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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
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Wednesday Jan. 22, 1986
Regulations right step
The Lawrence city staff last week finished reviewing a proposal to regulate handgun sales in the city and has recommended several changes in the proposal to make it more enforceable.
Commissioner David Longhurst, who proposed the handgun regulation, is taking the suggestions with precisely the right frame of mind and appears to be genuinely interested in getting whatever kind of law works best on the books as quickly as possible.
Longhurst's proposal called for a 14-day waiting period; the staff study suggests 72 hours.
Longhurst asked that records be checked and gun sales be prohibited to convicted felons, anyone under 21, people with a record of drug abuse or history of mental illness and anyone intoxicated or driving while intoxicated or
making a terrorist threat.
The study pointed out that the man-hours and money involved in such an extensive check would be unfeasible and that only local and state records would be available.
But Longhurst took all the recommendations in stride and drove home his original objectives. He said he wanted to ensure that guns were not bought and used for emotional reasons and that police had enough time to do as many checks as possible.
The commissioner's controversial proposal was made after a 21-year-old KU student killed herself with a.22-caliber handgun she had purchased only two hours earlier.
Longhurst is correct in noting that any cooling-off period and any time to check as much as possible are steps in the right direction.
The rights of journalists
A safe place to work. Freedom to not breathe second-hand smoke.
Workers across the country are fighting for these rights. And no one should be excluded from the right to request clean air in the workplace — not even reporters.
But one of the fundamental principles of journalism is: Report the news, don't make it. Some journalists questioned the reporters' attempt to influence, rather than simply to report on legislation.
That right came into question last week when six members of the Capitol press corps signed a petition requesting the Kansas Legislature to ban smoking in the Capitol except in specified areas.
Davis Merritt Jr., executive editor of the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, said, "It is entirely inappropriate and unprofessional for a reporter to seek to influence or persuade the people that he or she covers on any matter at any time, in any place."
Several statehouse reporters refused to sign the petition because they thought it would
put them in the place of lobbyists.
As long as the petition remained simply an employee request and not a news item, the reporters had every right to petition for a healthier workplace.
Their decision evades the question of what rights journalists have to publicly petition their government, or even their employer, to redress grievances. Reporters, as any employees, do not check in their liberties when they clock in on the job.
Unfortunately, the petition and the reporters were thrust into the news spotlight by other journalists who challenged the ethics of their request.
At that point, the four reporters who signed the petition removed their names, and the two who began it said they would let it die.
But journalists have a responsibility to avoid the appearance of bias. This often means making sacrifices.
It is unfortunate that the reporters must forsake for now their claim to clean air. But they made the right decision to drop their request when they became the news.
Hope for the media
Journalists have often been criticized for their lack of heart; for always seeming as if they are out to get someone.
A Gallup survey released last week says that the public's negative attitude toward the media is softening.
In fact, what in recent years has been called a "crisis" for the media—a lack of credibility among its readers—may no longer exist. Some 3,000 people rated the media at 80-90 percent for believability.
However, the report says the public still criticizes the media for political bias, emphasizing the bad news, invading privacy, failing to admit mistakes and bowing to outside pressures.
No journalist denies that there are bad sides to his profession. The problem areas are
compounded by the fact that journalists don't ask to be liked.
Journalism, as a profession, isn't supposed to inspire feelings of love. A journalist's objectivity is hampered or completely lost when working with close companions.
What journalism does require is trust and respect. Believability is the life-blood of journalism. Without it, all efforts are futile.
This poll appears to be a sign that the quality in the profession is winning out. The foundations of truth and objectivity on which journalism was built may be coming back.
With the return of credibility, journalists can concentrate on the remaining problem areas and further improve their image with the public.
News staff
Michael Totty ... Editor
Laurie 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
BrettMcCabe ... Business manager
David Nixon ... Retail sales manager
Jim Williamson ... Campus manager
Lori Eckart ... Classified manager
Caroline Innes ... Production manager
Pallen Lee ... National manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
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DIGGSMIMA NEWS
Taunts are response to 'red menace'
A big difference between the liberal and non-liberal (not necessarily conservative) resides in the choice of enemy. Nothing quite
WRIGHT
Liberals selective in bearing outrage
With surprising regularity, when a legitimate concern over a Soviet action is raised, the liberals gibe on the "red menace" and respond with schoolyard name-calling — "McCarthast!!" "Fascist!"
In more recent times, the advent of the Soviet Union as a rival — no less threatening than fascism — mysteriously produces no similar response from the liberal community.
"I n'y a pas d'ennemi a gauche"
unconditionally proclaims a French
phrase of ideological content: There is
no enemy on the Left.
This saying of moral conviction would be too extremist for the main body of American liberalism. It is sufficient to say the liberal views the real enemy as the Right.
Long before Hitler's armies stormed into Austria, Poland and all other points on the map, much of the liberal community was justly impassioned against fascist expansion. Many cried for sanctions before the war and fully approved of the unconditional surrender.
compares to the self-righteous orgy that liberals experience when charging down the hill as Don Quixote toward a right-wing windmill.
Imagine, for example, that there are two dictators who are both particularly nasty fellows commanding even more nasty police state organizations somewhere. For the liberal, the dictator on the Right is a brute deal with by revolution or violent overthrow. He is a fluke of all that is civilized and should be treated accordingly.
Paul Campbell Staff columnist
Staff columnist
has all the correct attitudes about human rights and colonialism that the liberal espouses in his most idealistic outburst.
Sometimes, as James Burnham contemplates in his work "Susicide Of
A big difference between the liberal and non-liberal (not necessarily conservative) resides in the choice of enemy. Nothing quite compares to the self-righteous orgy that liberals experience when charging down the hill as Don Quixote toward a right-wing windmill.
The West," liberals take the opportunity to capitalize on an enemy from the Right. Witness the bizarre ascent to prominence of Senator Joe McCarthy. As the anti-McCarthy
However, the liberals say, the dictator on the Left is not really such a bad sort. He's a bit misguided, perhaps, but is willing to sit down and negotiate differences. After all, he
biographer Richard Rouvere il illustrates, he was largely a liberal creation.
McCarthy had little money, an incompetent staff and as dim a pack of closest admirers as could be found under a rock. Could McCarthy have really been such a threat without the liberal propping him up as evil incarnate? Most likely not.
To continually reassure their querulous moral priorities in deciding who is inimical to common decency, liberals prefer to denounce South Korea's Chun Doo Huan rather than North Korea's Kim II-Sung, El Salvador's right-wing death squads rather than the left-wing terrorists and the Nicaraguan resistance rather than the Sandinista establishment.
The point is not that the Right is free from criminal excess, but that the Left is no less guilty of such
Guide to single guy's fridge
For liberalism, the outrages born out of moral transgressions are applied very selectively. So that there will be no conflict of interest by attacking someone who may pay lap service to the same interests that the liberal does, liberalism prefers its enemies to the Right.
An old friend stopped by recently and went to the refrigerator to get himself a beer.
He took the beer but stood looking inside the refrigerator for several seconds. Then he opened the freezer section and looked at that for a while.
And he began opening kitchen cabinets and looking inside. Finally, he shook his head and said:
"Are you moving or something?"
No. Why do you ask?
"You don't have any food in this place. I mean, absolutely nothing." I nodded. He was right. There wasn't a thing to eat in the entire kitchen. Not a morsel. Not a crust of stale bread. Not one can of tomato soup or a spoonful of peanut butter to be scraped out of the bottom of a jar. Nothing.
He shook his head. "You don't even have a can of stewed tomatoes or things like that. Everybody's got an old can of something or other in their kitchen. But you don't have a single thing. Don't you ever eat?"
"Ah, then you eat all your meals in restaurants?"
Of course I eat. I eat too much.
It works on a very simple principle: I buy groceries once in a while. And in large quantities, too. But then I don't buy another thing until everything is gone.
"But there's nothing to eat here. I don't understand."
Most people don't. So I explained the Royko System of Food Shopping for the Single Man.
No, only lunch. And dinner out may be once a week. The rest of my meals I have at home.
Mike Royko
Chicago Tribune
My friend happened to come along the day after I had eaten the last food in the kitchen — a can of tuna and a frozen waffle.
"What is the advantage of your system?" he asked.
There are several advantages, and they go this way:
First, you don't have to go shopping very often. At most, I make one shopping trip a month. I've gone as long as two months between trips.
Second, you don't accumulate things that begin piling up in most kitchens — those extra cans of stewed tomatoes and soup gathering dust
Chicago Tribune
in a cabinet; the smoked Korean oysters; the half-filled jars of Welch's grape jelly, side by side in the refrigerator door.
Under my system, you cannot accumulate cans of stewed tomatoes because you have to eat them before you can shop again.
"You must have some peculiar meals," he said.
There have been a few unusual meals, yes. One evening, I found that the last edible items in the kitchen were three eggs, a half-stick of margarine, an onion and some flour.
I could have taken the easy way out and had three fried eggs. But I was more creative than that.
It seemed to me that if I mixed a cup of flour with an egg, some margarine and water and chopped onion, I would have some form of dough. So I did.
As it turned out, my creation became something that resembled onion pancakes. Sort of dried out, slab-like, onion pancakes. Then I fried the other two eggs and put them on top of the sort of pancakes.
Well, Julia Child wouldn't recommend it for a dinner party, but it did get me through the night.
"It sounds awful," my friend said.
The advantages to this system are obvious. It's economical, because you never buy anything you don't eventually eat. And it forces you to be innovative. I remember the night I had nothing left but two pouches of frozen creamed spinach, three small potatoes and a frozen chicken leg. I made a stew. I don't remember how it turned out, but it was surely high in some kind of vitamin.
"But what about your children," my friend said. "Isn't it rough on them?"
I discovered a law of eating, which I call Royko's Law. It goes this way: Young people will always eat
Actually, my sons were partly responsible for my approach to food shopping.
anything that is convenient, ther wait until you buy some more convenient foods, and they will eat them too.
In other words, if I went out every week and bought five pounds of chicken pieces, five packages of spaghetti, five fries of Ragu sauce and 10 frozen pizzas, they would eat the 10 frozen pizzas and leave the rest. And the next week, they would do the same. Eventually, I would have stacks of chicken pieces, bales of spaghetti and cases of Ragu sauce, and they'd still be eating the frozen pizzas.
So, under my system, when the frozen pizzas are gone, they either eat what is left, or they don't eat.
"That's kind of sadistic, isn't it?" my friend said.
Yes, but then, what else are young people good for? I am particularly fond of the memory of the evening my youngest son came home and found me in front of the TV set with a bowl in my lap.
"What are you having for supper?" he asked, looking hungry.
He looked in my bowl and said:
"Jeez, there's no milk. It's just dry Raisin Bran."
"Raisin Bran," I said. "There's still some in the kitchen."
"It's not bad," I said, scooping some of it into my mouth with my fingers. "But some does tend to fall on your shirt."
My friend shook his head and said: "Your sons must be getting skinny as hell."
My friend went back to the refrigerator and said: "I notice there's no shortage of beer, so you must do some extra shopping for that."
No, that's not so. My system just encourages them to make the acquaintance of young ladies who have more substantial qualities than mere pretty faces. When they meet girls, they don't ask questions like: "What's your astrological sign?" or "Say, do you come here very often?" They're more likely to say: "Hi You don't know how to make a good pot roast and dumplings, do you?
"As an ancient wise man once said," I told him, "man doesn't live by Raisin Bran alone."
Mailbox
Elderly love, too
I was disappointed to see the Kansan resorted to printing that cutesy item about an elderly couple who were told to leave a Jackson, Miss., nursing home "because their nighttime activity in a single bed was keeping the three other men in the room awake."
What is so newsworthy about an elderly couple enjoying a romantic interlude? Such nighttime activity in a single bed takes place quite often in university residence halls all over the country, but few people would find this so amazing (or amusing) that it would make the News Briefs of a campus newspaper hundreds of miles away.
Perhaps the editors of the Kansan, like so many young people in this culture, find it humorous that the elderly still possess the need for emotional and sexual fulfillment.
If an elderly couple marries, or if they stay married until very late in life, many of the younger generation wonder how anyone "that old" can be in love. Love, marriage and sexuality are not strictly domain of the young!
No one thinks twice when they see young lovers sharing affection. If an elderly couple is seen displaying affection, onlookers find the behavior either sweet, cute or amusing.
In many cultures the elderly are treated with respect. In this culture they are often regarded with ridicule and condescension.
If fate is kind, four or five decades from now many of us will be among the elderly. Hopefully we will have developed very thick skins so we can deflect the ageist jokes and ridicule the younger generation will hurl at us
Better yet, if we begin now to put an end to the ageist language, stereotypes and attitudes which prevail in this culture, perhaps we can enjoy our later years without being made the butt of so many jokes.
Nancy Marie Wood
Lincoln, Neb. graduate student