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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, March 13, 1968
Old age
A conference on aging took place in the Kansas Union Monday. It makes one recall a few items about age.
"Never ask a lady her age," Oliver Goldsmith cautions in "She Stoops to Conquer," and one English man obviously carried the point to its logical conclusion. He would rather be punished than report his wife's age to government officials. The wife, of course, thought his refusal was unnecessary.
But not everything about age is or that mature. That's not saying that age should be taken with overall seriousness even despite the formal treatment William Shakespeare seems to have given to it in his Seven Ages of Man.
Another aspect of age, after all, can be seen in Pepsi-Cola's claim that we are in "the Pepsi generation."
But much significance lies in the area of people's relations with the government in regard to age. In this country, for instance, medicine comes at age 65, independence from parental supervision at 21 (and also the right to vote), while induction into the armed forces starts at 18.
Workers get pensioned in their sixties; children must be sent to school at five.
In Africa, old age carries with it such benefits as respect from the younger generation, while anthropologists report that there were cultures in which a man must be kille'd when he
was in his prime so that he would not be a weakling in the next world.
Such, of course, is not the only tragic consequence of growing old. Even in this culture a man may lose his job if he is too old for it yet too young to retire—at least if automation so dictates.
But there are discernible trends. In this country, there is one destination other than death. It is the grim circumstance of neglect, loneliness, poverty, confinement, alienation from the main stream of society, from the warmth of family friends who moved away singly at age 21 or were captured as wives at even earlier ages.
And so it goes around and around in a big circle seemingly without a boundary, seemingly encompassing all activities of mankind and seemingly beyond the domain of adequate definition.
Old age is not only being in nursing homes where professionals, whether in Florida or Kansas City, are more likely to be money grabbing than sympathetic to one's condition and crying needs, it is also the grim circumstances of waiting, waiting for the approach of death. No doubt there is a generally understood dread of that unforgettable day in our lives when we shall each admit that we are old.
— Swaecou Conateh Assistant Editorial Editor
'Don't Be Discouraged—I Still Believe In You'
Letter to the editor
Draft symptoms
To the Editor:
I am now a young man in what I feel is the prime of my life. I am engaged, very much in love, and very happy. I give life much thought and I have many wonderful plans for Sue and myself. But, the Selective Service also feels that I am in the prime of my life. Here lies my one regret, my one very large unhappiness.
I, a pacifist, oppose war and the selective service system. For four years, now, the draft has put great pressure on me and upon most other young men in America. I look back sadly and wonder why I cannot be free to dissent quietly and to live the life I really want, free from pressure.
I have, after much thought, established many ideals about this war, about all war, and about the Army. I am a pacifist and believe that the taking of a human life is very wrong, something to be prevented. I refuse to take a life in war and I feel that if increasingly larger numbers of men would faithfully stand up and refuse to take a life there might one day come an end to all wars.
Games of politics and war must end and I stand up a pacifist, even if I must stand alone. For too many generations mankind has killed his brother. I must speak out and say it has been very wrong, very sad.
This war we carry on today is greatly misunderstood. That the
The Army puts men in masses, makes them think as one. A man's identity, his ability to feel things as an individual is his greatest possession. Because the United States Army in so many ways crushes a man's individuality, I dissent from its policy.
Chinese will take over the earth is for the most part propaganda and mistrust. Why then is the U.S. fighting this war?
The Chinese resent United States intervention in Vietnam and it is horrifying to think that they might someday resent our intrusion enough to force us into battle. The United States made a serious mistake when it became entangled in Vietnam, Because I feel this war is so wrong and misunderstood, because I do not see why we continue to fight in Vietnam, I oppose the war and refuse to fight in it.
I want to be free from worry and pressure, yet the draft has proved a constant worry, a worry that increases as the day of my graduation approaches. I want to be free to marry, to carry out my love life, and to begin a family without interruption. To be forced to waste two years of my life is to me quite appalling.
Equally appalling is the thought of being in an Army Reserve unit, being required to attend weekly meetings, and thus having my freedom to travel greatly restricted. To travel is a great joy for myself and for many young couples. To be tied down in such a way to an organization whose purposes I disagree with is very wrong.
These are my reasons and opinions. Whether you think them right or wrong is up to you. I may stand by myself in my beliefs, but I force them on nobody else. I have one regret and at times it depresses me terribly. I only regret that I cannot be left alone in my dissent to live the life of peace and happiness I have chosen.
George Longenecker Reading, Pa., junior
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY kansan
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Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mail subscription rates: $8 a semester, $10 a year. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 66044. Online registration and employment advertised offered to all students without regard to color, creed or national origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
Draft-free symptoms
By Jack Harrington
"You are henceforth disqualified from entering into any military service. You will be ineligible for either induction or enlistment. You will receive a letter from your draft board in approximately six weeks which will reclassify you as I-Y."
As he spoke these words, the medical technician stamped my stack of papers and forms in the appropriate places and motioned for me to move on to the next "station" in the series of checkpoints through which one must pass in the process of undergoing an Armed Forces physical examination. If this guy senses any of my soaring inner elation, I wondered, would he so routinely process my file and thus grant me this pardon? Or would he be outraged that I was happy not to be allowed to serve my country?
The prisoner passed through the gates onto the streets of Kansas City a free man. I drove, jubilant at my new lease on life, to my wife's place of employment to tell her the news which would end our months of anxiety and fear, indecision and helplessness. I called my parents-in-law, who had requested that I tell them as soon as I knew, no matter how bad the news.
In Lawrence it was one of those prematurely warm Friday afternoons which students live for in the early spring; it was an afternoon that called for relaxing and relating while inhabiting the surface of someone's car hood in front of a nearby beer joint. I met some friends who had known of my appointment with the Grand Inquisitor that morning, and they too were proud and relieved that I would not be able to serve. Congratulations were in order, and I was called upon to make a speech—people whom I did not even know overheard, and also conveyed their greetings. Happiness these days, it seems, is either knowing or being someone who has beaten the system.
Possible cardiac disease. Sub-aortic stinosis or aortic valvular stinosis. Early essential hypertension. This is the diagnosis and probable cause of what is commonly known as a heart murmur and an increase in blood pressure, the anatomy of a I-Y classification. I face the real and present danger of falling victim to the disease which strikes down more people every year than does cancer, or the careless driver, or Vietnam. Yet I cannot remember feeling so happy, so alive—better to have a heart attack or fall severely restricted by heart disease than to become a carrier of the terminal sickness which infects and agonizes our twentieth century United States of America.
What kind of a commie-rat hippie peacenik queer is this, you ask? No, on second thought you probably don't ask that, because in your heart you know exactly who he is; you and me, that's who, and thousands of others of a growing mass of young Americans who are being called upon to fight this war which they do not believe in and which they are coming to see as only one of the many symptoms of this cancerous totalitarian illness (totalitarian because it permeates and infects the very being of society and everyone in it). He and his kind run the whole spectrum of social and political types—hippie and fraternity brother, liberal, conservative or apolitical (but not moderate—he senses that The Middle is Nowhere and expounds not moderation but irrelevance), law student, business student, "undeclared" student, nonstudent and even, yes, ROTC student; he hails from Johnson County middleclass-dom or any of a hundred small Kansas towns, many with a population smaller than that of the dormitory where he lives.
Dispensing with further examples, then, the message is clear: hardly anyone wants the war in Vietnam. Regardless of how one feels about Communists, or the military in general, fewer and fewer of our citizens feel that Vietnam is worth fighting and dying for. The fact becomes apparent that America is no longer a salable commodity on the world market, particularly when you realize that Americans won't even buy it. We force Americanism on people all over the world because they will not take it willingly, but how long can this state persist in forcing Americanism on Americans?
One tires, becomes painfully weary of redundant polemical bouts over the issues of our involvement in Vietnam, and even of its implications in society, politics, economics, etc., at home. The essence and focal point, however, of the Vietnam problem lies not within the Geneva Accords, or the SEATO treaty, or Walter Judd's International Communist Conspiracy, but within the answer to this question: What kind of society, what manner of nation-state, produces a man who prefers jail, desertion, expatriotism or physical disability or disease over the performance of a formerly heroic duty known in better times as "defending one's country"?
And what, furthermore, of the citizens who allow that state and that society to exist?
I celebrated last Friday. I drank and partied, enjoyng old friendships and the security of my lately-bestowed status, and trying, fearfully, only not to think. Laughing, somehow, seemed better than crying.