OPINION
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
PUBLISHED DAILY SINCE 1912
CRAG LANG, Editor
SUSANNA LOOP, Managing editor
KIMBERLY CRARTREE, Editorial editor
TOM EBLEN, General manager, news adviser
MARK OZMEK, Business manager
DENNIS HAUPT, Retail sales manager
JUSTIN KRUPI, Technology coordinator
JAY STEINER, Sales and marketing adviser
Monday, February 17, 1997
Jeff MacNelly / CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Editorials
Resolution will not help the war on drugs,may cause problems
House Resolution 88 is the bill that will suspend financial aid to students who are caught with or sell a controlled substance.
While the bill's intentions may be good, it does not offer viable solutions to America's drug problems, and it imposes a dangerous precedent for government influence.
Illegal drug use is a major problem in the United States. And the bill is correct in trying to address this problem but not at any expense.
The immensity of drug use makes it a difficult target for any solution. However, trying to prevent drug use by making education more difficult for individuals convicted of drug use will not solve the problem.
Students who are caught with illegal drugs could have their education pulled from beneath them for at least one year.
The bill should not be passed because it doesn't offer viable solutions.
One of the problems with the bill is that it doesn't offer these individuals solutions to their drug problems like drug counseling or rehabilitation.
Also, it does not give those individuals a good reason quit using or selling drugs and pursue a drug-free education.
Another problem with the bill is the precedent it would set for the relationship between government and the people.
By assigning certain values as correct and punishing individuals who transgress against them, the government will have too much say in the assessment of people's morals.
For example, students convicted of assault or shoplifting don't face loss of financial aid. By targeting drug use and thus making it worse than other similar crimes, the government would be interfering in an area best left to the individual. Laws should be followed, but not because the government places a stigma on certain offenders.
This bill should not be passed because it does not provide alternatives to the people it is intended to help, and it also creates issues of government involvement in private lives.
By taking away education from people who might need it most, the problem of illegal drug use is perpetuated. By making value judgments on individuals, society is wounded irreparably. Both of these consequences will occur without any significant headway made in the problem the bill sets out to solve.
GERRY DOYLE FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Students' voices produce change
How would you like to have your pizza delivered by women in bikinis? Or perhaps you would like to purchase a pizza that has been claimed to be cheaper than a $10 hooker?
These two reasons were among a top 10 list of reasons to buy Gumbi's pizza.
These two reasons were among a top 10 list of reasons to buy Gumbo's pizza. Although some men probably would not mind if scantily clad women delivered their pizza, the idea was offensive to, the women of Douthart Scholarship Hall.
These advertisements, which were delivered to scholarship and residence halls, should never have left the print shop.
Even if the top 10 list was meant as a joke, it wasn't humorous. Crass humor has its place, but it does not belong in business advertisements.
In response to this advertisement, about 20 Douthart women, including
The power of consumers to change policy can't be underestimated.
Douthart president Molly McFerson, wrote a letter to the management of Gumby's Pizza, 1445 W. 23rd St. This letter explained that the ad was offensive and that the Douthart women would no longer patronize Gumby's.
Gumby's response to these complaints was commendable. The ads were immediately recalled.
The triumph belonged to the Douthart women. Their actions were justified, considering the degrading material in the advertisements. Not only did they act on what they considered inappropriate behavior for a business, but they did so in a manner that evoked a
response.
In other words, they complained to the cause, instead of complaining among themselves.
Although some people would say the women acted out of feminist belligerence, this is just a cop out for people to avoid the real issue. A business issued an unprofessional ad. That ad went to many people, not just college males, and offended several.
This incident should serve as a signal to businesses that KU students and other members of the community will not tolerate degrading advertisements. The power of consumers to boycott a business and persuade that business to change its bad policies or practices should not be underestimated.
KU students should take a cue from the Douthart women and make their voices heard in the community.
KANSAN STAFF
NICOLE SKALLA FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
NEWS EDITORS
LA TATNA SULLIAN ... Associate Editorial
KRISTIE BLASI ... News
NOVELDA SOMMERS ... News
LESLIE TAYLOR ... News
AMANDA TRAUGHBER ... News
TARA TRENARY ... News
DAVID TESKA ... Online
SPENCER DUNCAN ... Sports
GINA THORNBURG ... Associate Sports
BRADLEY BOOKS ... Campus
LINDESE HENRY ... Campus
DAVE BREITENSTEIN ... Features
PAM DISHMAN ... Photo
TYLER WIRKEN ... Photo
BRYAN VOLK ... Design
ANDY ROHEBACK ... Graphics
ANDREA ALBRIGHT ... Wire
LZ MUSSEER ... Special sections
AERICA VEAZY ... News clerk
ADVERTISING MANAGERS
ADVERTISING MEMBERS
HEATHER VALLER . Assistant retail
JULIE PEDLAR . Campus
DANA CENTENO . Regional
ANNETTE HOVER . National
BRIAN PAGEL . Marketing
SARAH SCHERWINSKI . Internet
DARCII McLAIN . Production
DENA PISCIOTTE . Production
ALLISON PIERCE . Special sections
SARA ROSE . Creative
DANA LAUVETZ . Public relations
BRIAN LEFEVRE . Classified
RACHEL RUBIN . Assistant classified
BRIDGET COLLYER . Zone
JULIE DEWITT . Zone
CHRIS HAGHIRIAN . Zone
LIZ HESS . Zone
ANTHONY MIGLIAZCO . Zone
MARIA CRIST . Senior account executive
**Letters:** Should be double-spaced typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and hometown if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
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How to submit letters and guest columns
All letter and guest columns should be submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Stafer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject all submissions. For any questions, call Kim Crabtreat (opinion@kansan.com) or LaTina Sullivan (isuillian@kansan.com) at 864-4810.
C'mon customers; give servers a break
I've been working at minimum wage jobs since I was 14, which is strange because I don't like dealing with the general public. Why else would I postpone entry into the real work force as long as I have?
Columns
When the average American ventures out of their home and into public, they instantly loose I.Q. points. This has been my one constant observation during my many years of employment.
In high school, I worked at a movie theater where I had to answer questions like, "What time does the 9:30 movie start?"
And then there was the concession stand comedian. Lug
ging a gaggle of kids, he'd say, "Do I need to take out a loan to pay for this?"
Customers then become the responsibility of some kid who is only working so he can save up enough money to buy an '83 Trans Am. And for some reason, usually intelligent people don't mind being blindly guided through the consumer experience. Are we so ready to have others think for us when we step into the role of customer we automatically think that any schmuck behind a counter is Yoda?
By now, we all know that movie food is way overpriced so we should just fall in line behind the people who sneak in their own sodas and Goobers.
Just because someone is lodged behind glass and is wearing a name tag doesn't mean that he has the answers to the mystical questions of the universe. Most of these jobs pay minimum wage and they don't exactly attract MENSA members as employees.
We live in a stressful society and tend to take out our collective aggressions on each other. That explains why we flip each other off in traffic, and why the California freeway resembles the shooting gallery at a state fair.
When dealing with society's anonymous aggression, no other occupation has it worse than waiting tables.
The proud, the few, the servers of America. Ask anyone who has ever waited tables about their experiences, and they can easily rattle off a dozen horror stories about difficult customers. Once had a man made me send back a decaf coffee three times because he could see through to the bottom of his cup.
After waiting tables for six years, and I can safely say it was an experiment in patience. Those who enter a dining establishment expect the sun, moon and stars, but forget that they are not the only people in the place. And after making your life hell for an hour, they dine and dash.
I have one word for those who have ever dined and dashed: karma. What comes around goes around.
Servers are there to take orders and bring food. Just because a person brings you coffee doesn't mean they are your personal foot servant.
Servers make a whopping $2.13 an hour. I think convicted criminals earn more than that picking up garbage on the side of the road. And, contrary to popular belief, "tipping" is not a city in China.
I have never understood why people are intentionally rude to someone that has access to your food. If the customer is being a real pain, their burger might be served with an extra condiment on it.
Normally we would scoff at the idea of allowing a stranger to think for us. But when we are out in consumer land, we tend to check our brains at the door
It's time to collectively tuck in our shirt tails, wipe the drool from our chins and begin to act like the capable human beings we are.
Ashlee Roll is a Raleigh, N.C. senior in journalism.
Violence, gore remains sick thrill for many people
I was at a party one time, and I noticed there was a group of silent, awe-struck people crowded around one short, skinny guy.
He was holding some sort of photo album and was passively flipping through the pages. It was obvious that everyone around him was fascinated by whatever was on those pages, their mouths wide open and dropping into their beers.
One squealed, "That's so gross!" but no one walked away, and all eyes were locked into whatever was on those pages.
Naturally, I was interested. How could this dopey-looking kid have such a rapt audience with his stupid little picture album at a party full of drunk people? The next thing I knew, the thick album was in my hands.
With wonder, I opened it up, and on page one was a body in the front seat of a car. The body was normal except its entire head was grotesque, bloody and misshapen. I could make out an eye and some hair, but the rest was flattened and blood-red. The back of the skull seemed to be missing, and what I guessed was a brain was hanging down the crimson neck and shoulders of the figure. Other missing parts of the head splattered the walls of the backseat. I was amazed, and got out the words, "What happened to him?"
The guy, who was looking away, had evidently been through this a million times, yawning. "He blew his head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun"
Voiceless, I looked through the rest of the book, which featured a child run over by a car, a man with 37 stab wounds on his face and neck, an electrocution, a hanging, a person who had dived into an empty swimming pool, and a woman whose eyes had been sliced out. I was sick to my stomach. But for the life of me, I couldn't wheeled my eyes away from these horrible images.
When I finished, the guy casually explained that he'd worked over the summer a trainee on an ambulance crew. He had somehow gotten his hands on copies of the police photos that were taken at the scenes of various medical emergencies, and compiled them into his Book of Gore.
My nausea twisted into fury, and I asked him why. Why did he take the time to actually make this album? Why did he insist on glorifying the deaths of anonymous people? And why did he seem to enjoy getting attention from a disgusted crowd at a party?
I called him a sick bastard. I told him I hated him and his album. But then I realized my eyes were still fastened to the vicious photos as I told him so.
He told me that's why he saved the pictures. Because everyone told him how disturbed he was and how much they hated seeing revolting photos like these.
He simply got a rush out of exploiting our morbid fascination with blood and death and claimed that I experienced the same euphoria from viewing these snapshots.
Then they proceeded to flip through the entire album again, and ran and got their friends to look at the really appalling ones
I was ashamed by my fascination with this psychonath's book of gore.
We've grown up seeing thousands of grisly deaths in the movies and on TV, and we just yawn and continue channel surfing. But somehow the real thing stirs us up, like when we see a fist fight or a car crash. We have no choice. We have to watch even if it means being haunted for a long time.
But I'm glad I had nightmares about the corpse with no head. Because it showed me that I'm not so far gone that I'm indifferent to images of torture, suicide and pain.
To the guy with the book: Wherever you are,
thanks a lot. I hope you are locked up somewhere.
Jeff Ruby is a Wichita graduate student in Journalism.
Letters
Greek discrimination must be rough, hurt
After reading the article on
greek discrimination on Feb. 3, I
must say I sympathize with all
 Greeks everywhere.
Those poor kids pay large sums of money to be told what to do, who to be friends with and how to wear a white hat with pride.
The least that a professor could do would be to treat them as equals, because everyone knows how modest those fraternity brothers are.
Just because some people in fraternities decided to use former brother's papers as their own (because maybe they were out late the night before drinking twenty-five cent draws of Schwag beer), some professor
Michael McGuire
Overland Park freshman
Lee article contained many inconsistencies
decides to criticize their great methods of recycling. It must be rough being discriminated against just because of your social status. I pity thee, poor greeks.
Evidence from the article
Snike Lee pitches equality suggests that Dave Morantz should learn how to take better notes on what is being said. Several inconsistencies arose in his article.
Spike Lee did not state that film makers need to move away from negative portrayals of Blacks. He said that community leaders asked him to do this, but
when such films go the box office, they perform miserably.
Hence, only the movies with a lot of gratuitous violence and profanity do well at the box office, and the sales are what the studio consider. It's a catch-22.
To describe his mood as smug is a subjective statement. I attended the same talk and found Lee honest, not smug.
The consumer interest of the company did not prevent Lee from making Malcolm $X$, but it exhausted his allocated budget for the film. Then the studio's bond company shut the production down. To be fair to Lee and in appreciation for his lecture, I believe corrections should be made by The University Daily Kansan and Morantz.
Sharon Eicher
Lawrence graduate student