4
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.
University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Thursday, March 20, 1986
Placing the blame on someone else always has been an easy escape out of a crisis. It relieves the conscience to know that the fault might lie elsewhere. Blaming some sometimes soothes the wounds.
Apologies are hollow
All the blame for the May 13 siege on the MOVE house in Philadelphia, which killed six adults and five children, has been dumped on Mayor W. Wilson Goode. In this case, that's where the blame belongs.
The commission reported that Goode was not directly responsible for the deaths but that he was at fault for poor management. The commission said Goode was negligent for allowing the MOVE issue to escalate, and it accused him of not stopping police battle plans after he found out that children were inside the MOVE building.
Goode was criticized for being "grossly negligent" by a commission he hand-picked to investigate the incident.
"I wish that May 13 had never happened — but it did, and I am sorry for that," he said in a televised appeal to Philadelphia last week.
"The mayor paused only 30 seconds before approving the dropping of explosives," the commission reported. "Had he taken more time, he may have considered the possibility that gas was on the roof."
Too many or too few?
There are too many doctors in Kansas. O- maybe there aren't enough.
The tragedy of May 13 did happen and no amount of apologies and blame can bring back the lives or soothe the wounds. Perhaps the memory of the tragedy will prevent other leaders who might contemplate bombing their cities' problems.
Two conflicting reports have appeared in the past week, one saying the state has a physician shortage and the other citing a glut. The fate of a scholarship program for medical students hangs in the balance.
Goode has apologized again and again for the way he dealt with the radical group. He said there was not a day that went by in which he did not grieve for the loss of lives in the fire that trapped MOVE members and destroyed 60 other homes on the block.
State Sen. Jack Walker, R-Overland Park, says Kansas has too many physicians, and he has introduced a bill to phase out a medical scholarship program at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
Under the program now, 50 medical students a year can receive free tuition if they agree to practice in medically underserved areas of Kansas after they graduate. Agreeing to practice in critically underserved areas gets them free tuition and a $500 a month stipend.
But a report from the state Department of Health and Environment, released a few days before Walker introduced his bill, says no such glut exists. In fact, it declares that almost half the state's counties are suffering from a shortage of physicians.
Walker says there a glut in the doctor market, however, and the scholarship program should be phased out.
Walker's reasoning that the program should be cut because of a glut of physicians seems foolish in light of the health department's report. Physicians may be swarming around Overland Park, but 44 counties are still suffering.
The medical scholarship program is the best incentive for keeping students in Kansas until more counties can meet standards of adequate medical care.
Tapwater wars
The winning entry in a coming competition will be selected on the basis of clarity, color, odor and flavor, after three judges conduct a thorough test of nine samples.
But this test of palatable pleasure has nothing to do with fine wine. This is a heated competition for the best-tasting tap water in Kansas.
There's a lot on the line here.
The director of the Lawrence
Utilities Department has high
hopes of winning the
prestigious "best drinking
water" title.
Lawrence will compete with El Dorado, Olathe, Topeka, Arkansas City, Manhattan, Wichita, the Board of Public Utilities of Kansas City, Kan., and Water District No. 1 of Johnson County during the Kansas section of the American Water Works Association's annual conference next week.
He says the judges know that good water is not really a tasteless, colorless, odorless liquid. That fact alone should help Lawrence's chances immensely.
And once the city wins, just imagine the possibilities.
Lawrence could begin bottling and shipping its famous water all over the state, maybe the whole country.
It could be a booming business. Maybe something like "Lawrence's Luscious Liquid" or a "Kansas Cooler" of sorts is in the making.
We would hope that the folks at the American Water Works Association would indeed be concerned with what is in our drinking water.
But the idea of a hokey contest and a best taste title border on being all wet.
--entire world.
News staff
News staff
Michael Totty ... Editor
auretta McMillen ... Managing editor
Chris Barber ... Editorial editor
Cindy McCurry ... Campus editor
David Giles ... Sports editor
Brice Waddill ... Photo editor
Susanne Shaw ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Brett McCabe ... Business manager
David Nixon ... Retail sales manager
Jim Williamson ... Campus manager
Lor Edwards ... Classified manager
Caroline Innes ... Production manager
Pallen Lee ... National manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
Letters should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words and should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, include class and hometown, or faculty or staff position.
Guest shots should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 700 words. The
The Kansan reserves the right to reject or edit letters and guest posts. They can be mailed or brought to the Kansan newsletter, 111 Staffer-Flint Hall.
The University Daily Kan萨 (USPS 650-640) is published at the University of Kansas, Kans 181 Staffer-Flint Hall, Lawan. Kan, K6045, daily during the regular school year, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and finals periods, and on Wednesday during the summer session. Second-class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan, K6044. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $24 if a Douglas County and $18 for six months and $32 if a University Student. Students receive the student activity fee.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the University Daily Kansan, 118 Stauffer Fint Halt, Lawrence, Kan. 68045.
Generic society will follow ignorance
I'm an elderly man now, quite old. My skin is completely wrinkled, my bones seem to creak and my back is also. I know I just know my days are numbered.
It seems my intellect and my grandchildren are all I've got left, so I share everything I know with them, for my mind will surely go before they do.
Of course, I tell them what life used to be like. I tell them how it was filled with different people and different lifestyles. But they always stare at me when I blank expressions. I know their world in today's world is indeed hopeless.
"You see, back when I was a young man," I tell them, "civilized people appreciated differences in other people. They accepted them, even welcomed them because there was education and growth involved. One could always learn a great deal from others of different races, religions, creeds and lifestyles."
Poor kids. They don't even know what differences among people are. But it isn't their fault, for everything in their world is exactly the same—the same people, the same lifestyle, the same ideas.
The children are confused. "What is a race, grandpa?" they ask. "And what is a lifestyle? What are you talking about?"
David
Swafford
Guest columnis
"People used to have different ways of looking at life," I told them. "They had different ideas of how life came about and how it all would end. They called these thoughts religion. And people used to be of different colors and sexes, too. Some were light and some were dark. Some were men and some were women. They spoke in various languages, and lived in various ways.
"The beauty in life was the variety of it all."
Their modern society is a shame, a human tragedy. It is a unisex society and one of a non-race. People have the same name, and they all wear the same clothes. There is only one language. All artists paint the same picture, and all musicians play the same score on the same type of instrument.
My grandchildren were astounded. They couldn't believe people used to be so different, that life was so rich and so diverse.
Worst of all, this society that started in the domineering United States is now the only one found in the
I first began to notice this trend as a student at the University of Kansas, way back in the early 1980s. At that time, I remember my friends of foreign countries were shunned by many. They were deliberately looked down upon because their native language was not the same, which pointed out the ignorance of the people.
The sadest aspect is that, when I was younger, I saw this tragedy coming. Others like me did, too, but we couldn't stop the momentum of the ignorant. The masses were too great. The majority of people were a close-minded, stubborn lot. They couldn't accept differences in people, let alone appreciate them. For some reason, there was a big movement for people to become identical.
I had black friends and Jewish friends who were continually harassed because they weren't the same color or religion as the great majority. That also pointed to ignorance. Women I knew entering the same professions as men were paid thousands of dollars less, just because they weren't of the same sex, which was most absurd.
But the scale of such stupidity never really sank into my conscience until I started looking for a part-time job in Lawrence and was repeatedly
turned away because I had a beard. I always kept the beard clean and trimmed, and some people gave me compliments for it. But I wasn't the same as the great majority, that ruling, and soon to be only, class.
I was turned away from a host's job at Perkins, a stocker's job at Rusty's, a checker's job at Gibson's, a midnight checker's job at Food Barn, a job at Sub n' Stuff, jobs at Wendy's, Hardees and Rax, and finally, at Ace Hardware.
I had been discriminated against because of my person, my appearance. It had nothing to do with job qualifications. At that time I knew how my friends had felt.
The push was on to wipe out individuality, the push for a generic society in which learning and growth could not possibly take place.
"My days are numbered not because I'm so old," I tell my grandchildren, "but because the days of this modern society are numbered. When there is no longer diversity, learning can no longer take place. And when learning stops, the next thing to cease is life itself."
With liberty and justice for all?
Baah!
David Swafford is an Overland Park senior majoring in journalism.
Sovereignty should remain at home
Trooping merrily somewhere in the sunny American Southwest are a band of a few hundred renegades from reality — peace marchers who missed the last flight out of a time when the nuclear freeze was mistakenly thought of as a respectable issue. Perhaps the fresh air will do them some good.
These ever unrepentant pundits of internationalism still lay their trusts to a surrender-now peace in conventional sophomorisms. The United States has long been beguiled with unwarranted hope and nebulous trust in such anti-West bodies as the United Nations and the World Court.
Once, these bodies served as steam valves where frustrations could be vented. Now, they largely recirculate the airmen or aim them at the United States.
The most rose-tinted jargon of the "peace advocates" aside, the internationalists' foundations of modern diplomacy have left the world on a precarious perch. The result is that the world now totters between the unrecognized threat of global communism and absymal poverty communism seducing the world into thinking that it can solve the poverty.
Paul Campbell Staff columnist
Advocates of a legal framework above nationalism, which they see as rampant Rambomania, decry those who dare criticize the establishment as hooligans with no respect for law. Yet, with the Constitution enshrined by the Founding Fathers as the highest-law in the land, such a framework would be illegal.
The International Court of Justice would be the house for such an internationalist legal order. While the name may invoke a lofty image of wise sages solving world disputes, this court is actually one of the more laughable wastes of financial and intellectual resources that the international community has ever fostered.
Although the Court cannot hear a case without the defendant state's consent, this does not negate the efrontery upon national sovereignty that the Court represents.
There is no — repeat, no — precedent to allow the transfer of sovereignty, the very concept upon which the nation-state rests, to an arbitrary panel of jurists of Lord-knows-what legal thought.
There is no precedent to allow the transfer of sovereignty to an arbitrary panel of jurists.
Yet, the U.S. Senate seems willing to abrogate the Constitution piecemeal to some anonymous internationalist compulsion. Witness the Senate's recent passage of the Genocide Convention.
is sane enough, the Convention's definition of genocide has become ridiculously vague.
Left to the notoriously broad interpretive skills of the World Court, the Genocide Convention now holds the United States accountable to any peculiar infraction the World Court cares to imagine.
Although a policy against genocide
To date, the World Court has handled sundries such as border violations, fishing rights and continental shelf delineations. Except in cases where uniformity in world matters is important, such as navigation on international waterways, renewing the simplistic idealism that nations should subject themselves to an arbitrary international authority is pure folly.
A Latin phrase asks who will guard the guards themselves. When combined with the increasing trend of compulsory jurisdiction in legal matters, the enslaying submission of the United States to the World Court is not only unconstitutional, but a suicidal sacrifice of sovereignty.
Mailbox
Lofty ideals feed egos
Tim Erickson's column on "objective" journalism (Kansan, March 17) captured my attention because it honestly approached issues of human interpretation.
I did not feel the usual pressures of persuasion that accompany columns on "outside issues" because Erickson was writing about his experience as a journalist rather than interpreting the news. In doing so he gives us an opportunity to draw from our common experiences as human beings.
The problems of objectivity are not unique to journalism. It is human nature to rationalize and justify any meaningful activity. I wrote this letter partly because I wanted to avoid making too much claim about my I desired approval from friends.
However, if the rationalization process is left unchecked, we lose all sense of perspective, egomania runs rampant and any trace of objectivity
The purpose of the Kansan is to provide journalism students an opportunity to experience the realities of newspaper operation; the function of providing news for a student audience is secondary.
is lost.
Although the rise of mass media has revolutionized our world, previous societies have survived for centuries without it, and others will continue to do so long after the media's obsolescence.
The world comprises people doing things for themselves the best way they know how. It is humbling to admit that lofty ideals function only as ego-feeding mechanisms, but only through examination of our human frailties can we gain a clearer picture of the world around us.
Jeff White
Jeff white Lawrence graduate student
I am writing as an alumnus of the
KUEA image soiled
University of Kansas who has been closely following the event's concerning divestment. Let's face the facts. The image of the Endowment Association — and by extension KU — has become tarnished over the last couple of years.
The Endowment Association is no longer perceived as a leader in the state, but only a backward follower. The Wichita State Endowment Association, Kansas Public Employees Retirement System and the State of Kansas Pooled Investment Fund are all in the process of divesting at least partially. And Washburn University is about to approve partial divestment.
The Endowment Association has acquired an elitist image by its refusal to even consider the votes of students and faculty who called or divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. Since KUEA would not even exist without the University, it should consider itself part of KU and submit to democratic rule.
Also, a perception is growing that the Endowment Association's board of trustees may be motivated by racial prejudice in its refusal to even discuss the matter in a serious manner. Let's hope that not is the case, but that conclusion has been reached by many people, both black and white.
Finally, many people now believe that the University administration is controlled by the Endowment Association because of its economic clout. If that is the case, this situation should be reversed as soon as possible.
It would not be surprising that financial support for the University should decline as more and more alumni in Kansas City and Wichita begin to perceive KUEA as elitist, backward and racist.
Clark H. Coan Class of 1979