UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
February 26, 1979
Litter costs energy
Environmental groups throughout Kansas are rallying around an antititter bill that is before the Kansas Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee. And with good reason.
The bill would require a five cent refundable deposit on all beverage containers sold in Kansas. Supporters of the bill say that it would save energy and money and make a significant dent on carbon footprints, perk and roadside in Kansas.
But opponents of the bill claim it would increase the cost of producing bottles and cans, thus forcing those increased costs on to the consumer.
THE BILL'S potential as an energy saver, however, should override any possible cost concerns. According to State Sen. Pax Hess, R-Wichita, the bill's sponsor, the new bill could help cut into the energy used to manufacture the 60 billion disposable containers used in this country every year—a total that translates into the equivalent of five million gallons of gasoline a day.
Needless to say, that kind of saving can be much more valuable in the long
run than the pennies you put in your piggy bank. That energy could give you power.
In addition, disposable containers make up 60 percent of the litter in this country and are a major contributor to the nation's solid waste.
As anyone who has had the misfortune of discovering the sides of the roadways in Kansas knows, they are not the stuff of travel brochures. And a quick glance would certainly reinforce the impression that cans and bottles constitute much of that roadside litter.
OF COURSE, part of the problem might be the consumer-oriented society we live in, which fosters what one bill proponent called a "throwaway attitude" in which everything from razors to plastic silverware can be used briefly and then thrown away.
While the bill obviously would do little to solve that problem, it might force some to re-evaluate their sip-and-flap response to an empty can or bottle.
But more importantly, the bill can go a long way to conserving state energy expenditures and cleaning up the state litter problem, two moves that are desperately needed and long overdue.
GOP gathering invades the land of Democrats
By TONY PROSCIO
By TONY PROSCIO N.Y. Times Feature
NEW YORK—There was once a NEW republican in Detroit. He lived in my neighborhood, and I thought he was the only white person in the neighborhood, but later I discovered that we were white, too. We represented a republican, though, so it never mattered.
Clarke Reed, a Mississippi national complainant, complained after his party decided to hold its 1980 presidential convention in Detroit that he would "be the first white person to visit Detroit." This is not so.
But if he arrives early, he will be the first Republic to visit Detroit since Sen. Donald W. Reigle switches parties, which is nearly a time out of mind. If he's really after a "first," he should run for office there.
DETROIT IS none of the things the disgruntled Republican said it is; depressing, boring, congested. Of course, it isn't 'Republican, either.'
Ever since W.E. B. Du Bois told blacks to turn Lincoln's picture to the wall, Detroit has been single-minded democratic, in the blindest partisan weave.
Conservative white ethics, labor,
radical college students, disconformal
minorities, chic Palmer Woods
Kansas City Square every four years to
watch the Democrat officially kick off
the campaign on Labor Day, until
George McGovern put a stop to that
tradition. Municipal elections are nonpartisan in Detroit, mainly because there
are Democrats a Democrat in a partisan face-off.
NONE OF this recommends it to the GOP, it seems to me. The Republicans might be better off turning to the suburbs than in the rural areas. Pointe Farms, for example, or Bloomfield Hills. The trouble with those places is that they face issues with boring and increasingly congested
Compared with the much-photographed Renaissance Center, or the treasure chest of three-and-four-star restaurants in central Detroit, or the graceful boulevard near the convention center, there is not much to offer exchanging mails.
But Clarke Reed and his friends give the impression that shopping malls and trimmed lawns are what Republicanism is all about. This was certainly my impression but I was always afraid to say so for fear of sounding snobbish. Reed is.
apparently not ashamed of the fact, so I don't suppose I should be.
BUT NOW Mayor Coleman Young has taken off after the Democrats as well. They will not find Detroit boring or depressing, and as the mayor pointed out, Coleman's mind-convention in Memphis, Tenn., they will certainly not fist congested.
"You see this hall?" Mayor Young asked a convention office in Memphis. "I got a half twice this size. You could put this whole damn place in my hall and still have room." The mayor is a real civic booster.
The trouble is, the Democrats might find Detroit a little too interesting. It isn't exactly Carter country, after all; with all those old-fashioned Democrats in one place, it would be just the spot for Sam Brownstein to start up an audience of kindred spirits.
DETROIT IS the home of a circuit court judge who refuses the pledge of allegiance. On the city council sit at least one avowed Marxist and a councilman who has been charged with home of the nation's most unified black electoral machine, astutely piloted by one of the nation's most prominent urban blacks. A president who cuts urban aid, opposes national health insurance and has become almost as silly as the Republicans.
The strategy of holding your party's convention where you're weakest may work for the Republicans; it will not work for Jimmy Carter.
With unfinished urban programs littered all over Detroit and more policemen laid off, there will surely be demonstrations against the budget cutting president and his Sun Belt entourage.
In any case, both sides should be prepared for a cool reception if they go to the party. If the party is to be abandoned by the parties has a base in the Motor City; this sudden invasion of politicians can only make that more obvious. It is already obvious to Garke Reed.
So the Republicans will head north and the Democrats probably will go south. Each party would be ending up in the region where it was born, though these days not many people would remember the connection.
IF KENNETH—or any old-fashioned liberal for that matter—becomes a challenge to the president in 1890, Detroit last place Jimmy Carter will want to
Tony Proscie is a native Detroiter on the staff of the Ford Foundation.
Push for desegregation up to public
Not so long ago, the United States Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision on a series of cases filed by the NAACP, stating that separation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even when other factors are equal, deprives the children of the minority group an equal educational opportunity.
The ruling was set forth in 1954 in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, in which the plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of Topeka's segregated school system. The immediate result of the high court's rulings was that it overturned the previous doctrine of "separate but equal" as established by the Supreme Court, which beacon of hope to blacks who, for the first time, would have an opportunity to receive a respectable education.
Vernon Smith
In a subsequent 1958 ruling, the court said that desegregation of public schools should occur "with all deliberate speed." But the court did not specify how this was to take place. While some desegregation was to occur in most of the North, the true test of
the court's intent would inevitably come in the south.
LAST WEEK, ON the 25th anniversary of the landmark Brown decision, a report by the U.S Commission on Civil Rights called "Desegregation of the Nation's Schools": A Status Report," revealed just how far we have progressed in changing the nation's schools. The findings were not good.
For starters, the report stated that 4.6 percent of all minority students, or 4.9 million of them, are still attending schools in cities where they least "moderately or highly segregated."
And if that doesn't surprise you maybe this will. Suggration rates are consistent with the previous study.
cent, and North Central regions, 68 percent,
than in the South, 34 percent.
"We should be further down the road than we are at this time," said commissioner Jody Hale. "We must be indefensible," he said, for integration to proceed no faster in the future than it has to go.
IN THE 90-PAGE report the commission, which is charged with monitoring the progress of desegregation, based its observations on the Department of Health, Education and Welfare's 1976 study of 3,616 out of the nation's 16,000 school districts.
The commission noted that in some districts "equality of education is taking on real meaning," and progress has been achieved. Unfortunately, other school systems have "difficulty in the variety of devices to prevent, obstruct or slow down desegregation," the study said.
The commission had few kind words for Congress and the Carter administration for its foot-dragging policies in expending desegregation across the country.
"Congress has aided and abetted the
obstructionist...by attempting to make it increasingly difficult to enforce desegregation policies," the report said. "The executive branch has yet to mount the cement effort that will make clear that the nation is firmly committed" to integration.
IN ONE OF its recommendations, the commission urged citizens to organize to support the鞍阳学院Agleyton-Biden amendment. The legislation called for Thomas Eagleton (D-Mo.) and Joseph Biden (D-Del) for坠翼 HEW from cutting off the campus, refusing to comply with basing requirements.
In short, the commission's findings indicate that segregation in our schools is still a big problem, contrary to what most people would like to believe. Unfortunately, the commission lacks any status report. Any changes that will be made will have to come from the public. The future of our nation's children and of the nation itself demand that accommodations for change be implemented.
Gun lobbyists deserve equal voice
To the editor:
Must we have another strident voice raised against the myths and twisting of fact about gun control that the gun lobby perpetuates? Of course, the best way to counter gun lobby myths is with gun control myth. But, you haven't printed the other side of the story. When are you going to publish a pro-gun editorial?
Are 25,000 Americans killed by handguns each year? The FBI reported only 19,554 homicides in 1976 and people used handguns for only 8,700 of these homicides.
Gun control is in the interest of America? How so? It has nowhere been demonstrated to reduce crime rates. Where is the eminent reduction of violence in manifold, permanent reduction, of prevailing crime trends? Nowhere in the world. And yet we are asked; it is demand, that we make a huge financial and human investment of our society on the important projects of society, in the
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
The homicide totals are down from the 21,465 reported in 1974. While murder figures are the major component of the total number of recorded homicides, another 800 people were killed in 1976 by other people with handguns in the other classes of homicide. This despite the sale of 2.5 million more handguns each year.
STATE U.
BY T. M. ASLA
If you consider the total number of handgun crimes in the United States to the total number of handguns estimated to be out here distributed among the people, we find that, even if we believed each crime was committed with a different gun rather than one, there would still be a percent of all handguns are used in crime. And the rates for long arms are even less.
So, what you are proposing with licensing and registration of non-criminals is that we organize another huge, expensive bureaucracy to collect more computer banks of dossiers on the people who have the 99.5 percent of guns not used in crime.
questionable endeavor. That the debate continues with such heat and so little progress after 50 years should due to us in a public resistance to such a program.
This registration would not isolate criminals because the Supreme Court ruled in 1968 in Haynes v. U. S. and again in 1971 in U.S. v. Freed that criminals cannot be required to register their firearms, because it would be a violation of their Fifth Amendment. The courts self-crimination. This is because federal law already makes mere possession of a firearm a felony for convicted criminals. So why hasn't this accomplished the isolation of the crime element you refer to, and made the necessity of registration a moist point? In crime control you would gain nothing with registration but the criminalization of your crimes. If you have disobedience a valid response to this encroachment on the rights of us all.
for the nature of your gun control editorial, it perhaps would have been more appropriate to print or reprint an old car owner's manual to inform him about meeting a gun owner and informing him that the reporter's rugs under the First amendment included elimining the gun owner's rights under the second amendment and so they say—the second first the second first?
Yes, we do have rights in the Second amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Second amendment does not state the right of the militia, but specifies that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed upon. The militia has the authority to be unarmed by any Congress as being all able-bodied men between 18 and 65 years old.
The statistic that two-thirds of all killings involve a family member or acquaintance is misleading as reported. You should have further reported that in more than 60 percent of these cases the victim or assailant or both had criminal records and that more half of the incidents were connected with some unlawful activity (gambling, theft, murder) . Also global with a factor in a larger percentage of cases than guns.
The National Guard is not the militia because it is controlled by the states and
I am not a member of the NRA because I don't feel they have gone far enough in seeking Supreme Court clarification of Second amendment questions.
subject to federal call-up. The Constitution specifically separates and identifies the rights of states, the federal government and, separately, the people.
Pollis can be very valuable in reflecting public opinion but are only as relevant to any issue as the questions are unbiased and well designed. It is important to come every two years, that we call elections, are better indicators of the popular such as gun control that affects many people.
This statistic of family and friends being killed is widely reported, insinuating that mom and pop average America are so crowded that they have gun runs that they bribe tips each other away.
Contraint to the image presented by the anti-gun media, the million-plus members of the NRA are real people who respond with civility and respect to questions like the question of gun control, not to the direction of the organization. The NRA was already working to encourage the reduction of firearm ownership before it became fashionable with the PTA. They have a 100-year tradition of actively making all shooting sports safer and of teaching respect for and safe handling of firearms.
Ed Bray
Lawrence sophomore
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