KANSAN Comment
Editor in Chief, Ron Yates
Business Manager, Flatton
Editorial Editor Alan T. Jones
Editorial Editor Don Westerhaus
News Editor Jonas Wiese
Sports Editor Bob Kearne
Ad Manager Kathy Sanders
--considered is the importance of the life taken.
Voting begins today
There is an election today and tomorrow. Vote in it. (ATJ)
An eye for an eye?
The trial and conviction of Sirhan B. Sirhan have brought up a serious question in punishment, one that has been an object of argument in this country through much of this century. That is the question of capital punishment.
Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder and this leaves only two alternatives open to the jury that must decide his fate. The first is life imprisonment and the other is death in the gas chamber. The choice has been left to the same jury that convicted him.
In the face of mounting opposition to capital punishment this jury faces a very real and difficult decision. There is little doubt that Sirhan killed Robert F. Kennedy. There was even before the conviction was announced.
The jury has to consider the flagrance of the crime, the premeditation and the kind of person who would actually take the life of a man because of his thoughts and beliefs. One important factor to be
Had Kennedy lived, the chances are he would have been a major contender for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. If he had not made it in 1968, he certainly would have been in 1972. A question to ask here is whether that life is more important than any other. Another might be would Robert Kennedy wish revenge?
The Bible, which is notorious for being open to interpretation fails to agree within itself on what to do. Is it "an eye for an eye" or is it "Thou shalt not kill?" One would feel the Christian ethic calls for the latter but then many people have been killed in the name of the Christian ethic.
The fact remains that men are meeting to decide whether or not to take a man's life. The same decisions are made in other areas of public office but nowhere is the decision so personal. No where but in a civilized land do people sit and decide whether to kill another man. (ATJ)
Readers' write
To the Editor:
104174 is just a number and nothing but a number. 104174 is computerized, typed and recorded. 104174, like all other numbers, receives impersonal treatment, so long as it is here studying at this university.
This letter of grievance concerns an application 104174 made to the Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures for the Russian Summer Institute in Lenigrad. As good as 104174's application was, as confirmed by Chairman Conrad himself, it was rejected on the grounds that 104174 has been a member of the human race for only nineteen years. Chairman Conrad thus concluded that 104174's "emotional stability" was not as it should be, in order to be able to meet "the frustrations one encounters when one travels abroad". 104174 believes that the only trouble with Chairman Conrad's decision, as honorable as it may be, is that 104174 has lived in Europe for just eight years, and has been dealt with many "frustrations" in the past.
Furthermore 104174 believes that there can be no better qualification than experience abroad to meet the requirements of the program. Yet, because 104174 has lived for nineteen years, and only because of that, Chairman Conrad ruthlessly refused that number the right to advance in it's education. Age discrimination? Frustrating, isn't it? But the honorable Chairman Conrad is most certainly correct in his most honorable decision of wisdom, because numbers are ALWAYS numbers, and should not be allowed to challenge decisions made by human beings.
Tom Lo Bello 104174
To the Editor:
This letter is in response to Judi Diebolt's article on the black pom-pon squad (Someone's Missing). It seems to me that she (and a great many other people) are trying to oversimplify and to draw analogies where they don't exist.
First of all, blacks obviously aren't the same as redheads or journalism majors; we don't treat them the same and anyone who thinks we do is lying to himself. It would be nice if they were all the same, but they aren't and it's white America's fault that the situation is this way. Throughout our history, blacks have been excluded from the mainstream of American life through the racism which white Americans have perpetuated an institutionalized.
The few inroads that were made usually cost the Negro his blackness; he became, as Jesse Jackson so aptly put it, an Oreo -black on the outside, white on the inside. At the same time, we have done our best to suppress black heritage and culture, leaving the Negro with nothing save alienation. We have expected him to content to watch whites run the show and to watch from as low a position as we could relegate to him.
Blacks have obviously grown fed up with subservience and have begun to assert themselves and their blackness. They realize (as we never can) that it's useless to try for white acceptance because they too would have to become Oreos. Rather, they have decided to remain and to perpetuate "black"—on their own, without whitey's help. Realizing this new black "militancy," whites have tried to appease blacks by concessions, hoping to continue running things through tokenism. The trouble with tokens is that, although blacks and other minorities are involved, the act itself is white. It's like giving a child a toy when all the other children around him have ten toys and expecting him to be satisfied with that one toy.
It seems to me that blacks wouldn't want tokens because they are white gifts to blacks and not really black. Rather, they want (and deserve) black things with which they can identify. Whether one or three black girls on a white pom-pon squad, it's still tokenism. Only a black pom-pon squad with black girls doing black things can truly represent blacks; a white squad represents white ethic and culture, something from which we have alienated the blacks too long for us to expect them to accept.
We, as whites, must let them assert their blackness—must let them achieve an equal status on their own—and then worry about integration. I'm a little sorry it has to be this way, but it's a little late to "forgive and forget" after 350 years of rejection on our part. America and its institutions are permeated with racism, and it will take white acceptance of blackness to end it, a phenomenon which I don't think we'll see in the near future (blacks have had to accept whiteness since the first slave boat landed in 1619).
Obviously this letter is written from whitey's point of view, and I don't think any of us can really know blackness. But as white Americans we can try to understand what's happening; I'm afraid Miss Diebolt didn't try too hard.
Craig Cogswell
Former KU student now attending the University of Colorado
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