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Opinion
University Daily Kansan, September 9, 1982
Draft, aid just don't mix
The word is out. As of July 1, 1983, any male student who has not registered for the draft will lose his eligibility for Title IV federal financial aid. This includes Pell grants, Guaranteed Student Loans, National Direct Student Loans and College Work Study Programs.
At first glance, the new regulation appears to be an effective way of enforcing draft registration. In times such as these, not many students can afford to risk losing what federal financial aid remains available to them.
But there are some basic problems with this new law, not the least of which is its disregard for the constitutional right to due process. Legal means already exist to ensure compliance, and as difficult as these may be to enforce, this new tactic is not likely to prove any easier.
Existing laws dealing with draft evasion call for a hearing and, if convicted, a jail term or fine. The new regulation ignores the principle that one is innocent of a crime until proven
guilty. It is improper for the government to withhold funds duly granted without the recipient's first having been convicted of draft evasion. Just because one is a student should not mean he doesn't have the right to a fair hearing.
There are other problems as well. Since President Reagan's budgettrimming, Pell grants and other awards have become even more essential for some students, male and female. So long as men are the only students who risk losing their aid, basing financial aid on draft registration cannot be anything but inequitable.
The regulation is also unrealistic. It assigns yet another task to the already overburdened financial aid offices of the nation's campuses. As it is, these offices can barely handle the increased paperwork caused by earlier aid changes. This newest check may make the load impossible.
Simply put, the regulation is bad. It will not work, and it ought to be rescinded before the government begins wasting time and dollars on it.
Mock scenes of nuclear war offer lessons about humanity
Everything was gray with dirt. Even the grass was the same color as the sad-looking corrugated tin shanties and canvas tents that dropped under the Massachusetts Street bridge Friday.
Looking like some Hooverville during the Depression era, it was a pathetic scene. Filthy people wandered through the trash and heat, leaving torn and muddy, their skin caked with dust.
ABC had done an excellent job of creating its own little universe of nuclear devastation and imagined aftermath. Such a good job, in fact.
LILLIAN DAVIS Guest Columnist
that those of us who were extras started having trouble defending reality.
As movie extras, we all had gone through the makeup and wardrobe departments together, letting the Hollywood experts slop mud over our clothes and put a combination of gel and dust in our hair. I was so dirty that I could feel the grit between my skin and my jeans. My hands and arms were gray with dust, and as the day went on the flash burn that makeup artists had given me began to look even more realistic. Even my lips felt dirty.
As I looked around me, I subconciously tallied the number of people who appeared to be real "low lives." I was as filthy as everyone around me, and I knew the reason we all looked that way. We were the people, people, quickly discovered that the crowd did not consist of poverty-level people, but of chemical engineers, local store owners, students — certainly not the mass of characters I had so wrongly, and casually, judged. I fell sick. I was shocked at my prejudice that associated dirt with deceit, poison and ignorance. Here I was feeling sorry for these people when I was just as pathetic looking.
That was the first of many lessons on humanity I learned last Friday. In the 14 hours during which I was an extra on the movie set, I experienced and learned more than I ever had when, on a whim, I signed up to be in an ABC movie about a nuclear blast hitting Kansas City.
The longer I was on the set among the grayness and filth, I found, the more extremely protective I became of the props I had brought
and even the ridiculous little shed I had been assigned to sit in front of. And I wasn't alone in these strange feelings. Others there said that after 14 hours they, too, had started to think of you, and sat as home, and when someone else sat there they felt as if they had the right to tell them to move.
Everyone seemed to feel this way. When we were tired, we lay on the ground or on a dirty cot that the prop department had supplied. It sounds crazy, but after the initial shock of being drier than I ever had been before subsided, I began to feel natural.
My repulsion to my own filthiness soon wore off. I simply acclimated myself to the situation to such a degree that I forgot how dirty I was. What really bothered me anymore - me, the one who had been a bathroom of a bathtub. By the time I returned to my own home at 1:30 a.m., I was in no hurry to shower.
I also began to think in a totally different frame of mind, as if the dirt could protect me from any repercussions of wrongdoing. Suddenly, given the stinginess of the surroundings, thing didn't seem to be that big of a crime again. Again I was shocked at what I was thinking.
When we first went down to where the tents were pitched, there was a mass burial scene set up. I told my friends then that if we ever lived through a nuclear holocaust, I would want to be moved to a hospital in coordination to the heaped beds. Needless to say, we were a bit shocked at my defeatist attitude.
But this attitude changed slightly after I discovered how quickly I adjusted to a totally foreign situation. I think I could handle living in the filth and horror of those conditions if it meant my survival. Of course, I did not witness the slow evolution of radiation burns, nor did I have to cope with the lack of family and friends, but I learned that I could stand a lot more than I had ever imagined.
When I left tent city, as the directors called it, I seriously had trouble remembering where we were in Lawrence. My own world had shrunk to the perimeters of the mock refugee camp, and what had only been 14 hours seemed to have been a week.
As I boarded the bus that would return everyone to their cars in Memorial Stadium, I felt as if I was returning from a long trip back to the everyday business of life. To say the least, I exhausted, and when I finally did get into the shower at 2 a.m., I'll admit it did feel good.
Lillian Davis, Prairie Village senior, will be writing several columns for the Kansan.
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The age of the computer has struck the Kansas, and all other newspapers for which we worked, and with it has come this cyberphobia problem — a fear of computers.
I'm not afraid of technology, and I have little trouble grasping the intricacies of editing on "tubes," as they are called. But I am beginning to wonder whether some night I might leave the Kansan and stumble blindly across campus, glowing in the dark like a large firefly.
"If you're trying to say there is a lot of exposure to CRTs, the answer is yes."
There are 60 to 70 public terminals on campus, according to John Bucher, manager of user education at the Academic Computing Center, but not all are CRTs. "There is an additional number for staff use; I'd say we have to 10 to 15," Bucher said. "Then if you count all CRTs not owned by us, non-public terminals, like in the geography department, there are more than 200 CRTs hooked up to our computer or others."
You scout, I'm sure, you who are reading this during a coffee break from your 8-hour-a-day job that demands staring at the screen of one of the hundreds of video display terminals, or cathode ray terminals, on campus. Staring, staring, staring. Are you squinting? Do you have a stiff neck and headaches? Does your skin itch?
As I write this column, I am risking my life,
my health — or at least my eveight.
But if you're trying to ascertain the danger of that exposure, the opinion will vary — wildly
Eyestrain is the most prevalent and easily proven complaint from VDT users. "It is not natural for us as human beings, sitting in fixed positions and looking at flickering lights," says Marvin J. Dainof, a researcher with the Applied Ergonomics Branch in Cincinnati, Ohio. "You can feel those muscles pull to focus."
Ergonomics is the science that seeks to adapt work or working conditions to suit the worker. Daimo told a conference sponsored by the Society of Industrial Designers Association that studies indicated that those
I am suffering from a severe case of cyberphobia.
The great computer peril
If eyestrain were the only danger, the solution would be much simpler. Improvements are constantly introduced in the lighting of a room and the angles at which the screens can be tilted.
But oystrain is the least severe of the accusations leveled at VDTs. A recent report by A Canadian hospital union claims that at one Canadian hospital, six pregnancies among VDT operators produced only one healthy baby.
Two pregnancies resulted in miscarriages, one baby was born with a deformed foot, one baby was born a month prematurely, another had bronchitis and one was normal, a union spokesman said.
Brown attributed the complaints among VDT operations to "psycho-social" disorders. "The symptoms are similar to any other stress response (such as) sweatiness, palpitations, headaches, stomach discomfort, nausea and dizziness." Brown said.
In December 1981 Science News reported four "clusters" of miscarriages and birth defects in the United States and Canada. The women involved were the women involved was their use of VDRs.
York Times, who told the American Newspaper Publishers Association's 54th annual Production Management Conference in Dallas this summer that there was no scientific evidence to support claims that radiation from VDIIs cause eye disorders or muscular pain.
Well, thank goodness. I knew the palpitations were all in my head. And the fact that I haven't been able to wear contacts regularly since I was 19 had made of the VDT must be entirely coincidental.
At the Toronto Star, four of seven children born to women in the group had birth defects. In Marietta, Ga., a high miscarriage rate — seven in 15 pregnancies — was reported at the Defense Logistics Agency regional office during a one-year span. Although the remaining pregnancies were full term, three involved severe birth defects.
At a Sears, Roebuck and Co. Dallas office, seven of 12 pregnancies among employees ended in miscarriage from May 1979 to June 1980. An eighth infant — born prematurely — also die. The most recent cluster occurred during a two-year span: seven of 13 pregnancies among Air Canada's Montreal airport check-in employees ended in miscarriage.
It is a bit easy to pull the plug on VDTs. Much more evidence is needed, and not on an isolated basis. For now, VDTs are here to stay, along with the discomforts — and the dangers.
The Centers for Disease Control investigated the first three "clusters" and called them chance. The fourth was dismissed by Canadian health officials. But unions are not as敢, nor have they demanded labor agreements that offer pregnant women the right to refuse VDT work.
who used VDTS complained more of eye strain, burning and irritated eyes, blurred vision and various muscle pains than those who did not use the terminals.
His theory was based on a study of more than 200 San Francisco clerical workers. Seventy-four of those using VDTs complained of red eyes, compared with 47 percent of those using other methods. Eyestrain complaints came from 91 percent of VDT users and from 60 percent of the non-users.
Workers also complained of stiff arms, neckecks and shoulders. The solution? "You just can't buy the right terminal or the right furniture and solve the problem," says Dainof, estimating that nine million people are exposed to VDTs in this country.
That evidence was contradicted by Howard R. Brown, the medical director of The New
TRACEE HAMILTON
Immigration is not merely a domestic issue. It is also a matter of foreign policy. So even the strictest enforcement of the various elements of the Senate bill, which has been sent to the House, would have little long-term effect. Quite simply, these provisions do nothing to address the root causes of migration and the flow of refugees: economic underdevelopment, social injustice, human-rights violations, population growth. Until our immigration debate addresses these serious international issues, we will never develop an adequate immigration policy.
Immigration bill isn't enough to curtail flow
By SEN GARY HART
New York Times Syndicate
WASHINGTON — The legislation overhauling U.S. immigration law that the Senate has approved focuses almost entirely on domestic issues — traficker law enforcement, lower quotas, regularizing the status of undocumented workers already in this country. But the Senate has fully addressed the problem that brings thousands of immigrants to our shores each year.
The Haitian refugees detained in U.S. camps vividly illustrate this point. Although they cannot possibly think they have entered the "golden door" of economic and social opportunity, they continue to come. Life in the camps, with all its hardships, is obviously preferable to a life where social and economic opportunity are systematically denied.
There are enormous disparities between rich and poor in Haiti. Five percent of the population accumulates 50 percent of the national income. In 1980 (the last year for which data are
available), Haiti's average per capita income was $75, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. On the average, the Haitian government spends $18 a person per year on internal security.
According to the Organization of American States, corruption pervades all levels of Haitian government. As a result, domestic revenues and foreign aid are diverted for personal enrichment, rather than being spent on economic development.
Repression has been a fact of life in Haiti since 1957, when Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier began his brutal regime. His successor and son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, has continued the tradition. The result has been a flood of poor, uneducated "boat people" to the United States.
Haiti is by no means alone in contributing immigrants. From March 1979 to March 1881, the number of Central Americans and South Americans in the United States increased from roughly 840,000 to 1,022 million. In the last 18 months alone, 200,000 Salvadorans have fled to Haiti. The intolerable conditions have brought hundreds of thousands of Indochina to the United States.
It is unrealistic to think that these trends will not continue. Unprecedented population growth has contributed to tension not only in Mexico, the United States and Canada, but also in the Middle East and the Far East.
Entrants into the labor force in the non-industrialized world are expected to grow by at least 700 million in the next 20 years. Moreover, employment growth will be enhanced cities will increase. Add continuing civil
and regional wars, famine and repression, and migration flow will become a migration flood.
Limiting our changes in immigration policy to domestic measures will thus have little impact on migration pressures from troubled areas of the world. Ultimately, our immigration problems must be managed with the cooperation and participation of other governments. The immigration factor must become an integral part of the formulation of our foreign policy, particularly as it applies to certain areas of the globe. For example, we must recognize that our tacit support of the repressive Duvalier regime will be paid for in an influx of boat people to this country.
Policies that favor confrontation and military solutions must be avoided in dealing with Central American countries because such policies add to emigration pressures.
Trade and investment incentives for Mexico and the Caribbean basin should take into account their effect on the creation of jobs and demographic movements. For example, Washington might consider providing incentives to U.S. and Mexican firms willing to locate in northern Mexico in return for Mexican government assistance in blocking illegal immigration
Both bilateral and multilateral assistance can, if properly directed, help create jobs and slow population growth in various countries around the world.
Regardless of good-faith legislative efforts to reform domestic immigration procedures, the problems presented by immigration in the 1980s and 1990s will not be solved without a more democratic, imaginative and farsighted foreign policy.
Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., is a senior senator.