4
University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Tuesday, March 18, 1986
Pep talk not reassuring
The recent pep talk about the future of the shuttle program from a NASA official is more frightening than reassuring.
The official, who heads a shuttle planning group, promised that shuttle flights could resume as early as January and that nine launches were possible in the first year.
The message apparently was designed to bolster confidence for those workers who have been laid off since the Jan. 28 explosion of the Challenger. But his comments do little to hope that NASA had learned something from the disaster.
Even the modest nine-launch schedule suggests NASA wants shuttle launches to be as routine as airline flights. The agency apparently hopes to reassure its commercial and military customers that the shuttle is a reliable launch vehicle — whatever the cost.
One theme runs through the testimony before the committees investigating the shuttle explosion. Speaker after speaker blames the pressure of "the schedule" for a lapse in safety procedures on the morning of the launch.
It's not a matter of halting manned space exploration or the shuttle program.
No matter who turned the screws to force the launch, the question now is how to prevent a similar disaster in the future.
Instead, NASA needs to separate what the shuttle does best — scientific research — from those tasks that could be better performed by conventional rockets — launching the spy and communication satellites so dear to the Pentagon and private industry.
Space exploration then could face an already risky enterprise without the hazards caused by hurried attention to a timetable.
Fighting obsolescence
Actions speak louder than words, and President Reagan's actions are sending the unmistakable message that beating the Soviets is more important than controlling nuclear weapons.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has vowed to extend indefinitely a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing until the United States conducts a test.
The day after Gorbachev announced the Soviet extension, Reagan said the United States would carry out a nuclear test next month. He did, however, invite Soviet scientists to examine a new detection and monitoring system.
The new system, he says, will enhance verification procedures, perhaps leading to the ratification of the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty and the 1976 Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Treaty.
But a complete ban on nuclear weapons tests would
eliminate the need for the treaties.
Reagan's stance sounds like a stubborn attempt to keep his new detection and monitoring system from becoming obsolete. After all, a new toy without batteries isn't much fun.
His argument that the United States must keep testing to catch up with Soviet weapons technology is a lame excuse for continuing the intense arms race in which he has invested so much.
Reagan says he hopes the invitation to monitor the test will "pave the way for resolving the serious concerns which have arisen in this area."
If Reagan were serious about resolving nuclear problems, he would not dismiss the test ban proposal so lightly. Perhaps accepting this first small step would encourage greater strides toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Death of a bill
Of all the nerve.
Worse than that, the committee members crushed the hopes of 17 sixth-graders and ruined their debut as political lobbyists.
The House Energy and Natural Resources committee had the gall last week to let a perfectly harmless, and relatively uncontroversial, bill in committee.
The issue at hand is, of course, the schoolchildren's campaign to have the ornate box turtle designated as the official reptile of Kansas.
Their arguments were sound: The ornate box turtle is yellow and brown, in keeping with most of the other state symbols; the turtle is native to the state; and it is a reptile that happens to get along great with people.
the turtle's place.
There was no public outcry opposing the ornate box turtle, and no one suggested that some rattlesnake or lizard be designated as state reptile in
The dedicated students solicited endorsements, printed T-shirts and buttons, wrote letters, drew posters and traveled from their small town south of Wichita to lobby for their bill.
It was all to no avail.
Granted, the Legislature has more important issues to deal with than whether or not Kansas has a state reptile. But how long can it take to placate the wishes of some future voters and their parents?
It's not as if the committee members even had the nerve to vote down the proposal; they just let it die in committee.
And a little bit of the trust those 17 kids had developed in the state legislative system probably died right along with their bill.
'Phenom' no longer preseason focus
When the month of March rolls around, I sometimes wonder whatever happened to the phenom.
You remember the phenon, don't you? Or maybe you're too young.
The phenom was a creature who existed in the daily news dispatches that were filed from Arizona, Florida, California and other sunny places where baseball players went to soak the off-season booze and fat from their bodies and prepare for another season.
He, the young phenom, was what made March and spring training a special time of year for those of us who are still learning about ubliquity about the coming season.
We would sit in the cold Northern cities and read daily reports about the phenom. How he was hammering balls awesome distances over the fences, over the palm trees, over the trailer courts and into some distant drainage ditch.
And in almost every spring training camp, there was at least one young player, up from the minors, who qualified as a genuine phenom.
"The kid hit one today that had to be 550 feet, and it went right through the wall of a warehouse," said
Mike Royko Chicago Tribune
manager Lunk Hedd. "He's go,
muscles in his ears."
"When he runs, he reminds me of a gazelle," said scout Ben Zadrine. "He even nibbles leaves from the bushes."
"The kid made a throw from deepest center field that didn't rise more than 8 feet on the ground and hit the catcher right in the mitt and knocked him all the way to the backstop. The kid has an arm like a bazooka," said coach Biggie Gutt, "only it bends."
"All the tables . . . he can't miss . . .
the greatest prospect since . . . and
he writes home to his mudder every day."
It was the phenom who helped make the month of March less the tail end of winter and more the beginning of spring. When the phenom started hitting the blue darts or whipping blinding fastballs past helpless
hitters, we knew that summer was on its way.
Of course, we seldom ever saw the phenom in the flesh. Sometimes near the end of spring training, somebody would be unkind enough to whip a curve ball over the outside corner at the knees, causing the phenom to spin like a top. After that, it was just a matter of packing his bag and heading for another season in Chattanooga.
Now, though, what invigorating news do we have from spring training? Name me even one phenom who can hit balls into the distant cactus plants.
No, what we get now are stories that concern the burning issue of whether or not baseball players can or must urinate regularly into little bottles.
But that was OK. While the phenom lasted, he was fun to read about. And every so often, one would actually make it to opening day.
Or whether some players should surrender portions of their paychecks as punishment for having once sniffed white powder that made them say, "Oh. wow."
Where once we read about a
phenom racing to deepest center field, leaping 10 feet in the air and catching the ball between his thumb and forefinger, now we get debates on whether grown men should be required to make wee-wee into a bottle once a week, once a month, or between times at bat.
We read about agents deceiving the violations of their clients' constitutional right to the privacy of their urine content.
So the days of blissful reading about spring training are gone. No more phenoms to capture our imagination and give us the joy of even a false hope.
It used to be that a sportswriter needed only to know how to mark a scorecard to cover spring training. Now he needs a degree in constitutional law and maybe one in pharmacology.
But who knows? Maybe we will eventually get a new kind of spring training phenom in the future.
"This kid has got it all," says manager Lou Bodomy. "His nasal membranes are intact. Not one neel die mark on his arms or legs.
"And he's got the most terrific rine we've seen in 20 years."
Split arises within black community
In 1968, in the midst of the great upheavals in the American cities, the Kerner Commission issued a report on the rioting. It said something had to be done about the conditions of the cities.
Otherwise, said the commission report, the United States was in danger of becoming two societies, "one black, one white, separate and unequal."
Awful as that might have sounded 18 years ago, something far more devastating is occurring. It is a tragedy with no clear villain and no clear remedy. Only one thing about it is certain, and that is its enormous social cost.
Hidden from general view for a long time, the American underclass is suddenly visible. The television networks are now doing big stories, and so are the news magazines.
Illiterate in many instances, ensnared in the unhappy tentacles of poverty, the young women of this generation are searching for a role in
They are telling that impoverished teen-agers of all races are having children at an unprecedented rate, that the burgeoning underclass is multiplying itself.
Robert C.
Maynard
Oakland Tribune
life. Maternity is all too often the only job for which they need no credentials.
Most of what we read about this problem comes in the form of statistics or superficial analyses. Those are alarming and illuminating, but they often lack the impact of a name, a history, a person.
Now, because of a remarkable piece of journalism, we have an opportunity to see the problem from a closer vantage point. Leon Dash, a veteran reporter for the Washington Post, spent a year living in a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., called Washington Highlands.
He chose that particular neighborhood because of the high incidence of pregnancy among the teen-agers there. He found a culture of despair, poverty and pain. He found people locked in cycles of degradation they seemed powerless
to control. It is as you might expect.
Pathology feeds upon itself.
He found women as young as 11 and 12 who, far from avoiding pregnancy, longed for the chance to be mothers just so they would have something to call their own. Their young daughters of ill-educated men at the margin of society, unlikely providers over any sustained period of time.
When the Kerner Commission made its dire prediction, no one could have guessed what was about to happen. The black community split into two profoundly different communities.
Those blacks who were educated or skilled were able to make their way in the marketplace. The civil rights movement helped make it possible for middle-class classes to make their way toward equality.
The poor and illiterate have become worse off, and that is the group among which the population is most affected, and the societal challenge greatest.
Leon Dash said at the conclusion of his report that he could think of no government program to address the problems he saw at Washington
Highlands. The problems are too human, too intimate and personal to lend themselves readily to the bureaucratic approach.
Dash came away thinking he had found a job for middle-class blacks. He wondered what could be done to encourage blacks who had moved on to a better condition to come back and try to help those still locked in poverty.
Actually, the challenge is so great it calls for all of society's attention. It calls for a massive upgrading of urban schools, for greater housing opportunity, for counseling programs and for a revival of much stronger moral and ethical training.
The place to start, it seems to me is by making the problem of the underclass the subject of a bipartisan attack. Neither simplicistic outrage nor sociological apologies will suffice.
News staff
The health of the country requires that its leaders take seriously the need to address the causes of the collapse of the inner city family structure. Everyone has a role to play. Everyone has something to gain by addressing this problem. Everyone has something to lose if we don't.
News staff
Michael Totty ... Editor
Lauretta McMillen ... Managing editor
Olivia Berner ... Editorial editor
Cindy McCurry ... Compuser
David Giles ... Sports editor
Bradille Waddell ... Photo editor
Susanne Shaw ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Brett McCabe ... Business manager
David Nixon ... Retail sales manager
Jim Williamson ... Campus manager
Eckert Eckert ... Creative 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 home town, or faculty or staff position.
Guest shorthate should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 700 words. The
The Kansas reserves the right to reject or edit letters and guest shots. They can be mailed or brought to the Kansas newsroom, 111 Staffer-Flint Hall.
writer will be photographed.
The Kansan reserves the right to select or edit letters and guest shots. They can
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the University Daily Kansan, 118 Stauffer-Flint Hall, Lawrence, Kan. 60045.
The University Daily Kansan (USPS 650-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stairwater Flint Hall, Lawn, Kan. 6045, daily during the regular school year, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and late nights, and on Wednesday during the summer session. Second-class postage paid at a discount rate of $2.95 for every 7-day visit to the county. In Douglas County and $1 for six months and $35 a year outside the county. Subscriptions are $5 and are paid through the student activity fee.
Mailbox
Looking for a home
In recent issues of the Kansan and Kansas Engineer, articles have appeared describing a difficulty experienced by the architectural engineering department at the University of Kansas. The problem is the fact that the department has no permanent home on campus.
Hopefully that condition will soon change, but it is really the manifestation of a greater problem being experienced by the profession - namely, an identity crisis. Public awareness of the profession is very limited.
The complexity of the design of buildings often makes the services of various engineers necessary during the design process. Many schools have developed an architectural engineering curriculum to meet this
demand.
At KU there are specialties in structures, heating and cooling, illumination and construction management.
The balance between architecture and engineering courses give technical competence as well as aesthetic sensitivity to the student. These and other factors combine to make ours a nationally respected program.
Recently a national society was established to help architectural engineering professionals claim an identity for themselves. The student chapter at KU helps to identify us to each other as students in the program, and to the public on campus.
Until financing is available, the architectural engineering department will remain, waiting patiently for a
well-deserved permanent home at the University of Kansas.
Mike Parrish
Springfield, Mo.. junior
Mark Ziemer
Colorado Springs, Colo.. junior
Lesson from Vietnam
This kind of polarizing rhetoric is dangerously similar to that which America heard about its role in Southeast Asia. Didn't we learn any lessons from Vietnam?
From the tone of his column, I am
In Phill Kline's March 7 editorial about U.S. aid to Nicaraguan contras, he foolishly supports the Reagan administration's rationale that if the Congress does not supply such monies now, it will have to commit U.S. troops later.
unsure whether Mr. Kline is volunteering himself to die in Nicaragua as a result of direct U.S. military intervention, or (yet again) he is volunteering other American youths to die there.
As time blurs the awful tragedy that was Vietnam, there is a serious risk of being propelled into a false patriotism, of repeating the same errors in Central America. False patriotism or historical ignorance aside, the specter of Vietnam looms behind bellicose年nings to stop the Reds from Nicaragua to the Middle East, from behind the need to define the mess in Lebanon as an East-West crisis, from behind policies of confrontation that could have disastrous consequences, once again, for America and its youth.
Thomas Berger Lawrence graduate student