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Thursday, December 7, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Quorum should be present before Council does work
The University Council last Thursday rejected two changes in parking regulations recommended by the Parking Board. It did so without a quorum, raising the question of how seriously the Council takes some of its actions.
Because a call for the quorum was not made until the end of the meeting, when the Coucil was scheduled to discuss the Parking Department's budget, the votes on the recommended changes were valid.
Willing to make changes in parking regulations without a quorum, the Council obviously was less willing to tackle an issue such as the budget. Regulations are easier to change or rescind than budget items.
granted, the changes in regulations were relatively minor. One of the defeated changes would have extended the hours of faculty blue spaces to 8:30 p.m. in the lot west of Learned Hall. The other would have opened the lot north of Summerfield Hall at night and changed Lot 35, west of the Military Science building, to faculty and staff until 8:30 p.m. The changes would have affected a tiny segment of the University population.
However, parking is an important issue at the University and is the source of much consternation and debate. It should not have been dismissed as a routine parliamentary ratification, as the Council action implies. Once matters turned to money, the Council was hesitant to take action. It should have been equally concerned when considering such mundane topics as where and when people can park safely on campus.
a quorum should be called at the beginning of each Council meeting to ensure that decisions are being made fairly. If a quorum does not exist, the meeting should be postponed with an explanation for the delay. All the issues before the Council have some importance, or they wouldn't be there. Council members should take time to make sure they get the serious consideration they deserve.
Daniel Niemi for the editorial board
The gift of time celebrates season with holiday spirit
Lend a hand at a local charity this Christmas season. They need your help.
Lawrence Memorial Hospital, 325 Main St., always welcomes Christmas carolers, said Judith McFadden, director of community relations. She said the hospital also needed people to make tray favors. Patients in the hospital this time of year would welcome visitors. For more information, contact McFadden at 749-6132.
Penn House, 1035 Pennsylvania St., has a Christmas adoption program, said director Bessie Nichols. Community members are asked to donate clothes, food and toys. Nichols said that anyone who can adopt a family should call Penn House. A person who cannot afford to adopt a family can help by donating individual items. Nichols said paper towels, toilet paper, toothpaste, detergent, soap and other household goods were especially in demand because those items could not be purchased with food stamps. To help, call Penn House at 842-0440.
The Ballard Community Center Inc., 708 Elm St., needs holiday gift wrappers for gifts given to the center, said Sunny Bradshaw, a center volunteer. People who can spare some time to help wrap gifts should call Bradshaw at the center, 842-0729.
The Salvation Army, 946 New Hampshire St., needs more bell ringers this year. They also need help working with their food program, running the homeless shelter and setting up their toy shop for Christmas. To help, call Susan Beers at the Salvation Army, 843-4188.
Tiffany N. Harness for the editorial board
Correction
Information in an editorial about Tonganoxie High School in Tuesday's Kansan was incorrect. The Tonganoxie School District condemned the 97 students who had walked out in support of their teachers. Also, students who did not return to class that day must serve a six-hour, in-school suspension or six hours of community service.
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No Christmas for Freddie
Christmas is the season for symbols and tradition. It seems that our entire culture is given over to religious and secular songs and images that promote themes of plenty and generosity on hand, yet make more poignant the culture's widespread want and destination.
the culture's widespread wander. Outside our culture, revolution rather than tradition is the season's theme. Closed societies finally could not resist the infiltration of free market values and aspirations flooding in in the form of soft drink advertisements and "Brady Bunch" reruns. Governments topple from within with breathtaking speed, yet do the people below clamor for more freedom and faster change?
courtroom.
So surely, then, the symbol of the revolution might well be the beaching of the Berlin Wall. It was formerly the symbol as well as the fact of the utter barrier between two cultures, one "free" and the other "imprisoned." Now the wall is opened and those behind it are free to ... what? They are free to acquire and consume, that's what. Outside the wall isn't necessarily freedom from persecution or even freedom to be left alone. What does exist outside is the relatively unrestrained culture of materialism.
The traditions and rites of materialism are nowhere more enscribed and celebrated than here in the United States, and it's safe to say that the weeks preceding Christmas have become the apotheosis of this celebration. All around us secular and religious symbols are appropriated and combined in a monolithic liturgy of want and gratification.
We need a focused image of the product of three hundred years of free enterprise, generally unhindered by the social controls the revolution repudiates. Here, then, is that image, an 11-year-old boy named Freddie Jones. Harken, you who would follow us: Freddie Jones is our Spirit of Christmas Present.
want and gratitude. Then, is the end toward which an understanding flight to capitalism surges, the highest realization of the social model where everything is available, for a price. The revolution has its new symbol, and our culture, to which that revolution looks, needs a modern icon of its own.
is our Spirit of a Christian.
Freddie was a bright, engaging fifth-grade who did his homework and took pride in getting good grades. His mother, Nadra Jones, "wanted him to be well-known because he was an intelligent little boy. I thought he could be the first black president of the United States."
Any kid faces long oops in undertaking such aspirations; Freddie's chances were slim to none. In Freddie's culture, no, make that our culture, the dominant free enterprise model has extended to basic constituents of modern life: education, medical care, even minimal food and shelter. Mark this, you who would adopt our social system, we buy these things here, they are merely commodities. The quantity as well as quality of one's portion corresponds to the price one can afford to pay. Although there have been experiments, notably in the 1930s and 1960s, that tampered with the social marketplace, much of the machinery of those experiments has been dismantled in the last decade.
Freddie descended from people whom the founders of our culture kidnapped, enslaved, used and sold at auction. That is, the foundation of our society was built on the bodies of human beings that became merely a commodity. Remnants of this outlook have fostered to this day a pervasive disenfranchisement of their descen-
Stuart Beals
Staff columnist
uants, including Freddie. As a result they have been channeled into a subculture, deprived of equal opportunity to equip themselves for competition in the open market of this society.
market of this social market. Consequently, our culture has added a potent element to the demand-side of the social market equation; despair. Unsurprisingly, it has also provided a ready commodity in the form of drugs. For you draftsmen of the new economic democracies, this is the signal feature of our culture. Whereas per capita demand for food and shelter is relatively fixed, the despair/drug cycle is self-feeding yet open-ended. It is the ultimate realization of the possibilities inherent in our culture of materialism. It is, therefore, the most appropriate theme of our modern Christmas.
Christmas.
Freddie was growing up smack in the middle of this cycle. He had no meaningful address, school officials said; rather, he drifted, sometimes with his sister, from home to home in the tough Kansas City neighborhood around the street with the ironic name Prospect. With him he always carried a blue sports bag, which held his books, a change of clothes, toothpaste and a brush.
books, a change of His mother was in jail, after violating parole restrictions arising from a concealed-weapon conviction, including failure to enter a treatment program for substance abuse. No one knew where Freddie's father was.
Neighbors and friends remember that after school Freddie patiently worked on his homework alone at his grandparents' house. They said recently that Freddie stayed away from drug dealers and ran errands for spare change. A neighbor, Alonzo Dial, said he praised Freddie for his good report cards, adding, "If he missed the school bus, he'd take the city bus. He really had the desire to make good."
A couple of weeks ago, Freddie spent the last night of his life at the home of a friend of his mother. That evening he played school in the den with his sister and other children.
children.
The next day Freddie and his sister returned to the house where they used to live, which police suspect had become a crack house. He wanted to retrieve some belongings. His sister knocked on the door, entered and went upstairs.
Freddie then knocked on the door, the door to the house that had been his home once. Someone inside asked who it was. Freddie didn't answer and opened the door. A gun fired.
I recue turned and stumbled into the street and died. There will be no Christmas celebration for Freddie Jones, if indeed there ever was. Those of us left to celebrate ought to remember that and consider what his life and death represent.
This Christmas is a time of courage and social revolution elsewhere. So should it be here.
Stuart Beats is a Lawrence graduate student.
'Amen' for the Eastern bloc
The latest convert to success theology turns out to be none other than the head of the nominally atheist Soviet empire.
And they used to say this wasnt an age of miracles. Of course that was before dramatic events in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and now this benediction from the Kremlin.
For the moment, Mikhail Gorbachev seems to view religion as a means rather than an end, a tool of social renewal. On meeting the Pope, he noted that "the moral values which religion generated and embodied for centuries can help in the work of renewal in our country, too."
Lots of folks view religion as a way to another goal — material success, good health, psychological ballast. . . They recommend faith the way others prescribe pills. See some of the televangelists who crowd the screen, especially on Sundays and during the more desperate hours of the night.
hours of the man.
A lyric from Jasmin Jonis, that noted theologian, floats my head on such occasion. It went something like:
"O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz/Myrials all have Forsches, I must make amends." Mikhail Gorbachev, that altruist, would never be so crass; he's asking for socio-economic renewal.
"The government is looking to the church to help make the people good hard-working citizens." That's the opinion of Michael Rowe, a senior fellow at a British think-tank devoted to studying religion in the Communist bloc. Marxist daimna doesn't seem to motivate the proterarians any longer, so why not try an older, more established brand? According to this scholar, the Soviet Union's new rulers believe the church "can still instill something useful" — something helpful to the state, of course. That's what any Communist regime would love to have: the Protestant ethic.
Paul
Greenberg
Sundialed columnist
Syndicated columnist
This new, enlightened attitude in Moscow is not altogether different from the position of those Americans who complain that, ever since official prayers were dropped from the school day, students have grown lazy and rebellious.
and reprobates.
There are two ways to suppress the religious spirit. The first is to persecute and subvert it, to make it a matter of bought priests and empty ceremony. But there is a second and much more effective method, and it is not unknown in this country. It is to make religion respectable, semi-official, another social agency, a seal of worldly success. This is the American way, and the Soviets, newly interested in American ways, may have decided to adopt this one, too.
decided to adopt this but, this does not mean that deacon Gorbachev's conversion to tolerance is unwelcome. He may now think of religion as only a means to a greater end, but means have a way of becoming ends. What better illustration of that familiar tendency than the history of Marxism itself? The dictatorship that was going to be only a station on the road to utopia developed into a permanent detour.
on the road to baptism.
So welcome, Brother Gorbachev. Whatever your reasons, they may change. Faith has a way of growing.
Amen, heliJaluj and more power to you. As is the case with so many of us, Providence may not be finished with Mikhail Gorbachev yet.
- Paul Greenberg is the Editorial Page editor for the Pine Bluff (Ark). Commercial.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Lawrence folks friendly
Ever since we moved to Lawrence from Los Angeles last May, I have noticed and appreciated the difference in the young men and women who work the check-out in the grocery stores and drive-up windows in the fast food chains. In Los Angeles the folks were inarticulate and not very friendly. Here in Lawrence I find these people upbeat, warm, courteous and friendly.
I suspect that a majority of these workers are KU students. That, coupled with the friendliness that seems to pervade Lawrence, must be the reason why these people are so much nicer to deal with than their counterparts in Los Angeles. I hope the residents of Lawrence appreciate these young people as I do.
Bob Lewis University Relations
As I read Merceda Ares' column about losing her balance during a bus ride, I was appalled at her as a columnist and at the editors of the Kansan. I can't believe that she would submit and that the editors would accept such a useless bit of self nitty.
No pity for the rider
I'm sorry you lost your balance, but let's put up. This doesn't give you the right to label an entire profession just because you feel sorry for yourself. Even I a "naive" freshman, realize that life is full of unpleasant happenings. If this little incident bothers you this much, I think that you had better take up residence in a closet and quit wasting print ink.
Your solution was sand pits. This is a college campus, not a golf course. Yet I do believe that one campus sand pit would be good. Columnists who waste paper space could go bury their heads in shame.
OK. I can slightly sympathize with you but let's not stop with the bus drivers. Let's get those nasty people, who lay the sidewalks with cracks in them. I bet they do it on purpose so "you" will trip.
David Eschbach
St. Louis freshman
Bus drivers merit thanks
I want to respond to your column from Nov. 30. I'm sorry that the writer fell, but might I suggest to her that while standing or riding that she take advantage of the handrails down either side of the aisle and on the backs of the seats.
No. 2010-01-17
(5)
As for jumping off a rolling bus, I would imagine that the bus driver hasn't arrived at his stop yet. he or she is probably slowing down for pedestrians or other drivers in order to get to their assigned stopping places or a little beyond it to allow the bus behind him pull-in space. Why does't the rider simply speak to the driver and ask, "Are you stopped yet?" Drivers are human!
Both of the drivers on my route are great guys, easy to talk to. The young one with the boom box has a cheerful greeting for almost every student, even in a packed onslaught up on Daisy Hill. The older one has a wife and kids and will give you a progress report on his three-year-old's cold if you ask. Both drivers have gone out of their way to be kind to me.
In the morning, if it's cold, I have a promise that I can stand inside the Burge Union glass doors and if I don't see them in time to trot out to the stop, I can cross the street and be picked up at a non-designated stop corner after he makes his loop.
The evening driver always lets me off at a non-designated corner so that I and my neighbor, who is not my friend, don't walk to school. I won't have as far to walk.
I really think we owe some thanks to these guys, not criticism. When I lived in Japan, I remember watching the daily ritual as the school bus brought back the preschoolers. The bus driver always stepped off with the kids and bowed to the walking moms and their little kids, bowed twice and said in chorus, "Thank you very much," to the bus helper and then the bus driver.
Linda J. Donan
As Christmas is just around the corner, we all might want to take a moment to say our thanks to our bus drivers with a card or a candy cane. After all, they regularly shuttle us up and down the lofty Mount Oread with rarely a "thankss!"
Linda J. Donon
Graham, Mo., graduate student
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