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Wednesday, June 29, 1994
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
AIDS home test plan needs improvement
Last week former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said that home AIDS testing "is the single most important weapon we could employ to fight AIDS." Home AIDS testing could be an important weapon, but right now the plan has significant problems.
To use the test, which would cost about $30, buyers would prick their fingers, send blood samples to a lab and get the results by telephone.
Another problem arises because the average person may not send an adequate blood sample.
The kit is supposed to target the poor, but it is unlikely that this group can afford it.
Kit users would maintain anonymity by calling the lab and identifying themselves through a unique bar code. Eleven states have policies that would endanger this anonymity, however, because they require the names of HIV-patients to be reported to the state.
It is appropriate that the call would be made by a counselor, but it wouldn't be enough. Would the person seek adequate health care and professional counseling?
The most pressing problem involves getting test results over the phone. Those who are HIV-positive would hear the news from a counselor who would direct them to other sources of help and advice.
An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration has recommended pilot testing of the AIDS kit. This may help solve some current problems. All of these problems need to be addressed before the kit can be made available for everyone.
KATIE GREENWALD FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Responsibility is basis of family welfare plan
A "family cap" program now being implemented in Wisconsin is an appropriate attempt to reform welfare and improve the circumstances of welfare mothers.
Under the plan, a woman on welfare would not receive additional benefits if a baby is born to her more than 10 months after she goes on welfare.
Such a plan may seem Orwellian in attempting to influence procreation, but it encourages women to responsibly use the money provided to them by the government.
The issue is responsibility, not morality. The plan does not restrict sexual activity. Women on welfare would still receive Medicaid, which provides birth control.
Women on welfare can still have additional children. But the financial responsibility of additional children is completely theirs. People who aren't on welfare don't get a raise when they have an additional child.
The welfare funds currently provided to mothers are meager at best. Women currently receive $89 a month for an additional child. This amount is far less than the money needed to adequately care for an infant.
Because of this economic reality, women subsisting on welfare are already in a financial hole. The family cap plan encourages them not to dig themselves and their dependent children deeper into that hole. It encourages mothers, for the sake of their children, to live within their means. It encourages them to get off of welfare.
The Wisconsin plan is not an attack on women or their rights. Instead, it is a plan founded in reality and based on responsibility. It is an appropriate response to the excesses that have helped to make welfare a national emergency.
MATT HOOD FOR EDITORIAL BOARD
KANSAN STAFF
DAVID STEWART
Editor
JUDITH STANDLEY Business manager
KATIE GREENWALD Managing editor
SHELLY McCONNELL Director of client services
TOM EBLEN General manager, news adviser
JEANNE HINES Sales and marketing adviser
CATHERINE ELLSWORTH Systems coordinator
Business Staff
Campus ... Roberta Johnson
            Susan White
Editorial ... Matt Hood
Photo ... Martin Altaxtaden
Graphics ... Dave Campbell
Copy Chief ... Katie Paton
Editors
Regional zone mgr ..J.J. Cook
Production mgr ..Emily Gibson
Classified mgr ..Heather Nielsen
Retail zone mgr ..Mindy Blum
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Moral judgment is a losing bet in the riverboat gambling game
The mammoth paddles of riverboat casinos have begun to churn the waters of the Missouri River. Just as the river water swirls like an angry storm behind these powerful boats, I am faced with a potent mental and moral tempest. The strong currents of an anti-gambling, religious rearing crash wave-like against a new more liberal outlook on life.
Ever since I heard that riverboat casinos now troll the Missouri River, I have tried to rationally accommodate my personal distaste for gambling with the reality that it now resides in my home city.
In debating the issue of gambling, I'm influenced by my years spent in a strict Christian church. This church views gambling in any form as morally wrong.
At the same time I attended this church, however, I was raised by extremely realistic parents. They knew that neither they nor the church could shelter me forever.
They are morally upstanding people who taught me not to be judgmental of others.
I tried logically to navigate through my moral storm. I still don't like riverboat gambling.
Despite my problems with riverboat gambling, I look to the lesson of my parents. Unlike my church, I cannot
EDITORIAL EDITOR
allow myself to judge riverboat gambling as wrong
It is not my job to condemn people who want to gamble. Gambling is not a required activity. People play of their own free will. If people want to risk their hard-earned money on the good likelihood that they will lose it, that is their business.
Some critics of riverboat gambling preach about its addictive nature. They claim that in fact people aren't acting of their own free will. Gamblers blow money that should be spent on their families because of the evil and addictive nature of the game.
As cold as it may sound, I support the notion that one must allow others to make their own mistakes. Riverboat gambling doesn't force these
individuals to squander their money. My condemnation of riverboat gambling would not change the confused sense of priorities that cause the self-destruction of addict gamblers and the suffering of their families.
Critics of gambling have further ammunition when they cite statistics that link a rise in crime to the introduction of riverboat gambling. How, though, can this link be accurately proven? There is a problem with causality. Statistics may show that crime has increased in a city that has recently opened its shores to riverboat gambling. But that doesn't mean that riverboat gambling is the sole and direct cause of this crime.
It is almost impossible to accurately predict that the introduction of riverboat gambling into Kansas City will cause a rise in crime. It's equally impossible to say that it won't. The prediction becomes as confused as the tumbling sediment in the riverboat's wake.
The number of stray dogs picked up by animal control may also have risen in this city. But, did the introduction of riverboat gambling cause this?
I can sum it up in the word "tolerance."
How then can I, with my personal dislike for riverboat gambling, accept
the new cruises on the Missouri River?
It is not my place, however, to try and deny the experience of riverboat gambling to those who willingly want to participate. Furthermore, I will not judge those who want to take a ride, or be taken for a ride, on board river boat casinos.
The evidence on crime is still ambiguous. Should it be proven that riverboat gambling is corrupting Kansas City, my acceptance would immediately become a call for action.
Matt Hood Is an Overland Park sophomore in Journalism.
On July 4th,put away life's fireworks
Around every holiday, we are bombarded with lectures about how "we've forgotten what (fill in the blank with a holiday) should mean to us..."
You see, my typical day starts early in the morning. I commute to Lawrence for a9a.m. class, and I drive back home to Overland Park immediately after class, eating my lunch on the road. From class I go to work until 5:30 p.m. when I come home, tired and frazzled and attempt to do my homework. After several hours, I am
While these guilt trips are usually issued around Christmas, Independence Day is also open season for criticisms of our declining sense of what it means to be an American and other such complaints.
So I will not attempt to convince you to spend hours and hours this July 4 thinking about how lucky you are to be an American or to reflect on the freedoms that we are so lucky to have at our disposal in the good old U.S.A. My concern is not that we have lost sight of what it means to be an American, but on what it means to be human. Therefore, I encourage you to spend your day off relaxing, as I plan to do.
As I was driving from class to work the other day, eating my peanut butter and crackers, I tried to think of what I do every year on the 4th of July, and I honestly couldn't separate one July 4 from the next. There isn't a traditional family or neighborhood picnic or any other activity that I can remember
so tired that my eyes are burning, and I fall into bed, where I am tormented by the feeling that I should have accomplished more during my day.
I'm sure I'm not the only person living this way. We all tend to think that we have so much more to do than everyone else. The fact that my pile of work lately has been never-ending wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't one of my life's recurring themes.
The first part of my ultimate relaxation plan is spending time in my favorite environment: somewhere outside with a lot of trees and a beautiful blue sky filled with big, white blowfly clouds and a warm sun. I want to hear the sound of birds singing in a
throughout my whole lifetime of Independence Days.
Since I couldn't clearly remember participating in any 4th of July activities (except fireworks), I started to mentally trace backward in an effort to figure out of what exactly my previous independence Days consisted. I realized that I have spent every single July 4 working since I was 14 years old.
But this year I'm making sure that I do not even attempt one single task or chore on Independence Day. I will have July 4 completely to myself, whether I have plans or not. I will forget about work and homework and stress. My only activity, which I plan to make a tradition from now on, is to take time out on July 4 to relax. As a matter of fact, I am taking lightening up so seriously this year that I have outlined a formula for optimum relaxation.
light, cool breeze.
The most integral part of my relaxation plan, however, is laughter. Everyone should, if nothing else, have a good hearty laugh this July 4. We should sit around telling jokes and funny anecdotes all day. I can't remember the last time I had an opportunity to sit around with friends, telling jokes (even stupid ones). This brings me to my third essential for complete relaxation.
We get so caught up in assignments, deadlines, and schedules that we don't take time out often enough. This 4th of July provides an excellent opportunity for all of us, no matter how busy and stressed out, to escape our schedules and responsibilities. This year, and from now on, the 4th of July will represent me the freedom to relax.
Amanda Traugher is an Overland Park sophomore in Journalism.
The final component of my plan is to spend the entire day with people who are important to me. I spend so little time with family and friends anymore that quality time will be good for all of us.
Welfare plan would be costly to tax payers
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
It's doubtful that voters who listened to Bill Clinton's welfare reform plan understood it to mean that he would propose $9 billion in new spending. This money would be used to move one in seven welfare recipients into job training programs or into government-created jobs if private jobs don't materialize.
Yet that's the gist of the welfare overhaul the president formally announced. In effect, it calls for an expansion of government's role in the lives of welfare dependents.
The president's plan includes a
two-year limit on welfare benefits for recipients born after 1971. But the plan cushions that stick with employment training programs, child care services and government-subsidized jobs that could turn into a new and even more expensive form of dependency.
Byintroducing welfarereformlegislation that has little chance of being approved in a year when Congress is consumed with his health care proposal, Clinton appears to be underlining the importance of welfare as a political, not a policy, concern.
THE NEWS GREENVILLE, S.C.
N. Korean reports vary concerning nuclear arms
There are conflicting reports about North Korea's nuclear arms status. Some accounts say that President Kim has at least one bomb and can build several more at short notice. Other sources signal that he has not crossed the nuclear Rubicon yet.
Optimists might think that Jimmy Carter's 7,000-mile trip satisfied the North Korean leader's frustrated yearning to be treated with dignity by the United States. Kim was all smiles at his meeting with Carter and who knows, the smiles may mean something.
If there is one unanswered question, it is whether Carter's earnestness and simplicity led him to read too much into Kim's peace talk.
However, Carter has in recent years built up a worldwide reputation for mediation and conflict resolution. He brought the Ethiopians and the Eritreans together to negotiate an end to a 28-year-old war and kept in touch with Somalia's warlord, Aidid, in an effort to resolve the Somaliian conflict.
Carter has done his bit, but Clinton should maintain a tough stance until North Korea keeps its peace pledges.
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES