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Friday, August 29, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Stop, before it's too late
"Here we go again."
President Reagan was so fond of that expression during his 1984 campaign that it became his hallmark. For months he mocked Democratic politicians who compared his policies to others that had failed in the past. They have an obsession with history, he said, an obsession that would leave them unable to solve the problems of the future.
Perhaps Reagan should purchase a recently published history book and open it to the chapter on Vietnam. Then, compare the details of that foreign policy miscarriage with his own plans for Nicaragua.
Here we go again.
Here we go again!
Even if the Reagan-backed $100 million contra aid package passed by the Senate last week were not just plain wrong-headed, there are compelling reasons to oppose this American largess to rebel mercenaries fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Perhaps most disturbing is that the New York Times has reported administration sources as saying the newest round of financing will be accompanied by soldiers from the Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, who will begin training the guerillas at secret bases on the Honduras-Nicaragua border.
On the heels of the Eisenhower administration's financial support for the South
Vietnamese government,
President John F. Kennedy
sent a similar detachment to
South Vietnam to help bolster
its allied government forces.
He promised that American
troops would never see combat.
President Reagan and the
Pentagon have made the same
assurances about the GIs
headed for Honduras.
Aside from the military training, the CIA, which has overseen all U.S. contacts with the contrasts, will begin training the rebels in tactics that they hope will change their already tarnished image among the Nicaraguan people. Since the contrasts have been accused of numerous acts of brutality in recent months, such training would seem appropriate.
The Senate's narrow 53-47 vote implies that even in that bastion of Republican conservatism, there is no firm consensus behind Reagan's mistaken Nicaraguan policy. The balance may shift after the November elections, and a more far-sighted policy then may emerge.
It's like a page right out of the CIA's Vietnam manual. Remember their campaign to bolster waning government support among South Vietnamese villagers?
Opinions
His disdain for history does not overshadow the fact that President Reagan is guiding us over the edge, and into an abyss that might, again, consume the lives of thousands of young people.
Simply important
Students need to vote this year more than ever. But, come November, when the polls open, not nearly enough KU students will be doing their part to help Kansas.
That can be remedied. Students — both residents in and out of Kansas — may register to vote in Douglas County.
Rep. Judy Runnels, D-Topeka, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, stressed the need for student registration in her speech to
The candidates and issues you vote for this year will affect us all for at least the next two or three years. Students should feel obligated to decide who will participate in the government that subsidizes their education.
KU Democrats on Tuesday night. She wants to start a strong voter registration campaign on campus to get as many students as possible registered. She has the right idea.
Issues such as liquor by the drink will directly affect hundreds of students during their tenure at the University. Although the lack of registered voters in Kansas is not limited to college students, the campus is the best place to start The young minds being educated today will be held responsible for the shape of the nation tomorrow.
Registering and voting is simple and painless, but this simple act could have profound results.
As the White House sleeps
South Africa has taken another step toward abolishing freedom.
Last week, four shipments of videotapes belonging to the ABC television network, on their way from Johannesburg to the United States, were tampered with. Often videotapes are sent by jet to the networks if they are not scheduled to be broadcast immediately. Satellite transmission is expensive, so the tapes were being shipped aboard a South African Airways jet.
Pretoria already has imposed rigid press restrictions upon reporters that prohibit them from reporting the news as it
happens. Instead, the government must approve press reports about security forces and reporters are barred from going to many parts of the country and reporting about black opposition.
Again, South Africa's government has gone too far.
According to an ABC spokesman, at least one of the network's tapes has mysteriously disappeared. And television networks in England admitted that their videotapes also had been tampered with.
That's not just suppressing freedom of information; that's stealing.
News staff
News staff
Lauretta McMillen ... Editor
Kady McMaster ... Managing editor
Tad Clarke ... News editor
David Silverman ... Editorial editor
John Hanna ... Campus edu
Frank Hendel ... Sports edu
Jacki Kelly ... Photo editor
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
David Nixon ... Business manager
Gregory Keul ... Retail sales manager
Daniel Stephens ... Campus sales manager
Sally Depew ... Classified manager
Lisa Weems ... Production manager
Duncan Calhoun ... National sales manager
Beverly Kesten ... Traffic manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
The first year of college for many students is the hardest, because they dive in as if they were doing a gainer into a champagne-filled swimming pool. They are torn between keeping their heads above the surface and drinking the pool dry.
Of course, going overboard your first year doesn't mean failure. Some of the wildest people I knew graduated. In fact, having a good time was their main academic motivation. As long as they did their work, even if it was just the minimum, they knew they could stay in college and prolong their social life. For some, it was their one concession to reality.
them squinting, unacquainted to the sunlight, as they received their diplomas. They had spent so much time studying while they were in college that few students knew them. And their social skills had atrophied along the way, making them awkward in the presence of other people.
But he wasn't the worst. Another guy I knew took drugs until he thought he was a messenger from God. After his new career was discovered by his professors and friends, he was sent away for awhile.
It also meant stiffly assuming what should have been casual poses. Meanwhile, much of the upperclass establishment was at Lone Star Lake or local taverns soaking up rays and beers.
Some of the library moles sacrificed more than their social life. A guy who lived across the hall from me froze with fear the night before a test. He simply couldn't move. His trip to the hospital was not the way to prepare for an exam.
Library moles and wildmen are a great distance apart, but navigating between them is hard.
Letters should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words and should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, include class and hometown, or faculty or staff position.
Guest shots should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 700 words. The
But it isn't so easy. Being a freshman is rough stuff.
But the toughest obstacles often are the ones that you create on your own. That's why arriving on campus is easy, and staying here is hard.
It involves four years of overcoming obstacles created by professors, friends, adversaries and people you don't even know.
The Kansan reserves the right to reject or edit letters and guest shots. They can be mailed or brought to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Staufer-Flint Hall.
On Saturday, it meant playing carnival games behind Tempel Hill and devising ways to buy beer and then sneak it into the residence halls.
The opposite extreme to the wildmen were the library moles. These people made studying an incurable disease. Either out out of shyness or ambition, they buried themselves in books and silently burrowed toward graduation
Last week marked the annual arrival of freshmen to college campuses. Freed from parental restraint, these voyagers set sail in search of academic success and bednism.
Let's put drug tests in their place
If they survive, they become the ones who quote Nietzsche when ask-
On graduation day it was sad to see
Life as a freshman is tough stuff
out lighted cigarettes in the palm of his hand.
I had just finished reading the Kansas City Times story about President Reagan and other White House staffers submitting to urine tests for drugs the other morning. Between sips of my coffee, my mind drifted into one of those fast-paced, caffeine-induced daydreams.
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The stall door locks behind me, a bell starts ringing and a disjointed voice that sounds like the telephone company's information lady begins speaking.
ed about their hangovers. If they fail, they become burnout stories, often as colorful as those who manage to stay in school.
Just a few weeks into my first college year, Charlie, a friend of mine who'd been drinking, tried to throw $v$
I am standing in the rest room in Stauffer-Flint Hall, the building where I teach, and I have just flushed the toilet. As I aip up my pants, I hear a metallic thud not unlike the sound of a cell-block door being slammed shut in one of those old prison films starring James Cagney.
desk out a fourth-floor window. Instead, he fell backward and smashed his hand. Sometimes that's the way things go when you're a freshman, you fail even at the really asinine things.
Gil Chavez
"I knew I shouldn't have gone to that rock concert in Kansas City," I mutter to myself. "There was so much marijuana smoke in that place that you couldn't avoid breathing the stuff."
Columnist
"Instant urinalysis completed. Analysis shows traces of caffeine, cannabis and food preservatives from Hostess Twinkies Remain where you are until KU police arrive to question you about use of a controlled substance."
Charlie never recovered from this disaster and eventually began doing strange things on a regular basis. He started smoking, not because he liked it, but because he enjoyed putting
I am pondering how I can explain
Of course, only the guilty would have anything to worry about in court. But all of us would have already lost something precious by then — the individual freedoms that make this country a unique and wonderful place to live.
the presence of cannabis in my urine when the buzz of my intercom saves me from this daytime nightmare.
Ted Frederickson
Guest Shot
But isn't this vision just a more efficient version of what Ronald
My friend and President Reagan and Mike Hayden are free to urinate in a bottle anytime they like. But the proposal to require drug testing for everyone ought to be quickly filed in the same place this column began.
The contention that mandatory testing will hurt only the guilty ignores the tacky reality of requiring all KU faculty and staff to rinse into a bottle as a condition of employment. The majority are asked to prove their innocence by giving up their privacy, their dignity, their right to refuse to incriminate themselves, so that the minority who abuse drugs can be identified.
Reagan and others are planning for both public and private employees? In Kansas, Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Hayden has suggested that public employees, including professors at Board of Regents schools, should be tested for drugs.
Drug abuse is a serious social problem, but so are burglary and child
Proponents of testing state their case the same way a colleague did when we discussed the issue recently. "Drugs are a terrible problem in this country," he declared. "And testing can help solve the problem. It's not really a violation of the Fifth Amendment, because tests are voluntary. People may refuse to take the test, but the government or a company may refuse to employ them if they don't. The Constitution doesn't give them the right to work here. Besides, why should you worry about it? You've got nothing to lose. Only the guilty ones have to worry."
My friend is correct in calling drug abuse a problem, but he is wrong in characterizing employee testing as a "voluntary" exercise that only the guilty should worry about. Is it voluntary when one's boss is asking, and when a worker can lose his livelihood for refusing to be tested? Won't those who refuse the test, and those who speak out against testing (as I am), be branded as probable drug users?
Fluuuuuuussssshh.
abuse. Society might have fewer burglaries if we all "consented" to have our homes searched on a random basis by police looking for contraband. We might stop some child abuse if we allowed police to send vans equipped with sophisticated snooing devices (sound and video) into the suburbs in search of crying kids (although I would be in trouble if they ever bugged my house when I was trying to get my 3-year-old son to eat his vegetables.)
The Fifth Amendment was designed to protect individuals from police coercion, including physical abuse used to force a suspect into incriminating himself.
Crimes of all kinds might be avoided if we "volunteered" to let police randomly tap our private telephone conversations or stop and frisk us for no specific reason.
Those of us who value our professions highly would be more intimidated by the loss of our jobs than we would be by a threat to have our fingernails pulled out one by one unless we cooperated.
Ronald and the Sacred Cows
Trade deficit is new whipping boy
Six years later, the country is grappling with an even bigger deficit, but blaming the budget deficit is old hat. The new whipping boy is the nation's record trade deficit, and it's sure to attract even more attention as the midterm elections draw nearer.
The high interest rates and skyrocketing inflation woes of 1900 are gone, but there are new problems: U.S. industries being wiped out by low-cost imports, lost U.S. jobs, inaccessibility of foreign markets and U.S. trade secrets being copied abroad. Until recently, an inordinately strong dollar compounded the problem, but it has begun to fall back in line with other currencies.
As late as 1981, the United States had a trade surplus exporting more goods than it imported. But today, the United States is the world's largest debtor with a record $148.5 billion trade deficit in 1985.
Angry over plant closings that shut down one company towns in textile, shoe, mining and steel areas, the
Mary Beth Franklin
public communicated its concerns to Congress last year. Since then, hundreds of trade bills have been introduced, but the administration has branded most legislative proposals as "protectionist" and, therefore, bad.
UPI
they needed to deal with unfair trade practices.
President Reagan and his trade advisers argued that protectionist measures would raise consumers' costs and invite retaliation from other nations. Administration officials said they had all the authority
practice.
Congress responded that existing laws were worthless if Reagan refused to use them. Many in Congress suggested the president should be forced to retaliate when unfair trade practices were documented.
When Congress tried to pass legislation to deal with the trade problem, the administration would announce a new trade action, such as investigating charges of Japanese "dumping" of semiconductor computer chips in the United States at below-market prices. Critics called the actions diversionary tactics aimed at preventing Congress from taking more drastic action.
Treasury Secretary James Baker suggested in September that the overvalued dollar, which made U.S. exports more expensive abroad, was largely to blame for the trade deficit. Baker worked with finance ministers
of the other major industrialized nations to bring the dollar into line with their currencies. The dollar came down, but the trade deficit did not
Now, less than three months before the fall elections, Democrats are harping on the trade deficit as the root of the nation's economic problems, almost daring the administration to act.
The administration responds that it is wrong to tie trade negotiators' hands with legislation, and that it is essential that the president retain his discretionary authority.
The administration also hopes the trade deficit will start turning before November. But there is no sign of it, and Senate Republicans, with their narrow 53-47 majority, are getting nervous.
The Democrats are practically licking their chops, hoping to turn the new deficit into political gold.