Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Spencer Duncan, Editor
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Monday, October 27,1997
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Examining
Dennis Dailey responds to Promise Keepers
Andy, Andy, Andy!! Don't you find it just a bit ironic "that the only reason women don't attend the conferences (Promise Keepers) is because men are more open and honest about their family relationships when they are with other men. It's harder to talk about your relationship with your parents when they're in the room with you; same goes for marriage relationships."
My understanding was that women didn't go to the Promise Keepers meeting because they were not invited.
But more to the point. How sad it is that men can't be emotionally expressive, open and honest with their partners. Maybe what we should be doing is bringing men and women together to explore the struggles and learn new skills that would allow for more emotional intimacy in the marital relationship or any other relationship for that matter. "Love, protection and biblical values" may very well "build strong marriages." But it also might be helpful if men could truly communicate the fullness of their emotional lives with their life partners. In my clinical experience, this is one of the most frequent complaints that women have about the men in their lives. They (women) often know what men think (being intellectual or rational) or what they would do (being active or instrumental), but they often have no idea how men feel.
Now I'm sure that some of the emotional expressiveness that Promise Keepers men may learn would be transferred to their marital relationships, and that is good. But marital relationships are a two-way street, not a one-way street. It is the conjoint, interactive experience of both partners that makes the marital relationship a rich and safe place to share life's drama.
I already have had the experience of working with a couple whose marriage is deeply troubled, in part, because the Promise Keeper man came home from his meeting and tried to remake his marriage in the image of Promise Keepers without really seeking input of his partner. He was going to fix it, and that was all there was to it, given
that he was "head of the house."
Dennis M. Dailey
professor of social welfare
'Night' rally didn't respect all voices
All right, after reading the opinion on Oct. 20, I have no choice but to make a comment. The last time I checked, this is America and every person has the right to express what they think. I personally think the sorority comments and actions may have been in poor taste, but the fact is if they do not approve of the gay lifestyle, they can voice opinion against it. People need to grow up. All americans have the same rights. Just because a person goes against your beliefs, thoughts or actions does not give you the right to politically force them to have their thoughts stifled. If you want a full commentary, contact me and I will help these academic idealists come back to reality.
Robert Schwartz DeSoto graduate student
Stadium, not team,
is an embarrassment
For what it’s worth the University of Kansas should be embarrassed. Not for the game Saturday night, not even for the pathetic turnout of the fans, even though I thought I was in Lincoln. Our embarrassment lies in the stadium. I will start with the structure in general. Rebar sticking out everywhere from the structure, window screens torn out from their frames. Broken windows boarded up with plywood. The bathroom designs are terrible and they need to be redone. I encourage anyone to take a trip north a few hours next year when we play Nebraska and see what a college football stadium looks like. Heck, I even encourage you all to go see the Bob Devany Center, if you’re a basketball fan. Then there’s the concession stands. Come on, even the “Kansan” predicted 15,000 to 20,000 fans from Nebraska to be here in town. Two years ago there were nearly that amount here in Lawrence and yet whoever is in charge of the concessions failed to prepare for that amount of people. When the lights went out during the first half, I went down to purchase some food and hot chocolate. While standing in line, I found out that they were out of almost everything on the menu. It wasn't even half time yet! When I finally got to the front of the line and ordered my hot chocolate, it was cold. It doesn't take a neurosurgeon to realize that this sort of thing reflects poorly on our campus. This affects recruiting both for students and athletes, therefore limiting the amount of out of state students coming to the University, and as we all know, they pay a lot of tuition money to our school and help fund this University. Most of all I am just embarrassed that we have such poor facilities.
Butch Hogan Lawrence sophomore
KU employees doing more work with less
After reading the caption to the picture on the front page of the Oct. 21 "Kansan," I, as a working member of facilities operations, wonder just how informed the reporters were that decided on such an inappropriate statement such as, "How many facilities operations employees does it take"
For those reporters' information, and the general public as well, I think some approximate figures will tell the tale. In the past two years, most of Facilities Operations labor budget has been cut by nearly a third. This means, the real terms, that there are less facilities operations personnel to do the work of landscape, plumbing, housekeeping etc. while the square footage of buildings to maintain continues to grow. Skilled craftsmen like to do things correct the first time, and this includes being safe while doing the job. I am in no way complaining about our loss of personnel, but you see, it seems to take less and less employees to do more and more work every year. Your caption with corresponding picture is simply unacceptable.
Kansan staff
facilities operations employee
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Broadon your mind: Today's quote
“The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good.”
Rufus Choate
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My faith in humanity was damaged this weekend.
'Husker pressure marks players in many ways
Dave Morantz
dmonartz@kansan.com
M An invasion of Winnebagos and red, white and black Starter jackets forever
changed my opinion of college athletics and opened my eyes to the insane yet powerful desire to follow a football team across the nation.
It began Friday night with the preliminary wave of fans. Middle-aged Cornhuskers, clad in Nebraska paraphernalia, filed into a quiet downtown pub. They stood huddled in small groups, like their college-aged heroes on the field, clutching bottles of Bud Light.
Standing in the middle of dart games, they laughed and yelled out predictions to the next day's football game, hoping to draw comments from local bar patrons. Like most everyone else at the bar not wearing a big "N" on their forehead, I paid them little attention.
But the next day they multiplied. Like a red tide at sea they spread across Lawrence, tearing up gardens and yards as they beached their mammoth vehicles in search of spots to tailgate.
"Whooo! I said, Whooo!" one fan yelled after stepping out of a red bus that he parked in front of my apartment building. Making sure everyone knew a Nebraska fan had arrived, he reached through the driver-side window and honked the horn. The first few notes of the Nebraska fight song rang through the Oread neighborhood.
"Whooo!" he screamed, arms raised to the sky. "Husker power, Husker power. Whooo!"
Sure, they have a lot to brag about. Their football team could challenge many professional teams. Their offensive linemen push opponents wherever they desire, giving the team an option play that NFL coaches would kill to have. And most impressively, they somehow find a way to attract the best high school football prospects to Lincoln, Neb., a town with about as much appeal as Waco, Texas.
But Nebraska football, like many big-time
Now, like many other ex-Cornhuskers, he follows the team as it strive for another undefeated season and another national championship. He adds to a fan base that cursed quarterback Scott Frost last year for the team's loss to Arizona State, its first loss in two seasons.
college athletic programs, has a dark side,
created by the expectations and pressures of the more 15,000 Nebraska fans that enveloped Lawrence this weekend.
Of all the fans that came to Lawrence this weekend, this one knows what it's like to enter an opponent's stadium and receive more fan support than the home team. He knows the joy of defeating a quality opponent. He also knows the pain of losing.
But does he remember the pressure that drove him to steroids?
"Do you want to know what college football is all about?" a former Nebraska player in his late 20s asked her.
A friend of mine saw the most graphic sign of this dark side Saturday night at a downtown bar.
He physically suffered from the pressure to win, and now he contributes to it.
Yet a loss could be devastating for the Nebraska players, many of whom are just out of high school. The criticism of crazed Cornhusker fans rivals the cheap shots of New York sportswriters.
He rolled up his left sleeve to reveal a dark circle at the base of his forearm. A mark, the player said, of years of steroid abuse while competing for the Cornhuskers.
Each Saturday, a part of me wants Nebraska to lose. Not because of their players' off-field problems, or because of the obnoxious fan who was so proud of his melodious horn. I just don't like teams that never lose.
I wonder if the fan camped out in my front yard on Saturday realizes that his idols, his motivation for trekking across the country through snow and rain, are merely college students—physically unmatched, but emotionally inexperienced.
I would hope the inhumane pressure to win does not drive a current Nebraska player to sit in a Lawrence bar in 10 years and display what college football is all about.
Morantz is an Overland Park senior in journalism and a campus editor.
Psyche of psychology major turned engineer
M introduction to Physics occurred in the fall of 1988, my first year of college. For those of you doing the math, yes I should be about finished with
I was majoring in Psychology at the University of Redlands, and my best friend, Mike Hammer-smith, was majoring in physics. Physics, I would later learn, is basically the study of things that move. And things that move have an interesting way of always hitting something else.
Warren Garlock opinion@kansan.com
ing character; he stood 7-feet tall, 3-feet wide, and had hair down to his butt. Mike also believed that the best way to sleep was in two-hour shifts, four times a day. He lived in his own world, followed his own rules and beat everyone else by being better. Then one day he just disappeared.
One afternoon, Mike and I were sitting in the dining hall, discussing the lumps in tiapioca pudding, when he said:
Mike was an interest-
"It would be better to wreck a motorcycle at 10 mph than to have it fall over on top of you."
I thought this was a rather strange thing to say. Not to mention, entirely off the subject.
The faster an object is traveling when it hits the ground, the smaller the angle of impact, and thus less force is exerted on the object at any given moment in time. Mike explained. Mike actually talked like this. And it meant that I frequently was using physics Cliff's Notes in a feeble effort to maintain any conversation with him. For you non scientists, what Mike was trying to say is that if an object is traveling at a high rate of speed then the force of the impact is decreased and stretched out over time and distance. For example: If you were to jump off the Empire State building and land on the sidewalk below then you might make a splat 20 feet in diameter. But if you jumped off with a rocket attached to your back, assuming there were no buildings or trees to hit on the way down, and traveled at a speed of 20,000 mph then pieces of you
After some minor adjustments, a second plate was loaded and released. The plate sailed across the parking lot like a frisbee, hitting the ground three times before shattering. We shot 10 plates that afternoon. Every one of them broke, but not until their third or fourth impact. I felt we had successfully demonstrated that Mike's theory was correct.
Back to the story. Mike and I got into a small argument. Since he was far too big for me to beat up, I told him to prove it. He devised a contraption that would fling a dinner plate off a 6-foot platform.
What I discovered that afternoon is that I no longer had an interest in psychology. Science appealed to something primal, something I couldn't deny; I really enjoyed breaking stuff. Science is all about breaking; nuclear chemists split atoms, physicists study impacts, biologists and doctors cut, and geologists are constantly hitting very large rocks with very small hammers. From that point on, I was on a quest to disassemble, explode or otherwise break anything I could find.
Predictably, it broke into about a million and half pieces. Then Mike placed a plate on the platform and flipped the switch that would fling it across the parking lot. Fling, it did. The plate missed my skull by about three inches and slammed into the side of our dormitory at about 60 mph. Lucky for us, the plate broke.
Since our dining hall used only Corel plates, which are not supposed to break, I insisted that we buy some regular dinner plates. Mike did, eventually, prove to me that Corel plates will break if dropped correctly, but that's another story.
With our plates and Mike's contraption, we set out to test this theory of impacts. First we took a plate and dropped it on the ground.
would be strewn across four states. Oh, and
it would take longer than a simple splat.
One more lesson I learned that day; if you break 10 plates in the University of Redlands parking lot, campus security will bring you a broom and watch you clean up the mess.
Garlock is a Leavenworth senior in engineering.
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