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Tuesday, December 5, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Tonganoxie students find rights aren't guaranteed
Freedom of expression suffered a major setback last week when the Tonganoxie Education Association condemned 97 Tonganoxie High School students and threatened to file disciplinary actions against them when the students walked out of classes in support of district teachers working under 1988-1989 contracts.
Approximately one-third of the high school's student body left the classroom to exercise their constitutionally granted freedom to "petition" and "to assemble... peaceably."
Unfortunately, based on the response of Superintendent Stephen McClure, these constitutional rights and privileges did not justify the actions of the 97 students. McClure, along with Tonganoxie High School principal Lee Smith, announced that the students, who walked out and did not attend classes on Wednesday, must serve a six-hour, in-school suspension and another six hours of community service.
This seems like a harsh penalty to impose upon citizens who were exercising their right to express their grievances. And while their constitutional rights have been violated, so has something else equally sacred, their right to think freely.
An institution of learning should be a place that fosters free thought and independent opinion, not a place that squelches it. Obsequious behavior should not be expected or preferred in a society that must constantly re-evaluate its values and goals.
Tonganoxie High School students should be praised for their actions, not punished. While legitimately adhering to guidelines prescribed in our Constitution, these citizens were answered by school administrators' hypocrisy. Their response ignored inherent rights and even ionoardized free thought.
Today, students across the country are criticized for being unaware and apathetic. But based on the response of the Tonganoxie School District, conformity and ignorance certainly is preferable to action.
Thom Clark for the editorial board
Veto of Chinese Relief Act jeopardizes students' lives
If President Bush vetoes the Emergency Chinese Immigration Relief Act of 1989, he will endanger the lives of 60,000 innocent human beings. The victims of Bush's neglect will be the Chinese national students who are attending colleges and universities across the United States.
The legislation, introduced by Sen. William Armstrong, R.-Colo., would allow students to remain in the U.S. upon the expiration of their visas if there is sufficient reason to believe they would be persecuted upon their return to China.
Bush is expected to veto this legislation because the Chinese government wants him to. The Chinese government is so opposed to the U.S. protecting these students that it has threatened to quit sending students to the United States if Bush does not veto the legislation.
Since when does our country succumb to the idle threats of a regressive, anti-humanitarian, communist country? The Chinese government will only hurt its own economic and technological advancement if it denies visas to promising students. It's China's own fault that these students seek refuge. As a nation, we don't need to have the lives of 60,000 people on our conscience.
Bush should not give any credence to the demand. The issue at hand is not one of party politics. After all, the legislation was overwhelmingly approved in both the House and the Senate. Therefore, the only explanation for the President's veto is that he is honoring the Chinese government's request.
It is obvious from the occurrences last spring and summer that the Chinese government is not planning any political reforms. Its intolerance and disregard for democracy and humanity was exemplified through its actions against reformists. There is absolutely no reason for us to respect the Chinese government's request. It is China that will suffer the repercussions of its threats, not the U.S. And there is no justification for making 60,000 Chinese students return to a country where they will be persecuted and brainwashed.
If President Bush denies these students refuge, he will be denying the will of Congress and the will of the people of the United States.
Kathv Walash for the editorial board
News staff
David Stewart...Editor
Rlc Bick...Managing editor
Daniel Niemi...New editor
Candy Niemann...Planning editor
Dan Dee...Editorial editor
Jennifer Corser...Campus editor
Eileine Sung...Sports editor
Laura Huser...Photo editor
Brandon Winner...Artist/FanFeatured
Tom Eblen...General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Linda Prokop...Business manager
Debra Martin...Local advertising sales director
Jerre Medford...National/regional sales director
Jill Lowe...Marketing director
Tami Rank...Production manager
Carrie Stainka...Assistant production manager
Von Reed...Ken Leland
Eric Hughes...Creative director
Christi Dool...Classified manager
Jeff Meesey...Tearsheet manager
Jeanne Hines...Sales and marketing adviser
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Salvadorans deserve respect
The United States is not defending democracy in El Salvador; it is only supporting death and destruction. The $4.5 billion in U.S. military and economic aid to El Salvador for the past 10 years has not fostered peace and democracy but has only encouraged increased repression by a series of right-wing governments. The recent offensive by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) indicates the level of popular discontent with the Salvadoran government and the need for a political change in El Salvador.
The U.S. government has sought to cast the leftist insurgency in El Salvador as part of a Moscow-backed communist conspiracy for world domination. This perception, however, ignores the internal economic and political conditions in Central America that led to a search for alternative solutions to their problems. Capitalism is not the solution; it has only brought skyrocketing debt, hyperinflation, poverty and starvation to the people. Socialism can grow must grow out of a study of their history and development and not as a paranoid reaction to an ill-perceived "communist" threat to our hemisphere.
El Salvador has a long and bloody history of right-wing military repression designed to subjugate landless peasants to the whims of a wealthy oligarchy. For years Salvadoran peasants have been organizing for a democratic society in which there would be an equal distribution of wealth and power. In 1832 the Salvadoran army responded to the organizational efforts of Farabund Marti, the ideological forebear of the FMLN, with a massacre of 30,000 peasants in an oppressive government. Repression has always been the response of the Salvadoran government to greater democracy and popular participation in the government.
The present right-wing ARENA government of Alfredo Cristiani continues this tradition of responding to popular democratic impulses with bullets. On Oct. 31 of this year the Security Forces of Cristiani's government bombed the offices of FENASTRAS (a trade union federation) and COMADRES (a mother's committee for those who "disappeared" in the military's dirty war). These attacks, which killed 10 people and injured 43, demonstrate how the Cristiani government responds to its popular non-violent opposition. This is the action of the death squad government that the United States supports in El Salvador. These attacks, and countless ones before them, led many Salvadorans to understand that neither Cristiani nor the U.S. government was interested in a war against them. Rather, Salvadorans saw these bombings as a declaration of war by the ARENA government against the people.
Today, a small, wealthy elite continues to benefit from the exploitation of the masses in El Salvador. Two percent of the population controls 60 percent of the land. The average income for a Salvadoran worker is $820 a year, but many workers and peasants earn much less. Many Salvadorans cannot afford the basic necessities of life, and inadequate medical care has led to a high infant mortality rate. When Salvadorans organize to improve their desperate situation, the military responds with increased repression. Since 1980, more than 50,000 people, out of a population of 5.5 million, have been killed by death squads. Thousands more have been killed by the military's indiscriminate bombing and 1.5 million have been displaced from their homes.
Marc Becker
Guest columnist
In the present guerrilla offensive, more than a thousand civilians have been killed by the extensive use of white phosphorus bombs, rockets and Gatling machine guns in densely populated neighborhoods in San Salvador. This is not the action of a government with popular democratic support, but that of a desperate regime willing to hold on to power at any cost. The FMLN offensive continues strongly despite repeated statements by the Salvadoran and U.S. governments that it was a failure. Far from failing, the ranks of the FMLN have increased dramatically since the beginning of the offensive. The FMLN enjoys the popular support that the right-wing government does not have. The FMLN's military control of the outlying provinces has allowed the people to set up their own popular governments. For the first time in Salvadoran history, the people are able to gain control over their own social, political and economic life.
The ideology behind the FMLN does not come from Moscow but grows out of the historic economic and political conditions in El Salvador. FMLN demands such as land reform, purging the military of death squad members, freedom for civilian groups to organize and protest and negotiations with the Cristiani government are in response to their own demands. If it were happening in Eastern Europe, the United States would see it as democracy. In El Salvador we must be equally willing to defend and support democratic uprisings.
To cut off aid to the Salvadoran government would mean an end to right-wing repression and exploitation, and through negotiations, the flowering of a popular democracy in El Salvador. This move may cost an elite few their wealth and power, but the majority of the Salvadoran people would benefit tremendously. It is time for the U.S. government to respect self-determination in El Salvador.
▶ Marc Becker is a Lawrence graduate student in Latin American History.
Women smell like magazines
A freelance writer, working on an article, called to ask me what perfume I preferred on women. The writer was supposed to ask a bunch of people that question "If a woman passes you on the street, is there one perfume that you recognize immediately?" the writer asked.
"Actually," I said, "all women smell like magazines to me these days."
And it's true. Now that the slick magazines are filled with those snap-open advertising inserts that are coated with perfume, there is no real way to tell the difference between one perfume and another. The magazine-reading experience, once designed for the eyes and the brain, is now designed for the nose. By the time you're finished with a stack of magazines, you have smelled about a dozen perfumes.
My guess is that this is working against the perfume manufacturers. Yes, you can snap open the advertising inserts and find out what the perfume or cologne smells like. But you aren't left with any real memory of the different names of the different perfumes. What was the old slogan? "I can't seem to forget you; your Wind Song stays on my mind." The smell of perfume is supposed to remind you of a person, not of a publication.
I have a real feeling that the freelance writer is not going to be able to use my quote — a story about the romance of perfume will not be helped out by the observation that women are beginning to smell like perfume. The same could happen with obsolete by now. For the snap-open perfume inserts are being replaced by something even more nefarious.
I was reading a men's magazine the other day, and a few minutes after I had put it down I looked at my hands and let out a yell. My hands had turned three different colors, none of them very pleasant-looking. The colors were dark and splobyte, like nothing I had ever seen. I didn't know what was wrong, but my first instinct was to call a good dermatologist, and fast.
Before I did that, though, I tried to wash the colors off, and succeeded. I was totally puzzled by what could have happened, but then I went back through the magazine. There had been an ad from the Geurlian company, which makes perfume. It had looked like one of those snap-open
Bob Greene
Syndicated columnist
perfume ads. But it had not been for perfume.
The ad had been for "bronzers" and "blushers." Bronzers and blushes are makeup — you rub the stuff on your face and it turns your face a different color than normal. The blushers and blushers are being marketed both to men and to women.
Magazine advertising technology — which seemingly had been stalled with snap-open perfume inserts — has now reached the point where inserts featuring actual bronzers and blushers are possible. That is what had happened; I had inadvertently rubbed my hands against the bronzer/blusher ad, thinking that the pictures of the bronzers and blushers were merely that: pictures. They weren't; they were actual bronzers and blushers, which is why I screamed when I saw my hands several minutes later.
Vandy Lipman, an executive with Guerlain, said that what I had encountered was a "powder strip." She explained that a "powder strip" is different from a "fragrance strip." With a "fragrance strip" in a magazine, you smell perfume. With a "powder strip," you get blushers and bronzeers on your skin.
"It allows the customer to test the product without having to go to the counter in a store." Lipman said.
She said that readers are expected to rub the stuff onto their faces. Guerlain is running the ads in national men's and women's magazines, she said, and other manufacturers of blushers and bronzeers are doing the same than
Had any other startled readers complained about unexpectedly having their hands turn colors?
"We haven't had any problems with it," Lipman said. "You really have to rub it to get it. There has to be some friction."
Bob Greene is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Cartoon strip not funny
Michael W. Gier Parsons Junior
"Camp Unheely" is an interesting comic strip. It is refreshing to see the University Daily Kansan give space to allow Mr. Patty to ply his trade and address some of the issues unique to KU students. The strip, however, is quite simply not funny. As a replacement to the humorous but untimely deceased "Bloom County," I'm afraid it falls very short. The Kansan should keep the strip and should in the future continue to provide a medium for student cartoonists. I feel, however, that a more humorous, syndicated strip is both necessary and prudent. I suggest "Calvin and Hobbes."
Rightist view not realistic
Stan Dial, your editor on the civil war in El Salvador disturb me greatly. You see, I was beginning to believe, with great relief that your brand of conservative myopia was nearly extinct. Alas, itlings like a bad case of scurvy. You seem to believe a rather ancient (in light of recent events in Eastern Europe) conservative fantasy/nightmare that there is a worldwide "Communist agenda" to overtake the United States by first topping smaller countries and using them as stepping stones to our back door. Now, I know old habits are hard to break, but the commies and their cronies are being put to pasture in droves. And what about the "agenda"? Is that distributed like a newsletter? I would like to get on that mailing list. It would make for some interesting reading.
The problem in El Salvador doesn't stem from some imaginary agenda; it lies with the government that the United States has been keeping in power for years and is evidenced by the fact that $3.5 billion in U.S. aid (mainly military) hasn't been able to shut the rebels down. The rebels are Salvadoran not American, and they are fighting to bring an end to a regime that has proven its ability to do three things: ignore the general population, keep the land and money in the hands of a few, and eliminate anyone who disagrees with this.
The "leftist threat" to El Salvador is the population of El Salvador tired of living the "rightist" reality, and there is evidently widespread popular support for the regime, which crushed years ago by the much more heavily equipped Salvadoran army.
Are the rebels anti-United States? Well, yes, probably because we supplied the bullets to fill the heads of the civilian political opposition, which led to what is now a civil war. As for the rebels being Marxist, why would the Catholic church of El Salvador support a godless cause? It doesn't make sense and neither does your dogmatic conservative support for the continuation of aid to a government that does little more than pay lip service to democracy.
Silence the liberals? You've got to be kidding
Christopher Hill Houston, Texas, senior
Irish history distorted
In the article, "Library receives grant to catalog Irish works," in the Oread, Vol. 14, No. 13, there is a gross distortion of history. The Irish Free State was not "founded" by Britain (in 1922). Ireland fought her final war with England and freed herself from 800 years of occupation, signing a truce in 1920, having convinced England it could no longer militarily defend Ireland. What the Anglo-Irish treaty did not achieve was the full 32 counties of Ireland. Michella Collin, director of intelligence for the IRA and the prime guerrilla leader of the movement, and Authur Griffith, a member of the provisional government, were deputized by President de Valera to lead the truce talks in London. They were forced, in December 1921, to
"settle" for 28 counties. Ireland and England both still are paying the price for this piece of paper. The O'Hegarty collection in the Spencer Research Library should provide an excellent opportunity to educate us on this and other matters in Anglo-Irish relations.
Maura Piekalkiewicz
Lawrences Resident