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Tuesday, September 30, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
A rising tide of troubles
Residents and city officials of the Kansas City area must be tired of getting washed out. The heavy rains of the past two weeks have pushed the many creeks and waterways conducive to flash flooding to precarious levels and beyond.
Last week, the Little Blue River and the Blue River at Bannister Road had local residents worried. About a dozen intersections in the area flooded, causing some to be closed.
Streets near Brush Creek had to be closed because the water level was dangerously high. Indian Creek and Turkey Creek also were high. About 50 families living near 103rd Street and Lamar Avenue were warned by police twice in one week of the rising waters of Indian Creek. Basements flooded.
This problem happens every year. Why hasn't anything been done? It seems reasonable to assume that the people of Kansas City wouldn't want a repeat of the flood of 1977 — in which the rushing
Opinions
water took several lives and destroyed millions of dollars of property — and that they would be doing everything necessary to keep water levels under control. How many times does the city have to be wiped out before officials do something?
Kansas City needs to find an alternative to having to rebuild and repair every time the skies open up.
Possibly Lawrence has the right idea. City commissioners discourage the construction of any buildings on the city flood plains.
Wichita also has found a way to deal with flood water. A floodway around the city diverts excess water into a large ditch.
Kansas City should look into a similar investment; it would be well worth the money. A city with such a concern about its aesthetic value should take pains to keep the beauty from being ruined. Residents need to keep pressure on city officials to find some way to safeguard the Kansas City area.
A right to privacy
One recent case of government intrusion, a drug investigation involving air traffic controllers based in Olathe, is an ominous and fearsome indication that Big Brother may not be simply a fantasy.
The nationwide monomania about drug abuse seems to have cast aside the right of personal privacy that has been interpreted as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
In all, 31 controllers were tested for drugs after allegations were made that they had used drugs while off duty. They had been turned in by people who "knew" or "heard" that their co-workers were using drugs away from the job. Five technicians tested positively and were told to choose between rehabilitation or unemployment.
Drug abuse is a problem. It's perhaps not as prevalent as some would have us believe, yet destructive to those who are afflicted. However, when the eyes and ears of government begin to peer into the sanctum of our homes and
private lives, we no longer remain private citizens.
The right to personal privacy is breached whenever an employer, civilian or governmental, monitors their employees' off-duty behavior.
Before we barter away those rights in an effort to satisfy our craving for a drug-free society, one should pause and remember that once surrendered, they are not easily regained.
Once the drug-use precedence has been firmly established, it will become easier for employers to delive into their employees' private lives; sexual and religious preferences and personal beliefs that have no bearing on job performance will also be threatened by this wave of intrusion. And it's "all in our best interest," we're told.
The Olathe case is an example of how far we are going in this prying game and how quickly we have gotten there. No, an Orwellian "tescreen" won't be in your living room tomorrow. But your boss might be.
The farm crisis deepens
The American public can only take so much. And when the public wearies of whatever crisis was designated by the media and the folks in Washington as the hot topic, then all discussion is pushed to the inside pages and stored on the back shelf of the collective memory. Some examples: censoring rock music lyrics, NASA safety standards, AIDS and the farm crisis. The problems are still there, the concerns still legitimate. They have, however, not been receiving the attention they once had.
The farm crisis was, not too long ago, on the top of the agenda for our leaders at the Capitol. The increasing number of farm foreclosures
and the inability of the American farmer to make a living was a number one priority. Kansas' own Bob Dole was at the forefront of the movement for legislation that would solve, or at least alleviate, the farm crisis.
But who's on the farm bandwagon now? The farmers are still losing their farms. The
media is still carrying stories of the farm crisis, but it is making fewer and fewer front pages.
Where are our leaders with comforting words and promise of aid? Bob Dole has been silent lately, more concerned with the tax bill than the old hat issue of the farm crisis.
News staff
Lauretta McMillen...Editor
Kady McMaster...Managing editor
Tad Clarke...News editor
David Silverman...Editorial editor
John Hanna...Campus editor
Frank Hansel...Sports editor
Jacki Kelly...Photo editor
Tom Eblen...General manager, news adviser
Business staff
David Nixon...Business manager
Gregory Kaul...Retail sales manager
Denise Stephens...Campus sales manager
Sally Depew...Classified manager
Lisa Wennes...Production manager
Duncan Calhoun...National sales manager
Dunian Calhoun...Traffic manager
Beverly Kastens...
News staff
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The story of a gentleman from Vilna
We met him at Sanborn's. That's the place to go for breakfast your last morning in Mexico City on the way to the airport, when you've grown weary of the authentic and are homesick for plastic and sanitation. After a U.S. citizen's taste for the slightly sordid is satiated, Sanborn's offers the Mexico of the posters, neatly packaged.
We might not have noticed the man except that he was carrying a Hebrew newspaper under his arm. As he passed our table, we invited him to join us, which he did after a polite moment's hesitation. He was no tourist, he said, but lived here. "I am a Mexican national since last September," he explained, not
Paul Greenberg
Columnist
without pride. And how did he come to be a Mexican? The answer required a leisurely breakfast, and might have run into lunch if we hadn't a plane to catch.
He had been born in a village in Poland but was sent off to study the holy books when he was a child, and was graduated from the yeshiva — the Jewish seminary — at Vilna in Lithuania.
Did we know of Vilna? Of course, Vilna was the great citadel of Jewish learning for hundreds of years before World War II began and the history of European Jewry was ended. Vilna was the Notre Dame, Vatican and St. Paul's of Jewish orthodoxy.
The yeshiva at Vilna offered no secular courses but its requirements
were so rigorous, its emphasis on memory and logic so well known, that its graduates were virtually assured entry into many of Europe's best universities.
The gentleman from Vilna chose the University of Grenoble in France, and, after only one year of exposure to secular civilization, he had learned an important lesson: "I learned that, in the year 1839, Europe was no place for a Jew."
He set out to say goodbye to his people in Poland as September approached and was caught in the war. Dabbing neatly at his moustache after every sharp, methodical bite of his eggs and toast, the gentleman from Vilna explained how he managed to get out of Europe in 1939. He couldn't get a visa, but he had a friend visit the British consul and swear that he had been an officer in the Polish Army. That made him Britain's ally, and "I got something better than a visa — a certificate of protection from His Majesty King George VI." He pronounced the royal title as if there were a drumroll in the background. Somehow he managed to come to attention while remaining seated.
With that certificate, he made it across the U.S.S.R. on the trans-Siberian railroad. He was headed for Shanghai, which was one of the few places, maybe the only one, that freely admitted Jewish refugees in the 1930s. He planned to go via Vladavostok and Yokohama, but he was interned upon reaching Japan.
Every morning, he would ask for a visa and every morning the Japanese sergeant on duty, having noticed the religion listed in his papers, would put him off, asking, "Why does Hitler hate you people? What did
you do to him?" And every morning, the gentleman from Vilna would process innocence, saying he had no idea what had so enraged the Emperor's honorable ally. But one morning, tiring of the game and of being intermed, he fessed up. "I'll tell you why Hitler hates us," he said. "Yes, yes, asked the sergeant. "He hates us," said the gentleman from Vilna, "because we are an Asiatic people." The sergeant reached over, stamped his passport, and our friend was on the boat to Shanghai that evening.
He had learned an important lesson: in the year 1939, Europe was no place for a Jew.
Shanghai itself was all right, but the gentleman from Vilna soon树 tree of the daily bombings and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in general; he found his way to Bombay, which he liked very much as long as the British Raj was there. He took up tailoring as a profession and grew fond of his clientele. As he summed up his feelings about the British over coffee and flan: "The English are cold people but they have character." And when they left India, so did he.
He looked around for another British Commonwealth in which to settle and chose Canada.
winter. "And was he still tailoring? Oh, no, by now he had advanced to the position of publisher's representative. That meant he visited various professionals (architects, doctors, dentists) and sold them subscriptions to high-toned U.S. magazines — Architectural Digest and the like. The way he said publisher's representa­tive was not entirely unlike the way he had pronounced "His Majesty King George IV." And he said "I am a Mexican national!" as if at any moment he might move for Texas back
Canada was all right, too, but he had come to Mexico on vacation and preferred it. As he put it: "In Montreal, there are two seasons. July and
I regretted that we could not stay to hear more but even Mexican airlines leave sometime. It was only after I had paid the bill, which was quite reasonable considering the entertainment, that I began to wonder how often the gentleman from Vilna had breakfasted on his story at Sanborn's, or enjoyed a repeat on its strength at the Carmel kosher delicatessen on Genova Street, which he had recommended.
I hadn't thought to note the date on the copy of Davar he carried on his arm, but the newspaper had a few extra folds and a slightly yellowish tinge, as if it were more prop than periodical. His story had a practiced touch that its delivery in a mixture of Spanish, Yiddish and English only further flavored, like a really good sauce.
I have dined out on his story myself since. With each retelling (as the Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan would say, and did) it's tempting to add a little corroborative detail here and there merely to lend artistic versimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. Such a story might even carry a gentle reader to the last word of a newspaper column.
Reagan's arms control, buildup plan
President Reagan, who believes in goals and in winning, faces some of his toughest fights in the struggle for some semblance of nuclear arms control.
He is getting an absorbing initiation into the art of diplomacy as the
Helen Thomas
UPI Commentary
superpowers zig and zag toward an inevitable second summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
The road has been tortuous as both sides have edged toward a compromise, some steps that will make a summit worthwhile and acceptable to both nations' constituencies.
It appears that Reagan seeks to leave a legacy of some success in cutbacks in the devastating nuclear arsenals that both sides possess. But
he sees no contradiction in the demand for more and more spending on military programs — to the tune of billions of dollars that are mortgaging the future.
In short, he wants to continue an unlimited arms buildup as he pushes ahead in negotiations for weapons cutbacks.
No drive for arms agreements has curtaled his deep opposition to a ban on testing nuclear weapons or to producing the means for chemical warfare.
He is totally taken with the Strategic Defense Initiative, and he interprets the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in a unique way so it will permit him to test the new shield with impunity against charges that the United States is violating the accord.
He assured the United Nations in his speech to the General Assembly that space defense would lessen the need for offensive nuclear weapons.
In a recent vitriolic speech, Reagan accused members of Congress who seek a test ban of equating
weakness with peace. On the other hand, he believes that no nation should stop preparing for armed conflict.
"To preserve peace one must prepare for war," is his credo, which he believes the lessons of history have often proved.
In view of his total respect for military might and his distrust of the Soviet adversaries, his stand appears to be ambiguous. But no U.S. president can fail to declare his peaceful intentions, nor could any Kremlin leader say otherwise.
The desire to disarm must be there to some extent. It is understandable that no president wants to take the chance of putting the United States at a disadvantage in view of the closed Soviet society and its expansionist policies.
The president is now midway into his second term, and time is running out. His interest in reducing the world's nuclear might did not come early in his presidency, and might have come too late.
An agreement on a reduction of medium range missile warheads in Europe and Asia appears to be in the making. And talks at the negotiating table in Geneva, Switzerland, now in their sixth round, have a new momentum, prompted undoubtedly by Reagan's desire to see progress.
Concessions will be needed on both sides for any agreement. Reagan believes in his cause that the United States can have a total defense in space that will spare generations to come of the terror of nuclear war. The Soviets say that space should be free of any weapons, defensive or otherwise.
With the billions of dollars in contracts out and the United States committed to advances in space technology, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's call for "open skies" may not be for long.
The Soviets are bound to try to match the United States in the race for space, and the superpowers will then be contending for dominance in the heavens
Mailbox
Soviets' atrocities
Wednesday night on PBS "Firing Line," the horrors of the Soviet Union were finally brought before the public — over 50 years after the event. The event in which the Soviet state killed over 10 million people through forced starvation. The same state whose ambassador had the gall to shout the sanctimonious statement that the U.S. has plans of a first strike policy with SDI.
Fortunately, the public had a glimpse at the real Soviet conscience. This event was not the only
horror to have occurred in the Soviet Union — there were many immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution — but the facts shown Wednesday are morbid enough.
So, why is it that the world should not hear of these horrors for so long after the events that mar the very substance of the Soviet state? As the Soviets are the greatest propagators the world has ever known, their ambassadors especially, can the answer be too hard to find? With such thoughts in mind, when I hear people speaking of negotiating anything with such people, a moan of despair
is not all that escapes my lips. However, it is obvious that negotiating must be made, to keep the beast in sight if nothing else. But we should caution ourselves greatly.
Still, one might logically ask, "How can any rational human being place an trust into creaturess with such total disregard for human life?" Unfortunately, the woes of diplomacy are many.
However, with regard to the ambassador, when I hear arguments in favor of SDI along the lines of, "If we share the knowledge of such a defense both sides will be in a safer state, and
the Soviet Union will no longer have fear of a first strike capability. "I erange. Would any sane creature have given Adolf Hitler such knowledge? Knowledge that he could possibly use against so many people obviously affected by SDI? No! It seems apparent to me that the American people will have to decide to either dump SDI, or embrace it as our last hope against such a mad people without sharing it. Their spies will learn of it soon enough.
Ben Bunner
Wichita senior
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