KANSAN COMMENT
Paying the price for progress
Progress.
There was a time when, if you threw a pop bottle out your car window, someone would pick it up and cash it in for two cents. A lot of children used to earn candy money that way.
Then there was progress. You would throw a steel pop can out the window and it would lay there for five or ten years then deteriorate.
Then there was more progress. Today you can throw out an aluminum can and it will still be there in the year 2470-500 years from now. If Columbus had thrown aluminum cans out of the Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria, they might still be lying in San Salvador today.
There was a time when cities were surrounded by empty countryside. People had living space then and they would share it with five or six or seven or eight or more children.
Progress.
Then there was progress. Suburban housing developments grew where wheat and corn and tomatoes had once grown. The farms moved away and raised more housing developments.
Progress.
There was a time when the drive from Lawrence to Kansas City seemed to take forever even when traveling as fast as 45 miles per hour.
Then there was progress and cars were swifter and easier to handle. The trip to Kansas City was shorter.
Then there was more progress. Today cars travel easily at 70 miles per hour, steer true and stop quick. Everyone has one—or two—or three. The trip to Kansas City is quick now—once you escape the Lawrence traffic and until you run into the Sunflower traffic and the DeSoto traffic and the Olathe traffic and the Shawnee Mission traffic and the Kansas City traffic.
Progress.
There was a time when you could drive west to Denver. As you penetrated deeper into the
Colorado foothills you would rise up over a hill and look expectantly for that first glimpse of Denver and the Rocky Mountains.
Then there was progress. There were canned foods, bagged foods, boxed foods, frozen foods, paper mills, soap mills, steel mills, oil refineries, automobile factories.
Now as you approach Denver and the Mighty Rockies you rise up to the summit of a hill and there—spread before you in all its majestic grandeur—hangs the smoke from Denver's progress blotting out the Rockies and the horizon. And over horizons hangs the evidence of Kansas City's progress and St. Louis' progress and Chicago's progress and Los Angeles' and San Francisco's and Dallas' and all the others.
Progress.
There was progress measured in dead fish, dead birds, dead animals. There was progress measured in asthma cases and highway fatalities. There was progress measured in overcrowded schools, overcrowded highways, overcrowded cities and overcrowded suburbs.
Progress?
A few cynics and cranks began to complain. Like most prophets of doom they were ignored. They were ignored until the doom they had prophesized became apparent, then everyone began to notice.
The President espoused ecology. The magazines gave it the cover story treatment. New cars were buried, cans dumped on the lawns of canners and there were marches.
Now everyone talks about ecology. Earth Week begins today. Maybe this awareness will bring more progress—a different kind of progress. Maybe it will bring—instead of a deadly progress—a livable progress.
Then there will be progress.
—Mike Rieke
Earth Week April 20 to April 27
Photo by Mike Rieke
Smog
The smog Comes from little car pipes. It sits—choking all in harbor and city in silent bunches—and won't move on.
Mike Rieke
hearing voices—
To the editor:
Please do not throw marshmallows at me.
Just to make sure that this is a democratic university and that a difference of opinion does exist here, I propose that Professors Velvet and Litto be fired!
David L. Brady
Shawnee, freshman
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To the editor:
I would like to comment on your "Pressing the Press" editorial.
The Journal Company of Milwaukee owns a dynasty, the only major newspaper in the city. The company owns the morning Sentinel and the evening Journal. No other newspaper has been able to compete with it; therefore, the Journal had little to lose by suspending cartoonist Bill Sanders (Incidently, he is the best cartoonist they have ever had).
The Kaleidoscope is an underground newspaper, similar to the Vortex, handled by high school and college students and local newswriters. The newspaper became notorious only when the high schools began confiscating papers from students who had them in their hands or in their lockers around the time of the "Milwaukee 14" incident. The Milwaukee Journal did not speak out against this confiscation but did speak out against the Kaleidoscope.
It seems to me that the "liberal" Milwaukee Journal is hardly that. What does the Journal have to fear anyway?
Joanne Lewis Milwaukee, sophomore
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