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University Daily Kansan
Thursday, Feb. 6, 1964
Danger Beyond
Now that the U.S. Government has confirmed and underscored the long series of major research projects that have established smoking as a major health hazard, an even more important and related question calls for study. This has to do with the attitudes of people toward the report and the light they throw on human values and a view of life.
The research undertaking we have in mind would begin with those heavy smokers who do not question the factual content or the conclusions of the report but who are indifferent to the meaning of the report to them personally.
A DOCTOR friend of ours who is a heavy smoker may be typical of this group.
"I didn't need the government's report to convince me that smoking can cause cancer or bronchitis or various forms of heart disease," he said. "I see the evidence almost every day in the hospital wards or among my own patients, and I have seen enough lung surgery to recognize the difference between the pink, healthy tissue of non-smokers and the discolored, foul tissue of smokers."
"You know all this and yet you yourself will continue to smoke?" I asked.
"Yes"
"Why?"
"I SUPPOSE I'm like many of my own patients. I've advised them to give up smoking but they'd rather not. It doesn't make that much difference to them if some years are lopped off their life. I'm very realistic when I tell them about the probabilities, especially when I point out that their chances of dying from cancer are about ten times greater than if they didn't smoke. But they really don't care. That's about the size of it. They really don't care."
"And you feel the same way?"
"Just about."
Here, then, is a problem even more serious than the problem leading up to it. And it calls for examination no less intensive and comprehensive than the research into the effects of tobacco on human health. For what is involved here are the ultimate questions a society has to ask about itself. What are the basic values of its people? How much sensitivity do they have to the fragility and preciousness of life? How shallow or profound is their awareness of the potentialities of a fully awakened human being? What connections do they see between a respect for life and healthy development of the society itself?
THESE QUESTIONS are even more vital to the nation's future than the size of our stockpiles
or the steady increase in the gross national product. Nothing can be more dangerous to a nation than the feeling by any considerable portion of its people that they really don't care whether they live or die. This indifference is not a narrow affair or a sometime thing. It affects the tone and quality of the entire community. It helps to determine a nation's goals and its ability to meet them. It colors the entire range of a nation's sensitivities and its perceptions.
THE RESEARCH project we have in mind would not confine itself to the attitudes of heavy smokers. It would attempt to find out to what extent an indifference to life may exist quite apart from the issue of smoking. And, if possible, the study might look into some of the causes. Is this a failure of education, or the home, or the church, or any of the other institutions, alone or in combination, that go into the making of a national environment? Is there any correlation between abundance and indifference? Is there any connection between insensitivity to the uniqueness of life and the spread of violence in all forms?
Whether or not an over-all study is made, there is nothing to stop the individual or the groups of which he is a part from pondering these questions and even acting on them. The entire field of education, for example, can ask itself whether content has been emphasized at the expense of attitudes. No lesson to be learned in school compares in importance with those lessons that develop respect for life and the possibilities of life. A school can be a supreme instrument for developing the human sensitivities. Not every student, even in college, may be capable of comprehending fully what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is talking about in "The Phenomenon of Man," or W. Macneile Dickson in "The Human Situation," or Dr. Walter B. Cannon in "The Wisdom of the Body." But the essential message in books such as these is clearly translatable and constitutes a specific challenge to all those who have access to the formative mind.
THE BASIC test of a society is represented not by what the society does for its people or even by what the people do for their society but by the ability of both the society and its people to comprehend the principles of human plasticity, human perfectibility and human growth. These are not marginal principles. They are the principles that make other principles possible.
Saturday Review January 25
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Dailijransan
University of Kansas student newspaper 111 Flint Hall
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from the morgue
A naked man was reported chasing three KU women on the 11th and Indiana block at 10 p.m. Monday, May 12, 1947. The women were on their way to Corbin Hall from a downtown show.
The man's shadow was noticed first by one of the women who turned, saw him and screamed. The woman ran to a car, which just had pulled up at the stop sign, and climbed in it without asking questions.
The exhibitionist, whose identity was not discovered, fled down the street and disappeared in the darkness.
Miss Margaret Habein, dean of women, and Henry Werner, dean of student affairs, made the following joint comment:
"We've assurance from the chief of police that immediate action will be taken and that a police car will be sent out at once."
"Why Not?"
Welsh Play Proves Amusing, Bit Corny
The corn was green and a trifle hard to digest last night at the University Theatre.
Emlyn Williams' three-act comedy, "The Corn Is Green," opened at Murphy Hall before a small but enthusiastic audience.
The plot of the play is hardly complex: a middle-aged spinster with an excess of time and money tries to start a school in a remote Welsh village at the turn of the century.
Believe it or not, Miss Moffat, the schoolmarm, plucks from the depths of a nearby coal mine a latent literary genius, Morgan Evans. She spends two years tutoring Evans for an Oxford scholarship competition.
Major conflict: hardly of heroic proportions.
Admitting the limited scope of the play, it is still a wonderfully amusing and touching autobiographical account of Williams' youth and his relationship with his teacher, Miss Cooke.
The first half of last night's performance was lively and entertaining. Miss Moffat arrives in Glansarno and enlists the aid of gloomy John Goronvy Jones and flittery Miss Ronberry in establishing the village school.
Miss Moffat, an unsentimental and direct Englishwoman, is portrayed by Ann Runge, Higginsville, Mo., graduate student, as a saner, female version of Teddy Brewster.
These characterizations are humorous and well played: Jones (Patrick Prosser, Lawrence graduate student), who is continually delighted by the fact that he is "saved," and Miss Ronberry (Sylvia Groth, Mayville, N.D., graduate student), who understands that eight sevens are 56, but not that seven eights are the same thing.
They are blocked by the obstinate opposition of the Squire, (Tom Behm, Wheeling, Ill., graduate student), who owns most of the village and resents the school's taking young boys from the coal mine.
Then Miss Moffat discovers a composition by young Evans (Dennis Dalen, Lawrence graduate student), who has taught himself to read and write.
Attractive and intense, Dalen portrays well the young miner torn between the pleasures of rum and Cockney snips and the joys of "becoming more clever still."
The best-received performance was by Diane Gray, Kansas City senior, who plays Bessie Watty, daughter of Miss Moffat's housekeeper. Bessie, bored with schoolwork and the local males, struts around munching "sweeties" and flaunting herself before any and all spectators. Miss Gray would have been perfect as Bessie were she not so slender, for Bessie is virtually a forerunner of a Faulknerian Eula.
Mrs. Watty (Becky Davis, Prairie Village sophomore) is amusing as the crusading Sargeant-Major of the Militant Righteousness "Corpse."
The last part of the play gets bogged down in over-emotional scenes that the characters are incapable of carrying off. Bessie and Morgan Evans seem more like first-graders making discoveries in the alley than a couple about to have sexual relations.
The last scene, when Bessie returns with Evans' child, reaps even more corn when Miss Moffat adopts the infant so that Evans may accept the scholarship to Oxford. She sends him off in martyred dedication to the world.
The set, costumes, lighting and sound effects are all commendable. "The Corn Is Green" is a highly enjoyable production which falls just a little bit flat.
Margaret Hughes