Page 4
Opinion
University Daily Kansan, November 22, 1982
For tomorrow's elderly
Social Security reform continues to be one of the most vexing domestic political issues. It is an issue set with thorns, and congressmen are unwilling to risk getting pricked.
It had been hoped that the lame-duck Congress could devise a non-partisan means of reviving the wiling federal retirement program. But U.S. Reps. Dan Glickman, D-Kan., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan., discouraged those hopes last week when they said that little could be done before the next session.
That something must be done, few debate. Just what that something will be, however, has been the subject of heated argument. Many people fear that any changes will necessarily be to the disadvantage of the elderly. Given the political clout of the nearly 26 million senior citizens in the United States, this is no small consideration among politicians.
"What we must do," says Roberts, "is define what we want the system to be. It was initially designed to be an income supplement program and not a program for those who are disadvantaged and needy to live off of. But
you can't tell that to the elderly when that income decides whether they are going to make it or not."
It may be time to rethink the purpose of Social Security. The system is near the breaking point. Surely those retirees who continue to make more than $20,000 or $30,000 a year do not need to contribute to the strain. As far as the practicality of maintaining Social Security as an income supplement, there are many more efficient means of investing dollars, including tax-sheltered pension plans.
So long as Social Security remains politically untouchable, the problems associated with it will grow worse. Fewer and fewer workers are supporting more and more retirees. When the system grows too top-heavy, it will simply collapse.
It is well and good for legislators to consider what reforms will be least damaging to the elderly. But they should remember that the workers who are supporting the system today will be the elderly who depend on it tomorrow. And, in searching for fair solutions, they must protect this class of "elderly" as well.
Compulsory voting might be one solution to low turnouts
Brazil, although not a model country on the whole, has a good idea to try to help make it a better country. In Brazil, elections are compulsory.
Logic says that with compulsory elections, there will be 100 percent turnout at the polls. Earlier this month, the United States had voted only was only a 33.8 percent turnout at the polls.
We pride ourselves on our democratic system, but when far less than half of the eligible voters cast their ballots
What's truly disgusting is that that 33.8
CATHERINE BEHAN
percent was considered a good turnout for an off-year election.
Students have one of the worst voter turnout records of all
When we finally won the right to vote and Congress passed the law that brought the legal voting age from 21 to 18, the voter turnout rate fell from 60 percent to 50 percent.
We must have wanted the privilege pretty badly.
Making voting compulsory in this country might give us greater reason to call the United Nations on it.
It might also solve a few domestic problems. Voting is a privilege U.S. citizens have striven to get and keep since this country began. It was a primary idea for the founding fathers, became an official religion in 1796, and were given the right, and was the source of a bitter struggle for women in this century.
Citizens 18 years or older, regardless of race or sex, have the right to vote. Less than half of voters have a valid ballot.
But as the saying goes, with every right, there is a corresponding responsibility.
In this case, we have the responsibility to elect those people we think would be the most capable of doing so.
Since so few exercise this responsibility, perhaps we should provide an incentive — a fine.
Fining eligible voters $50 for not voting would do two things — encourage people to vote and give the government some money that is not a tax and is very useful.
This money would not necessarily come from the rich or poor, the black or white, but only from the poor.
Employers are required to give employees time off to vote.
Facilities for the handicapped are required,
and if not perfect, should be changed so that no
Before you pick up your pens, there is not a single eligible voter in this country who has a
one has a physical barrier preventing them from voting.
Voting is free. It takes very little time, and
polling places are always nearby.
The money collected in fines possibly could go to provide better voting arrangements for the handcapped, jobs for the unemployed, or help with services like a service programs from the federal government.
In the 1978 elections, 155,682,000 people were eligible to vote in the United States and could have elected our congressmen and others. About half of three eligible, or 77,841,000, exercised
If the other half had been fixed $50, that would have brought $38,920,500 into the federal coffers — not a staggering sum by governmental standards, but certainly enough to hire a few unemployed people to build roads or to augment ailing social programs.
Some might say they have the right not to vote for bad people as well as the right to vote. But casting a vote, any vote, is telling people something.
In the 1972 election, many people voted for Communist Party candidates. Washington got the message — the people were not thrilled with candidates the Democrats and Republicans gave us.
Voters can also write in the name of any person they choose. Writing in the local garbage collector for president or congressman might tell voters that a ticket just what you think of political rhetoric.
Not voting tells them simply that we are lazy or that we do not care what goes on in our
People will not get elected or thrown out of office unless we decide to vote them in or out. You cannot be heard unless you make your views clear, in a small booth on a piece of paper.
Some say they do not vote because they do not know the issues or the candidates. This is an incomprehensible excuse — every person in this country should know the issues and the candidates. It is part of the responsibility we have as citizens.
The severely mentally handicapped should probably be excused from the compulsory vote, but those who simply choose to be handicapped shouldn't be excused from the presentation shouldn't, and our system lets them.
I once had a roommate who did not know who the president was — it was an election year. Neither did she know who Richard Milhouse Nixon was. No, she was not brought up in Guyana nor was she stupid; she simply did not care.
Fining people who do not act as responsible citizens might not be the best idea in a "free" society, but unless more of us participate in this debate than we might, we might just end up without a free society.
All it takes to know about the people we are voting on is to pick up a newspaper or two or to
Plan would be 'academic eavesdropping'
A story in the Nov. 9 Kansan reports that resident assistants in the residence hull system shall soon have access to students' academic records, and if it passes, what good would come out of it?
To the Editor:
First off, I've been a resident of the hall system both of my years at KU. I have yet to meet or hear of an RA who was overly concerned with a student's problems with school. It's not easy to know what to do, but it worry about without having to hold 65 people's hands. He does have his own life to lead.
When I left home to come to college, I was excited about the fact that my mother would no longer be holding my hand. But soon, if something isn't done, RAS will have the power to take me away. If someone people just like myself. It seems to me that there is not a lot of personal growth involved in that.
I think that college is a place to learn and grow, a place where one can learn from his or her own mistakes. I would rather be left alone with my education than to have an unqualified counselor telling me when I'm screwing up. I want to learn from my own mistakes, even if it hurts. You don't have to lose what you have learned from my own mistakes, no matter how harsh a lesson it may be.
Individuals do have the chance to learn from their own mistakes. His or her school watches the grades, and if anyone falls below minimum, he or she is placed on probation. Once that occurs, the student knows that things have got to change — he has been warned. If it happens again, he's out. Maybe college isn't the thing for him.
When a person picks up his folder, the first thing he sees is the word CONFIDENTIAL in bold. black print. That sums everything up in one word; the folder is private. The only people who should have access to such records are the student and the administrators of his school. I firmly believe that anyone else who looks at this privacy policy has wrong right — the right of privacy. Anyone who violates this privacy is guilty of academic eavesdropping.
Michael Jewell Lake Quivira sophomore
Crusaders limit choice
To the Editor:
As a born-born Christian — a Southern Baptist one, no less — I thought that I would type a few lines to try to interpret Maramatha's recent speech. In 2014, I shared this story with Plavoy and Plavovire at the Kansas Union
First, they have decided that the students of the University of Kansas cannot exercise their free will in a responsible manner; therefore, they should not be given the opportunity to exercise it. They lament the fact that the Lord God gave Adam and Eve a choice in the Garden of Eden and that the poor couple chose to disobey God's command. They don't want another expulsion from Eden, so they have decided to remove all your choices. (They think that God would accept them.) They treat a tree of knowledge of good and evil just lying around with only a command to protect it.)
Second, they believe that after eliminating all sources of visual and written pornography from campus, the incidence of violent crimes of a sexual nature will decrease. They don't realize that Uthah has practiced that practice of censorship for decades, but that the divorce rate there is high (the national average and the rates of violent crime (including rape) are not at all below the average.
Finally, they believe that the grace of God is sufficient to save man from all his sins, but they don't think that the power of grace is sufficient go deliver man from his desire to sin. They aren't at all sure that the power of God Almighty and Jesus Christ, His Son, working through the Holy Spirit, is strong enough to keep a Christian from buying a Playboy if it is available to buy. They think that the Maranatha police force has got a little more bite than the Holy Trinity.
Now that I have helped the "heaven" in understanding Maranatha, I think that Maranatha needs a few lines from a Baptist minister. He is very passionate about the type of negative campaign that you are
waging. God gave man a choice to obey or disobey in the beginning, and He has never ceased to allow man a choice. The free grace that He offers in Christ is plenty powerful to remove the desire to sin from a man. Your censorship of people's freedom to accept something or reject it is nothing more than a form of torture. You cannot Inquisition Let people choose or reject Christ for what He offers to man, and not because you've made it the only choice that he can make.
John E. McLaughlin
John E. McLaughlin Brigham City, Utah, graduate student
Porn, rape not related
That Steve Mobley, director of Maranatha Campus Ministries, is opposed to the sale of "pornographic" magazines in the Union seems quite reasonable. That his followers choose to support him in his protest seems quite acceptable. What is neither reasonable nor acceptable is the causal inference he expresses, i.e., "If we take these things off the shelves, we we're going to see a lot of things happen, like a drop in rape and a drop in incest." His inferences reflect a total lack of understanding of the dynamics of rape and incest.
Rape is much less a sexual matter than an issue of power and control, a feature of the male-dominated society in which we live. Maybe that accounts for the fact that rape is decidedly an expression of what men do to women. If Mobley wanted to reduce the incidence of rape, he might be better off attacking the underlying sexism in our society. He might rather look at the biological roots of that sociological theological roots that he represents, a perspective that still subjugates women to men.
Incest (familial sexual abuse) is a product of family disorganization, the result of which is incest as a symptom. Mobley might be interested to know that one of the characteristics of incestuous families is that they often associate with fundamentalist theological groups. These families are usually closed systems, but one of the things they often do is attend church regularly. It is not uncommon to have the incestuous occurrence justified in theological terms.
I urge Mobley and his followers to protest all they want and, further, to choose not to read what they find "pornographic". His causal inferences should, however, be reserved to those situations where he has information to support his arguments, so people would take his protestations more seriously.
Dennis M. Dailey Professor of social welfare
Don't blame economy
To the Editor:
In "Money problems increase abortion rate" (Nov. 4 Kansan), reporter kissa Asue causes Merle Hoffman, a social psychologist and director of CHOICES, as saying, "The Reagan administration has viewed as having a direct effect on abortions in this country, now more than 1.5 million a year."
Whether the Reagan administration is to blame for the current recession is not the issue in question. Rather it is whether the difficult economy can be blamed for the increasing lack of respect for human life, denoted by the increase in abortions.
Hoffman also said, "Because of the reality of the economy, many women are sacrificing their desire for children." It seems, rather, that women are sacrificing their children for innocence.
I say "children" because it is a scientific fact that a developing embryo has a different and unique genetic makeup from both the mother and the father and is not simply an extension of the mother's body. It is also a fact that the aborted fetus suffers great pain during the abortion operation and afterwards, if it is not killed during the operation. Somehow, this is never mentioned to a woman who is considering abortion. Many aborted babies, those aborted by the saline injection method, for example, are left to die slowly in anguish.
Let us not blame the state of the economy for the increase in abortions, as this article does. The problem is not that the state is not doing anything.
more comfortable, the ever more convenient,
above everything else.
Lisa, the woman mentioned in the article who had had an abortion, said, "I didn't want to take time out of my schedule for a pregnancy." She didn't say she could not afford it because of hard times. So let's give credit/discredit where it is due: rather than coming from an exterior source, an increase in the abortion rate is a reflection of our own lack of respect for life.
Julie Erken Wichita graduate student
Abortion may be best
Lisa Guitierrez has decided that "money is a sad reason for abortion rise."
Why? If you can't afford to adequately care for a child, doesn't it make sense not to have one?
And if you find that you have become pregnant you must make sense to terminate that pregnancy?
Without getting into an argument regarding the moral implications of abortion, I would like to point out to Gutierrez that financial considerations are a valid reason for not bearing children. She says she is "saddened" by the women who opted for abortions, but when "the baby is born, the alternative women had at their disposal, that sadness quickly diminishes."
Well thank you, Miss Compassion! What viable alternatives? She doesn't mention any in her column, unless you consider the absolutely absurd statement in a later paragraph a viable alternative: "If these women truly wanted to bear children, they could carry the infants full-term and let someone adopt the child and pay the 'exorbitant expenses of child-raising.'"
I think Lisa Gutierez should come down out of her ivory tower and stop judging people from a position of ignorance. I have nothing but respect for a woman who is intelligent enough to examine her situation and make a realistic determination as to her ability to financially care for a child. I think the Lisa Gutierezes in this world are largely responsible for the fact that there are far more children born than can be adequately care for.
Never have I encountered a woman who was dying to experience the thrill of pregnancy and childbirth alone. Most women who want children look forward to caring for them, not to the morning sickness, the hemorrhoids, the back pain, the nausea. We don't need to mention the actual event of childbirth (which is high on my list of things that make me glad to be male).
Lisa Guitierrez is "certain that the women surveyed. . . would have found that the financial burden of having a child need not 'force' anyone into having an abortion."
Come on, Lisa. Drag out the common sense that I'm sure licks somewhere in the dusty corners of your mind. Take a look around you. Would you want to have a child if you were employed at $3.35 an hour and living alone; paying gas bills that exceed rent payments? Think about what's best for that potential child, and the answer should be obvious.
Keith Sessions Lawrence Junior
The University Daily KANSAN
The University Daily Kannan (USPS 500-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Hall Floor, Lawrence, Kan. *Paperback* $39.00 Thursday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods. Second-class postage paid at Lauverne, Kan. 40044 Subscriptions by mail are $15 monthly or $25 per month or $3 a year outside the county. Student subscription are in a semester, pass through the student activity fee. The University Daily Kannan, 118 Hall Floor, Lawrence, Kan.
Editor Business Manager
George Geerge Cookson
Managing Editor Steve Hoberman
Editorial Editor Steve Chang
Campus Editor Mark Zieman
National Sales Manager Dur巴桑
National Sales Manager Jake Wenderson
Campus Sales Manager Malcolm Langan
Campus Sales Manager Laurie Sammonsoon
Production Manager Harriet Harmon
Artist/Photographer John Kweling
Traveler/Manager Mike Bunberg
Manage Media and News Advisor Advertising Advisor John Oberman