4
Tuesday, November 9, 1976
University Daily Kansan
Comment
Opinions on this page reflect the view of only the writer.
Spray laws needed
There's no doubt that the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides has dramatically improved crop yields throughout the world. Without them, the world hunger situation would surely be much worse than it is. However, environmentalists and health experts have warned of the dangerous effects of such chemicals. Many chemicals have been banned or weakened after it was proved that they posed threats to human safety or to the ecological balance in nature.
THE CONTINUING debate about the use of these chemicals recently has arisen in four south-central Kansas counties. During the spring, wheat farmers there resorted to large-scale aerial crop spraying to control a damaging attack of army cutworms and greenbugs.
The Kansas Department of Agriculture estimates that pesticides were applied to 1.4 million acres there, about $20 million worth of wheat to be saved. Yet, because of the carelessness or stupidity of a few of the fliers who applied the spray, yet a higher price may have been paid for that wheat.
IN THEIR rush to save the crops, some sprayers forgot basic instructions for the chemicals' use. Many used too much chemical on each acre. (One chemical widely used, called parathion, is so toxic that a teaspoonful absorbed through the skin can kill a person.) The sprayers employed the chemicals, and others sprayed in high winds, causing the spray to drift to inhabited areas or farm ponds.
The result was a great deal of damage in the four-county area. There were animal deaths, losses of hundreds of thousands of fish, and reports of human illnesses caused by the spray. The event was covered by the copyrighted story that there were more than 100 instances of people being sprayed while at work in open areas, in cars on highways and, in one case, in a loaded school bus on its way from
school. Fortunately, no one received a lethal dose of the spray, even though a few people required medical attention.
INVESTIGATORS say the damage can't be measured accurately in dollars. The loss of a private fishing pond or one's favorite dog is hard to put a price tag on, as are one's fears and concerns with asthma hazards that the spray can cause.
The Star reported that some federal and state officials have accused the state department of agriculture of trying to whitewash an investigation of the damage. Department officials deny the charge and say many of the damage claims are exaggerated. The department also has said it does not have the necessary legal authority to deal with pesticide misuse, although it licenses spravers.
One federal investigator said the department almost has a built-in conflict of interest because it serves both as an enforcement officer and as the enforcer of pesticide rules.
WHAT IS clear is that if the department of agriculture has no authority to punish those responsible for the damage, then it or some other department should be granted authority immediately.
The whitewash charge should be thoroughly investigated and, if proved true, there should be some major changes in the department. Farmers need pesticides, which have been proven safe if used correctly. The same chemicals that caused so much harm last spring recently have been applied to the same areas with no reports of damage.
But the public also needs protection from foolhardy or careless application of chemicals. Strong legislation followed by vigorous enforcement is needed to prevent such unnecessary and harmful situations from occurring again.
By John Fuller Contributing Writer
There is a large, glossy pamphlet out that tells you how to get taxpayer money to mess around with other people's children. Put out by the National Youth Alternatives Project, this publication is called "Stalking the Large Green Grant: A Fund Baising Opportunities Agencies," and on its cover there is a blowup of part of a Federal Reserve note.
THE YOUTH Alternative Project centers its attention on runaways and works with shelters which have been established for them. With names like Yellow Brick Road, Grey Street and Looking Glass Family Crisis Intervention Center, they conjure up a vision of a dreadful melange of the viler sor of ordained youth worker: charlatans from the (ugh) human potential movement, the more wildess sort of social drug addicts who can't throw off the juvenilia of the 1960s.
Like many of the earlier entrepreneurs in social work, the people building up this new industry are honest by their lights and oblivious to the objectives that ought to be raised. The people who do not accept money for these purposes. After all, running away from home isn't a serious problem unless the rest of us make it one. If minimum wage and health, safety and other standards are not employed, it's difficult to see why the state (that is, the government) should be concerned about runaways, at least those over a certain age. What's important is that runaways, with clergy stocked to stop their schooling, receive a practical way to resume their studies after they've had their fun and their flair. A system of shelters, stocked with clergymen, various species of animals and social workers, most likely acts to encourage runaways.
THE ALARMING thing about Stalking the Large Green Grant
Youth agencies criticized
Carter pardon incomplete
Some might argue against such a pardon right away, saying it would end Carter's honeymon and divide the country. However, it is important that Carter act appropriately if he doesn't deliver in him certainly be lost if he does not deliver on the one promise he can keep.
After all, it isn't going to be easy to reduce inflation and unemployment to 3 or 4 per cent and balance the budget. Referencing the Fed's latest report, it will be a quite trick. Making detente a two-way street while cutting the defense budget will require another good amount of sleight of hand.
WE SHOULD be patient while waiting for this magic act to materialize. But there is one promised Carter trick we shouldn't have to wait on.
One of the big questions these days is whether Jimmy Carter can deliver on his promises, and, if so, how soon. He did such a good job of promising things that it would be almost unfair to expect him to do everything he said he would.
Carter has said he will pardon the estimated 4,000 draft resisters who still live in Canada and other foreign countries. That won't take any secret powers. As soon as you go to a new state, January, he need only say the word (and sign a document) and the deed will be done.
that his pardon of Richard Nixon was justified because he put Watergate behind us in the water.
I am not sure that those who resisted the draft or who deserved their units once drafted did the right thing. But I am sure that the leaders who sent more and more people to the war effort in Cambodia did the wrong thing. No one has forced those leaders to exile themselves.
MOREOVER, it is long past time that America finished the Vietnam story. The United States will never forget it.
True, the resisters and deserters broke the law, the leaders, in most cases, didn't. But if a terrorist wanted to attack a city,
the law, not unlike Richard Nixon, suffered enough?
Greg Hack
Contributing Writer
SOME PEOPLE can't see it that way. Many fathers who served during World War II and Korea can't understand why those who said so to Vietnam service should be "taken back." Mothers who waited for their sons to come back from war, and for their sons to come back from Vietnam, may wonder why resisters and deserters should be hardened.
But there are also parents and brothers and sisters who wish that their relatives—who couldn't bring themselves to fight in a war—can come home again. Many Vietnam veterans
wonder just what they were fighting for and don't blame those who didn't fight.
Are those who violated draft and service laws during Vietnam really worse than those who did so during World War I and World War II? If anything, the Vietnam violators are better, for their war was at best questionable, unlike the world wars.
THE RESISTERS of the world wars were given amnesty. Is America now less cruel?
Are these people really less deserving of a pardon? They are the people who didn't have the money and education to leave the country, the people who weren't afraid of their consequences of their actions, the people who at least tried to fight—being human—crashed.
Besides the 4,000 overseas to whom Carter has promised pardons, there are almost 800,000 Vietnam veterans with bad discharges, a million men who could be indicted for not registering for the draft, 12,000 overt resisters in the United States and countless deserters. To them Carter has promised only a case-by-case review.
TO SHOW true compassion and leadership, Carter should keep his promise to pardon those overseas, and he should go a step further by giving an equal break to the almost two million others who violated laws concerning Vietnam.
We shouldn't forget Vietnam, lest its mistakes be repeated, and forgiveness is needed.
is the number, variety and nature of the federal giveaway programs aimed toward youth. It is important that the federal government buries names like the Office of Youth Development, it is hard to foresee any limit to the information functions in the relationships
which was once a state of life through which most of us go in our journeys to the grave, has made the pathological condition with its programs—medical, social workcal and psychological. The pathologicalization of the human race vanished, and you think I么m
Nicholas Von Hoffman
(c) 1974 King Features Syndicate
between older children and their families.
Take the Michigan Coalition of Runaway Services, an entity that didn't exist four years ago and now has a director, an assistant director, a technical assistant specialist, a part-time training specialist and another individual along with a budget that has moved up from zero to close to half a million dollars. Stalking the Large Green Grant tells us, "The coalition members have recently decided that providing runaway services should be seen as only part of its function, and the coalfaction should be more intrusive by young people's problems and needs in general."
THE CLASSIC way for hungry social workers and others engaged in the taxation process is pathologize the victims—that is the "clients" or recipients of these services. Thus, old age,
engaging in hyperbole, I cite the case of James, a school boy sentenced to drug medication for hyperkinesia although he displayed none of the symptoms of the disease. How is this case represented as a quote from the report of the chief审察 who examined James.
The agency began making diagnoses of the kids who came there to play basketball, even in, the words of a social worker who tried to stop what was going on, "No client had been advised of the agency's intention to play basketball" of the agency's intention of 'cooperating' with the appropriate city and state agency by sending in diagnoses. Since the kids came here for recreation it was unfair for them to be diagnosed. When I send my own kid to camp or to the "N" to swim, etc. I would be asked to be informed about the existence of such a file on people who come and use services innocently, and then have a folder made up on them that can be damaging to them in later life."
"James showed no hyperactivity either in my office or in the waiting room. He was not restless or fidgety. His attention and concentration were good, and he wasn't distractable. There was no thought or affect disorder. Recommendation: acceptance for treatment; program as well as pharmacotherapeutic treatment based on the diagnosis of hyperkinetic reaction of childhood."
THIS CASE is cited by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a recently published book called "Radical Children," which costs $2.95 paperback. They also included an example of a social agency, originally set up to provide recreation for kids, deciding it could get more funding for children to health a huge growth industry.
No symptoms, no clinical
No reason to think the child had the
need for therapy and on medication
and on neurologist and a psychologist
who also examined James came to the same conclusion, namely that the boy displayed no sign of hyperkinesis; they also recommended him for treatment.
FIRST YOU rearrange a society to make it difficult for the family to carry out its traditional job. Then you further incapacitate it by encouraging family members to look to institutions, outside, and your own to perform the family's functions, and you tax the family to pay for it.
But it doesn't work because in our stage of history, our big institutions are only able to weaken traditional relationships, not substitute for them. "The goal," he says, "to mothe HEW made famous: 'No service for every need, no need for every service.'"
WHEN IT isn't immediately possible to convince people that what was once normal, ordinary and usual—i.e., childhood, youth, old age—is now pathological, it is done by diagnosing someone and giving them the shadow of institutional and governmental supervision the rest of his life.
It is certainly true that parents have never felt less able to do for their children, to provide a cocoon and an environment in which their children will grow up absorbing their values and emulating their behavior. Government action of these kinds accelerates the development of community as the primary means of training and controlling the young.
Letters
To the Editor:
HOPE credibility waning
I would like to congratulate Professor Turk for winning the 1978 HOPE award. He was selected from an excellent field of deserving candidates, a fact that I think adds a tremendous amount of credibility to this distinguished award.
But as I look at the past two years, I see a trend developing that may hurt this standard of credibility. That is that a journalism professor was again selected winner.
It is not the fact that the
Voting is done in the information booth on Jayhawk Boulevard, directly in Front of the building. The system provides easy access for journalism seniors to vote and hinders the chances of a business, law, physical science or computer science professor receiving the votes.
Summerfield, Green Robinson or Blake and don't have the accessibility to the voting booth the journalism seniors have.
The seniors in these schools spend most of their time in
I also think it is easier for journalism seniors to generate more votes because the booth is in front of Flint Hall.
I don't think this is a healthy situation. I would like to see an alternate method of voting in the future to keep one school on campus from dominating this prestigious award.
Corky Trewin
Redmond. Wash.. senior
pros in a hurry—maybe even sooner than Butler himself plans to make it.
Corky Trewin
Vice reported in Last Thursday's Kansasan that Butler has compiled impressive statistics this year against All-Americans from both teams, Kentucky, Mike Vaughn of Oklahoma and Dennis Luck of Wisconsin.
There is no disputing Butler's prowess against these three players. But an incongruity develops. To compile impressive statistics against Lick this year, Butler must have flown to Chicago some week when I was not watching.
Student government apathy rife
Bv JEFF LATZ
Guest Writer
Dennis Lick was theırround pick of the Chicago Bearsin in the 1976 National Football League draft.
Is student government a faece? Just how many of the 20,000 students at the University of Kansas care about their student government, or care about what their student government functionaries do for their constituents?
FARBER said that this type of government might be worth supporting if it was willing to catch bell from the students until they "what you’re more likely to get is bigger homecomings and maybe an extra wing on the student union, with more bowling ales and so on to keep the children occupied.
In 1967, Jerry Farber said in his book, "The Student as Nigger," that student government should throw college or university system. He said student governments should throw off the trappings of the whole "pompon-waste" economy and spend money in meaningful ways."
Do student governments give all college students a means to effectively participate in a representative and educative democratic model?
CERTAINLY we would be a poor
democracy if we did not educate our citizenry about its governmental methods and procedures of operation. Although many student senators, and even students, may not know it, the University of Kansas Student Senate emulates the American system of government to a degree.
Most of these schools have their student governments fairly well defined on paper, but they all seem to be getting students to participate.
It has an executive branch, a legislative branch and a somewhat furzzy, but existing, judicial system.
The student governments at Kansas State University and Emporia State College have the three systems well defined in their constitutions.
SIXTEEN PER cent of the KU students voted in the Senate election last February—a rather surprising
Of those four Kansas schools, Kansas State University had the highest voter participation for the 1976 election year. Of those four Kansas students, approximately 14,000 KSU students voted
PITTSBURG STATE has only executive and legislative branches in its student government.
turnout when you consider that the Senate has a fiscal budget for 1976 of $446,897.
But college students, because they supposedly make up some of the "cream" of the great American population, are more interest in their government.
Student senates seem to be plagued by the same problem of getting voters to the polls that exist in regular local, state and federal elections.
That sort of thing happens because most college faculty, students and
WOODWARD AND Berstein said in "All the President's Men" that Segrette, Chapin and some others implicated in the Watergate affair belonged to the University of Southern California student political "mafia." There they learned how to stuff balloons, send out subversive and bogus campaign material and, in general, sabotage an election in their favor. They also examined a form of how an educative, democratic model should not be run.
When they don't, they let such people as Donald Segretti; subvert government for their own purposes.
Tom Schaffner Clarendon Hills, Ill. senior
administrators are disinterested in student government.
As long as a student senate does not make any real "waves," college administrators are content to leave it alone.
STUDENT SENATORS, supposedly the backbone of the student government, also have problems. They are not paid, receive no academic credit and achieve little glory for what can sometimes turn into a boring, tedious job. All they get is committee work and a slap on the back if they do well.
Then, if they are lucky—after putting up with this slavery for two or three years, they can campaign for one of the Senate's aid jobs.
At KU and most universities, only one senate job pays well, and that is the position of student body president.
The ordinary student senators, who also had to campaign and face the electorate, usually get only the satisfaction of having won a seat and the expectation of becoming an member of the student government.
Because of the seeming lack of interest in student government on the part of college administrators, students
and professors, perhaps its usefulness should be reevaluated.
If American college students are not motivated to participate in, or actively learn about, the American government by having realistic, meaningful educational models, why have them at all?
Essentially, a better system of student government could be established that would motivate the majority of students to participate and could also manage students, faculty and administrators matters government studies of student government.
Butler not yet pro
To the Editor:
Gary Vice, this fall's assistant sports editor for the Karsan, really wants KU football star Mike Butler to make it to the
MORE THOUGHT could be given on how to motivate students to be senators. Possibly they could receive much more attention well done tuition reductions or pay
Perhaps the departments of history, sociology and political science could take more interest to help formulate a student government worth summoning.
Jeff Latz is journalism education graduate student.
This sort of improvement program for workers in student government might mobilize them to have more than one attitude toward their governments.
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas daily August 16, 2018. Please visit www.kansas.edu/about-us/june and July except Saturday, Sunday and Holiday. 66044 Subscriptions by mail are $8 a semester or $14 a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are a year outside the county.
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