Editorials
Blind to poverty
A friend and I were in Kansas City one afternoon a few weeks ago just for some shopping. At one point in our jaunt we wandered into one of the city's large discount stores and ended up in the clothing department, looking at blouses.
We were amazed at the prices which started at $.94 minimum and $2.67 maximum. At these prices, we couldn't afford to pass the blouses by and decided to buy one for fun—just to wear with slacks or loafing clothes, of course, never to wear seriously for good. We were talking and laughing and saying things like "I can't believe these prices, can you?" and "We've got to have one even if it falls apart in a month."
AND, THEN, WE noticed the rather serious, yet wishful look, that another shopper, an older woman in a plain brown coat, gave us.
It was almost a look of envy and surprise that we could say what we were. She was examining the clothes much more intently than we. She appeared to consider her shopping as desperate business.
It struck us that we might be looking at what had always seemed a very vague, dimly perceived play in the U.S.-the tragedy of the American poor. The woman was part of a scene that was repeated daily in such stores. What we were buying for a lark was the limit of what she could afford and, perhaps, even that was too expensive.
These cheap clothes, the discount stores are part of what Michael Harrington was talking about in his book The Other America when he said that we have a very convenient, comfortable poverty because this nation's 36-40,000,000 poor, 15 per cent of our population, are out of sight and out of mind. The poor aren't in rags, begging in the streets upon which their countrymen pass. The affluent 85 per cent are offered handy blinders in the form of discount stores that sell cheap clothes, super freeways that bypass the slums, and suburbs that protect them from the poor.
THIS IS NOT TO advocate getting rid of any of these things, but only to note, that they help make it awfully easy for some to question, deride, and ignore the attempts to aid the poor—the War on Poverty, unemployment compensation, social security, and private programs. Apparently many Americans simply do not see (certainly, it couldn't be that they don't care) that some face barren lives in a vicious circle of slums, in migrant worker camps—wages $1 a day, on desert Indian reservations, in broken-down farms that they cannot change without outside help.
It is a shame and outrage upon a nation, the richest in the world, that there are men, women, and children who must scrape and subsist in poverty while the rest go merrily along watching James Bond movies, deciding whether to buy Junior a GTO or Thunderbird, and choosing where to vacation next summer—Mexico or Canada.
It would be interesting to learn the reasoning of those who can turn their heads and conclude that little needs to be done to give the poor a chance to find the dignity they, themselves, have and the ability and choice to buy a blouse somewhere besides a drugstore, which they enjoy.
SCHWEITZER HAS said it best: "It became steadily clearer to me that I had not the inward right to take as a matter of course my happy youth, my good health and my power to work. Out of the depths of my feeling of happiness, there grew up gradually within me an understanding . . . that . . . whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others."
Oh yes, and the blouse that I bought? It looks fairly good. It is a little smaller than normal size and shrinks a little each washing.
But, of course, you can't tell that it's starting to choke unless you're wearing it yourself.
— Rosalie Jenkins
The People Say...
Mr. Justin Beck
re: Your letter to the Editor printed in the Kansan on Nov. 30.1965.
Dear Mr. Beck:
SINCE OUR LAST MEETING (which was also our first) you have undertaken the worthy task of reorganizing student government at the University of Kansas. In this undertaking I offer you the assistance of myself and any of my 400+ colleagues within student government.
However, before fully engaging in such a noble and admittedly needed task, I suggest that you garner more information than you have managed to consume to date. Within the last two-and-a-half years I have never seen you in attendance at a Vox Populi meeting, an All Student Council Meeting, and although I have not attended the University Party meetings this year, I have an irrefutable source who
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The editors welcome letters of opinion from all Kansan readers. We reserve the right to edit all letters for style, content and unreasonable length. All letters must be signed. Opinions expressed in letters do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors.
Daily Kansan
Tuesday, January 11, 1965
assures me that you are not a religious follower of that organization either. May I suggest that you owe it to yourself and your multitude of followers to make better use of the information sources available to you.
2
Everyone associated with student government realizes that changes are needed—however, such changes as are needed are not easily effected without damaging the efficiency of student government in carrying out the myriad of tasks currently charged to it. You have failed to mention in your letter just what programs you would see changed—you did mention the problem of "in loco parentis," which has been a major topic of discussion on this campus for as many years as many members of the administration can remember. Since you did specify this topic, I invite you to watch for the results of the meeting of the Human Rights Committee (an ASC Committee) Sunday, December 5, in the Pan American Room of the Union. I am certain that it will be a great relief to you to see the number and types of people actively concerned with this matter. In addition to the HRC, the Deans' Advisory Council is currently involved in discussions of this (and many other) tenies. Also, the AWS is faced with certain aspects of this situation every year, and reviews it with astonishing accuracy each time it is brought up.
I don't wish to admonish you for your interests-I would instead suggest that you channel your interests into constructive criticism-i.e., suggesting improvements and/or changes in existing and/or proposed programs of the ASC, AWS, AURH, IFC, Panhellenic, etc. Those of us involved in these activities invite your questions and suggestions. Indeed, the improvements we so consistently seek should ideally come from you, the people we try to represent.
Bill Robinson
Great Bend junior
Student Body vice-pres.
Speech Colloquium Set for Today
Professor Lewin Goff, director of the theater at KU, is scheduled to speak Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. in the monthly Speech and Drama Colloquium organized by the School of Fine Arts for graduate students and faculty.
Prof. Goff will discuss his visit to the International Theater Institute 11th Congress that was held in Tel Aviv, Israel, last June.
The Congress was a committee meeting which had to do with theater.
Prof. Goff is going to report principally on papers and speeches that were made by people who attended the committee. The subject of the congress was "Problems of Training Students for the Classical Theater," particularly Shakespeare.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
**SORRY ABOUT YESTERDAY. MISS LATOUR.** — IT'S JUST THAT WE
VEGG SELFDOWN HAVE A GIRL ENROLLED IN AN ENGINEERING CLASS,
'Best-yet' look at Henry James
HENRY JAMES, by F. W. Dupce (Delta, $1.95).
Generally regarded as one of the best biographies of Henry James is this new paperback. Not nearly so detailed as the great volumes by Leon Edel, the book still is likely to be more satisfactory to the average reader—if the average reader reads about Henry James.
For James, in all probability, still belongs more to the English professors than to the reading public. And this paperback is notwithstanding. Bookstalls offer the many James novels, but few of us likely read more than "The Turn of the Screw," "The American" or "The Portrait of a Lady."
The Dupee book is both straight biography and critical evaluation. There is little doubt about the significance of Henry James, and it is unfortunate that he has never truly become one of the "popular" novelists. He was American to the roots, even though he spent much of his time abroad. Always America was his theme—the innocent American, usually, in conflict with the more sophisticated European. His ventures on American soil—in the literary sense—were never as successful, though "The Bostonians" is worth taking a new look at.
We were thinking...
Commonplace people dislike tragedy, because they dare not suffer and cannot exult. The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be
scorned. A carelessness of life and beauty marks the glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history.
John Masefield
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