low percentage, but one that surprised few, considering it was a non-presidential election.
As a nation, we are lethargic, mired in a state of political enniu. Never before has our world been spinning so rapidly out of our control — our elected leaders are making decisions that could jeopardize not only our country but our world. And we feel helpless, impotent against the rising tide of nuclear proliferation, terrorism and government secrecy.
We look to our candidates who promise to pull us from the river of our troubles. We see their flashy commercials aimed at the yuppie crowd, and wonder how they feel about the common constituent. We see the metropolitan banker walking in the wheatfields in his new jeans, and bet
that its the first time he's done so. We see desperate candidates resort to nasty mud-slinging to make their opponent look as immoral and incompetent as possible. And we throw up our hands when asked to make a choice.
The point is democracy, that form of government we try so hard to advance in other countries. How can we promote our system of government to others when we find it difficult to get so worked up about it that we actually get out and vote? There seems to be a bit of hypocrisy at work. But the answer lies not in giving up on democracy. It lies in not giving up on ourselves.
And so on election day, when we have lost hope that anything we do will make a difference, we sit at home. We think about voting, but wonder what would be the point.
It is up to us to make it work
- let's not give.up now.
Responsible sinning
Nov. 4, the three "sin" amendments were passed by Kansan voters by overwhelming margins. But the amendments — liquor by the drink, a state-run lottery and parimutuel wagering — are not yet "official" in the state.
The fact that voters throughout the state passed the amendments doesn't necessarily guarantee that the Legislature will pass them. The election provided only for the Legislature to consider approving them in the 1987 session.
However, it is likely the amendments will be approved by the Legislature and will probably be law by next July. If so, the amendments will bring with them much needed and welcomed sources of revenue. But they also will bring with them added responsibilities Kansans need to be aware of.
The liquor amendment will allow alcohol to be sold in public places. It's about time Kansas caught up with the rest of the country. With passage, only two states — Utah and West Virginia — do not have
legalized liquor by the drink.
The lottery amendment, which could earn the state as much as $4 million a year, requires the public to be informed of the odds of winning prizes in the game. It will be the duty of Kansans to play the lottery responsibly and not abuse the privilege.
Pari-mutuel wagering is predicted to earn the state up to $3 to $5 million in state taxes annually. In a state that is suffering economically, this will be a welcomed income. But it is essential the state provide a good racing commission and secure against illegal off-track betting and the influences of organized crime.
It is the duty of the Legislature to implement airtight legislation to assure that criminals don't infiltrate the liquor and gambling activities. The laws must also be written so Kansas will benefit from the amendments. At the same time, it is the duty of Kansas citizens to responsibly take advantage of the issues.
These much-needed revenue boosters can only work if they are carried out responsibly.
A living tribute
At memorials across the country today, families and friends of America's war dead will gather to remember the soldiers' sacrifice. But today is also a celebration for the soldiers who came home.
In Kansas City, Mo., tonight
thousands will gather at a concert to honor Vietnam
veterans and their families.
At times during this century, wars brought Americans together. At other times, war tugged at the national fabric, threatening to tear us apart. Through it all, there is one common denominator: The soldier.
Whether on the bridge at Concord, on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Vietnam, their task was the same. They gave all they had in defense of their country, even if they did not know why.
For the first time since the fall of Saigon, 11 years ago, such a celebration has received praise, not disdain. America is changing, forgiving and beginning to understand the generation of young men and women who fought the "unpopular" war.
It's easy in a time of relative peace to forget what our soldiers gave and lost in our defense. To take for granted all that they have given us is to doom ourselves to take up arms again.
We have our own monuments on campus — the Campanile and the Vietnam memorial. Read the names and see the message inscribed on the stone. They were students, no older than most of us. Remember what they gave up, and what they have given you.
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News staff
Lauretta McMilen ... Editor
Kady McMaster ... Managing editor
Tad Clarke ... News editor
David Silverman ... Editorial editor
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jacki Kelly ... Photo editor
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news adviser
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Jeanne Hines ... Sales and marketing adviser
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Faded memory shrouds ghastly history
He remembered. Kurt Waldheim now has remembered that, sometime before he was president of Austria, before he was secretary general of the United Nations, even before he
Paul Greenberg
--became a doctor of philosophy, he was indeed in a place called Kozara, a region of West Bosnia in Yugoslavia.
Lest spring, he didn't remember being there, and he certainly didn't remember what happened there. A massacre? "That's nonsense," he told a newspaper in Belgrade. "There was no massacre, there was fierce fighting."
Now it begins to come back. Why, yes, he was there after all. Seems he was mistaken earlier. So were all those witnesses Waldheim quoted last April, in a 13-page white paper, as saying he was elsewhere at the time.
This was the same document in which Waldheim referred repeatedly to the World Jewish Congress "false accusations," and he even got a little huff when it was pointed out that he kept changing his story: "I explicitly
reject the WJC's contensions that, in producing this memorandum, I have 'changed my story.' Nothing has been changed. But details of my story have been added as the result of the accusations."
He's just added one more detail. Contrary to his earlier denial, duly attested by all those witnesses, he was indeed in the Kozara region when, to use a polite term, it was depopulated.
It's strange that a man, a human being, should forget something on that scale. He didn't forget the medal with oak-leaf cluster he got for his participation in the Kozara operation. As such operations go, it was not small. More than 13,000 unarmed civilians were killed, and 68,000 marched off to concentration camps or forced labor camps, many of whom would not survive the march, let alone the camps. Of the 23,000 children separated from their parents and sent to special camps, 11,000 would die from starvation and disease.
Sometimes memory returns only slowly. At first, to go only by Kurt Waldheim's memoirs, one would be suprised to learn that he had done anything but study for his doctorate after being wounded on the Russian front early in the war. Then, when he acknowledged he had been in the Balkans, he explained it had been only as a translator. Now he says he
was in Kozara only as a "supply of
fice." What will he remember next?
As one reviewer of Waldheim's memoirs noted: "What may be most striking to its reader is the persistent deficiency of its author's memory, here evidenced in the absence from his account of his early life of any reference to his military service in the Balkans . . ."
Year after year, what happened there lay forgotten in the files, denied and dismissed. ("There was no massacre, there were fierce battles.") Yet Kozara keeps returning, with a scream.
"And then came the most horrifying part," a German correspondent named Hans Hensher wrote of Kozar at the time, "that made everyone's blood run cold. A woman started screaming hard and long, and hundreds took up her call. Men and women and children threw themselves with beastly intensity upon our lines. It seemed to us as if we were present at the instant of the forming of the primal horde, with men rushing us in human waves, intent on self-destruction and mindless of all fear. Their faces were bestial, belonging to a truly lower race."
Year after year, what happened there lay forgotten in the files, denied and dismissed. Yet Kozara keeps returning, with a scream.
Did that German correspondent remember Kozara? Did he understand it? Kurt Waldheim now remembers being there, but did he notice it, did he feel it, any more than he has noticed or felt any other moral crisis that might have interfered with a long and distinguished career?
Some time ago, when he was still forgetting, Waldheim said an international tribunal should be appointed to examine his war record. That record is not yet complete, but it's being completed with each document, each revelation, new version of history. Even Waldheim begins to remember, and so does a world that must not forget.
As for the tribunal that Waldheim once requested, it is already in session. It is a species of memory called history. Like memory, it is a creative act. And somewhere in its obscure, convoluted, interconnected passages, where the past is made ever present and ever instructive, a woman's scream is heard forever.
Courts and schools: The new censorship
Every time I leave Kansas, people torment me with Dorothy and Toto jokes. But there is an end in sight. School children may be prevented from reading "The Wizard of Oz," at least in some states.
Jan Underwood
Columnist
Two weeks ago, in Hawkins County, Tenn., a school board was sued for making their pupils use offensive textbooks. Seven fundamentalist Christian families charged that the Holt, Rinehart & Winston reading series offended their religious beliefs. The families demanded that separate texts be provided for their children.
The federal judge agreed. Judge Thomas G. Hull, appointed by Reagan, ruled that the school must provide separate readers for fundamentalists and must pay damages to the families.
In Alabama, 600 fundamentalist parents are suing the state school board because they object to some history and economics textbooks. The parents are receiving legal help from the National Legal Foundation, which was founded by television faith healer and 1988 presidential hopeful, Pat Robertson.
The parents charge that the textbooks propound the evil doctrines of secular humanism, such as pacifism and religious tolerance.
"Secular humanism" is a world view that focuses on the improvement of human life, stressing education and human rights. But fundamentalists use it as a catch-all phrase for whatever they don't like. One of the parents said that she opposed any book that "could produce changes in my child's way of thinking."
U. S. District Judge Brevard Hand is expected to side with the fundamentalists.
If the parents are successful, every textbook in Alabama may have to be purged of references to secular humanism, which the parents describe as "an anti-Christian religion."
Apparently, the public school system is no longer a place where children can be exposed to a variety of ideas. The purpose, seemingly, is to inductate children with their parents' dogma.
But if the school system must provide separate textbooks for fundamentalists, it will also have to provide them for Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and atheists. Perhaps the school system will ban the Pledge of Allegiance. After all, the assertion that we are "one nation under God" might offend non-believing families.
A school that tried to provide a different textbook for every ideology would have an impossible task on its hands. So would a school that tried to provide a textbook free of any material that could possibly cause offense. "The Wizard of Oz" is apparently
Despite what the fundamentalists assert, intellectual freedom, not religious freedom, is at stake in these trials. The fundamentalists' desire is to shield their children from ideas altogether, not just anti-Christian dogma. In fact, they would really prefer to ban these "secular humanistic" textbooks from all schools.
objectionable because it portrays courage, intelligence and compassion as personally developed, rather than God-given traits.
These same fundamentalist groups, such as Concerned Women for America, are the ones who are trying to banish books from school and public libraries.
Court rulings like the one in Tennessee threaten the entire public school system. When schools must shape their curricula to fit the desires of a special group, they are essentially "privatizing" education.
The Reagan administration doesn't seem to care what happens to public education. (Just as well that the fundamentalists are gaining power in the school system; they vote Republican.) They favor private education by giving tax breaks to parents who send their children to private schools and by cutting funds to public schools.
The privatization of education would assure that education would be the privilege of the wealthiest class.
But then, some fundamentalists want to keep their children ignorant anyway.
Elections end fundamentalist social agenda
The decision of U.S. voters sweeping the Democrats back into control of the Senate has doomed the religious right's social agenda of such issues as restoring state-sponsored prayer in the public schools and ending legal abortions.
David E.
Anderson
UPI Commentary
At the same time, however, the constituency created out of the link of conservative politics and fundamentalist theology appears to have firmly established itself in the Republican Party, especially at the grassroots level.
"The 1886 election marked a significant defeat for the Christian right and a reaffirmation of the American people's commitment to traditional views of separation of church and state," said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Saperstein said that according to his analysis, in the 36 races for Senate. House and governor seats were given to the Christian right, it failed in 23.
Saperstein also noted that all three Jews targeted for defeat by the
Particularly important losses for the religious right included the Senate seats of Republican incumbents Paula Hawkins of Florida, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, Mack Stevens of Texas and James Browill of North Carolina.
In all three of those cases, the campaigns were touched by elements of apparent anti-Semitism.
Christian right — House Democrats
Mel Levine of California, Larry
Smith of Florida and Howard Wolpe
of Michigan — won re-election.
Smith's opponent, for example, circulated literature saying the congressman's stands on gun control, abortion and school prayer make him the antithesis of what the Christian city in the district would prefer."
While the negative nature of some of the religious campaigning — negative campaigning was a larger part of many secular as well as religious-oriented campaigns — seems to be creating a backlash among voters, the most severe blow for the religious right would be in
their inability to push their agenda in Congress.
While President Reagan has rhetorically championed the antiabortion and school prayer issues, he has expended little political capital in fighting for legislation related to them.
And now, with both the House and Senate under Democratic control, it is very unlikely that such issues will even be granted committee hearings, much less brought to the floor.
"The dramatic results of this election," Saperstein said, "make it exceedingly unlikely that the 100th Congress will pass legislation in such areas as prayer in the public schools, abortion rights or federal aid for parochial schools."