OPINION
7A
MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2008
THE UNIVERSITY HARLY KANSAN
FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Lauren Keith/KANSAN
How Budig turned into a 'waste' land
The two freshmen sat in Budig eating their breakfast out of a paper bag — a grab and go from Mrs. E's. The professor stopped lecturing. She scolded them for eating in class, perhaps afraid they would leave a mess.
These two students threw everything away after the professor said something, but too often, KU students don't throw their garbage away or recycle it.
and it covers the floor of hallways and classrooms.
Maybe the scolding was harsh. But maybe her actions were necessary. Food means wrappers and paper bags. Trash.
It takes an extra 30 seconds at the most to do the right thing. Thirty seconds. Probably less, and there's no mess left behind to clean up.
So find a trash can. They're all over campus. If it's a newspaper, bottle or anything else recyclable, go to a recycling bin. Sometimes they're tough to find, but they're on campus, too.
OUR VIEW
If students start properly disposing their trash, it will prevent classrooms from looking like Hoch Auditorium on a recent Wednesday.
The place was empty. Classes
were done, but remnants littered the ground. Newspapers were in the aisles and under seats. Pieces of notebook paper were too. A few red Coca-Cola cups and food wrappers completed the picture.
The janitorial staff picks it all up, eventually, and the floors are trash-free in the morning. But the janitors could be doing other work rather than cleaning up
Students also need to do a better job of recycling. According to KU Environmental
Services, the number of items recycled on campus actually declined last year for the first time since the recycling program was started in 1992.
debris that easily could have been thrown in a garbage can.
That trend needs to change. It's in the student body's hands to recycle and properly dispose of trash.
The beauty of the University depends on it. Right now, it's the classrooms and buildings that have newspapers and cups littering the ground, but Jayhawk Boulevard could be next if students don't make a change.
Mark Dent for the editorial board
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
KANSAN FILE ILLUSTRATION
Why can't the student body be more creative?
I love the student body's enthusiasm for the football team, but to continue the kickoff chant after Coach Mark Mangino's plea showed real disrespect to a great coach at KU. Surely the intelligence in our student body can come up with something funny and clever without being vulgar. At least change it to "fricken" or "friagin" if nothing else.
Remember that we have bowl and TV executives who
scrutinize our moves. It puzzles me why this chant has suddenly taken on a life of its own after all these years, though. However, our students have to be more creative and disciplined. Please be better than other student bodies. Be good role models for the young children who attend and respect our coach and athletics director who have worked so hard to make this a great program for a great university that you attend.
— Robert Holmes is a season ticket holder who lives in Dexter.
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My face contorts, tics and quivers in an angry gymnastics of muscle twitches. The throbbing vein in my forehead, the little barometer of rage that assumes three dimensions when you're truly furious. has bulged out in the shape of a mushroom cloud, hovering over the psychic Hiroshima incinerating my mind.
THE EDIT ORIAL BOARD
Members of the Kansan Editorial Board are Alex Doherty, Jenny Harty, LauREN Keith, Patrick de Olivaire, Ray Sebreghe and Ian Stanford.
Children have unattainable dreams, so we need to help them unattain those dreams as quickly as possible. Had someone handed me a shovel 10 years ago and just told me to start digging, a lot of trouble and woe could have been saved.
Sure, in the short term, disabusing children of their dreams might seem to be kind of harsh, but just remember that in the long run it's actually a lot of fun for you.
I stand across from a screaming, grabbing, pulsating larval mass of kids. They're everywhere, climbing all over me. One child has so tightly grafted his limbs around my leg he looks like some ghastly, underdeveloped Siamese twin sprouting from my knee.
You don't really need any formal training, what with your already keen, pop-culture-inculcated sense of irony. And you will quickly learn the other necessary skills, like the important role that hypocrisy and outright lies play in moral education. Can you say "it's possible to have fun without alcohol and smoking isn't cool" with a straight face?
out, sporting Obama T-shirts in one last self-destructive bender of hope, audacity and change.
Why I spent some time with the future
If so, man, I need your help. The little shit attached to my leg has quite possibly done just that, and I see three kids assuming classic cry posture — seated, with arms out front like they are dangling invisible marionettes.
"Well isn't that just fantasst—"
"Hey, Grant! Grant! Grantgrantgrantgrant!" screams a bouncing, chubby little one, bulging out of his overstretched Wal-Mart wear like a large salami stuffed in a tiny sock. He grips a crayon drawing in his Cheeto-filmed fingers. "Lookit what I'm sending into Highlights!"
Jagged crayon slashes intersect randomly. It is either a crappy picture of a castle or a perfect representation of the Pictionary card "Delirium Tremens."
"Mister!" interjects my Siamese leg-twin, the cuteness of his little freckle face somewhat challenged by the alarmingly ripe farts wafting upward. "You sound like the leader on Power Rangers."
Gimme some of that Ultimate Truth, stat!
"Oh, well thanks, I gues—"
I chose this mess, I tell myself. I chose it, and I'd choose it again. I'm here with these kids based on principle. We have a responsibility — we jaded, ironic college students — to
"The BAD GUY leader," he says, solemnly, as I struggle to resist the urge to morph into a giant, rubber-suited robot and start karate chopping randomly.
instruct and warp the next generation into the sort of deformed creatures that are capable of thriving in our thoroughly effed civilization. It's our duty to take the cult-ishly credulous young, those little sentient tampon pads who just absorb everything, and then feed them the blue liquid of Ultimate Truth.
No. Me and you need to step up, to become a set of Big Brothers and Big Sisters who have actually had big brothers and big sisters.
If not us, then who? Our career teachers? Well, if you combined all of your elementary teachers, you might scrape up enough social and real world skills to run an unsuccessful fourth-meal shift at Taco Bell.
We need volunteers willing to engage in a little child disabuse. To disabuse children of those dreamy notions that will eventually leave them shaking and strung-
Would a real big brother ever take you to the county fair or go "shoot hoops" with you? Sure, but only as the precursor to some sort of psychological torture. I still experience incontinence whenever I see a basketball, and my therapist says I'll probably never be able to eat funnel cakes without seizing. But those psychological calluses have perfectly prepared me for a life of shitty jobs and sadistic girl-friends.
Reichert is an Oberlin graduate student in law.
What Ralph Nader should be working on
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader spoke to a welcoming crowd of about 400 at Abe and Jake's Landing Oct. 9. He was introduced by Adam Wood, a candidate for student body president this past April and an avowed Ron Paul afficionado.
"We've had enough of Democrats," he insisted. "We've had enough of Republicans. They do the same things. They're the same thing."
Every third party candidate must rehash the obligatory rhetoric of our nation's bankrupt two-party system. But this year Americans actually do have a significant choice between the two major party's candidates. The quadrennial ritual of Nader's candidacy seems ineffectual and strikingly out of place.
positions he advocates.
Kevin Grunwald/KANSAN
His passion for consumer advocacy and political reform has become an admirable but unrealistic endeavor. This year's campaign will have even less of an influence than it has in the past. Nader's relentless insistence on the "two-party dictatorship" detracts from the more plausible and practicable
About 40 minutes into Nader's meandering speech, the large projection screen behind his lectern reverted from the Nader-Gonzalez logo to the soothing constellations of a Windows screensaver. It was a tragically appropriate symbol of his latest campaign for president.
All of us owe Nader for introducing crucial political issues into mainstream discourse. His challenge to the pernicious influence of corporations in politics remains as relevant today as it ever has been.
government to achieve the type of European-style proportional representation that he champions.
The problem is that Nader advocates the dismantling of the two-party system, not simply a change in the two parties' policies. It would take a drastic reworking of our
And this is precisely the positive role that third parties can play in American politics. They have been able to introduce new issues into the national discourse that the major parties have neglected. Take, for example, Eugene Debs' socialist party with its demands for workers' rights, many of which were eventually implemented in the New Deal.
The two-party system is inextricable from the type of single seat plurality and winner-take-all elections that we have used in the United States since this nation was founded. This won't change now. It won't change in 100 years.
I disagree with Adam Wood: Democrats and Republicans are not the same thing, and certainly not in this election.
But even if he were correct, he should challenge the two parties to change instead of challenging the premise of the system.
Thompson is a Topeka senior in economics and political science.
To contribute to Free for All, visit Kansan.com or call 785-864-0500.
Free for All, no offense or anything, but I really, really hope you stay sick online. And I hope you stay sick for the rest of your life.
--on every day.
--on every day.
--on every day.
Good luck on your marathon Break a leg.
1 ounce of gold equals 28.3495 grams.
I lost my car keys tonight, so if you see them, please let me know. I think they are somewhere between Murphy and the law building.
When I want to relax, I listen to Pantera.
For all of you who are stuck in Kansas,I'm halfway to Florida
--on every day.
I found a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kentucky.
--on every day.
I've been in the parking lot for five minutes just watching this guy wait for someone to get out of their parking spot. I know I'm supposed to be leaving, but this is just too fun
I thought leggings weren't pants. Isn't that the equivilant of wearing panty hose as clothing? At least panty hose
--on every day.
I don't know what should embarrass me more: the cat mutilator, the kickoff chant, the beating on Ohio Street or the Jesus-was-an abortionist letter to the editor. This school urks
--on every day.
To the girls in Fraser: Could you please lay off on the perfume? I'd really like to be able to walk down the hall without sufficing on the five ounces of the Eau de Stank you put
Will you please tell me why my favorite music channel in St. Louis is now all Christmas music and it's the middle of October?
Seriously guys, stop with the chant before the football games. You're making us look like a bunch of white-trash Missouri fans
Is it wrong that the presidential debates are only interesting when I'm high?
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Apparently the Amish are making infomercials now.
@KANSAN.COM
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