4A
Wednesday, December 4, 1996
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Students shouldn't forget the harsh reality of AIDS
Playboy's Miss September 1986, Rebekka Armstrong, contracted HIV when she was a teen-ager from the only man with whom she ever had unprotected sex.
Armstrong's condition was diagnosed three years ago, and she now speaks at schools to educate students on the perils of unprotected sex. She is an example of the changing profile of AIDS victims in the United States today, a profile that is becoming increasingly younger, more feminine and more heterosexual.
World AIDS Day was observed Sunday through worldwide efforts to promote awareness of the disease and the safer sex practices that help prevent its contraction. In our community of higher education, however, awareness is too broad a term for the education that needs to take place.
Young people face a greater threat
Few students at the University of Kansas are unaware of HIV or the way it is transmitted, through contact with the body fluids of an infected individual. The formidable obstacles facing HIV-prevention campaigns directed at young adults include the perceived invicibility of youth, the continued belief that AIDS is a gay-only disease and a loss of fear of the disease.
Few college students have faced their own mortality seriously. Most think they are invincible and could not possibly contract a disease such as AIDS. The fearless attitude of many young adults quickly can become careless when combined with alcohol and drugs. "Get high, get stupid, get AIDS." Such slogans of recent ad campaigns aired on MTV and other youth-oriented media outlets make a valid point. Alcohol and drugs impair judgment and lead people, especially young adults who may not know their limits, to act in ways they normally would not. When sober, students need to consider the safest way to react to situations they may encounter while partying. Define a clear "no condom, no sex" rule and stick to it.
According to the World Health Organization, 75 percent of worldwide AIDS cases were heterosexually contracted. Despite this, many Americans continue to believe that AIDS is a disease that afflicts only gay men and intravenous drug users. Although gay men have accounted for a large proportion of HIV infections since the early days of the epidemic in the United States, the latest trend shows an increase in heterosexual transmission as homosexual transmission decreases.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1981 and 1995,the proportion of AIDS cases in the United States that were heterosexually contracted rose from 3 percent to 11 percent. Homosexually transmitted infections decreased nearly 20 percent during that same time. These statistics are meant to make one point: Everyone who is sexually active outside of a monogamous relationship risks contracting HIV.
Recent advances don't eliminate dangers
In recent years, our society has been presented with a different image of AIDS victims. Drugs such as AZT and the powerful protease inhibitors are lengthening the life to many people with HIV and AIDS.
We now see many people with AIDS living active, longer lives, which is a sharp contrast to the emaciated, frail images shown on television a decade ago. Although the recent advances in medical care are wonderful and should continue, they have created an HIV that does not seem quite so frightening. Maybe young adults who have not been confronted with the horrors of AIDS are not deterred from unsafe sex by the fear of contracting the disease.
Students need to be more than aware of HIV and AIDS. They should identify the factors that put them at risk and develop a plan to avoid those risk factors.
BRENT SUITER FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
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WASHINGTON — It was a rifle. I felt foreign in my hands. But I was in basic training, where much was foreign to a young draftee.
Army sex scandal shows military has lots to unlearn
A rifle? I figured I wouldn't be much competition for the country boys in my unit, who had been totin' pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles all of their lives.
Yet my scores for accuracy were among the battalion's best. A fellow trainee explained why.
"You have an important advantage over the country boys," he said. "You don't have any bad habits to unlearn." Unlearning is just as important as learning. That lesson comes to mind when thinking about the Army's sex scandal.
The Army has learned that female recruits in at least 17 training programs across the country may have been victims of sexual misconduct or abuse, including rape. And when a toll-free telephone hot line was set up to receive complaints, the floodgates opened up. The hot line received 4,000 calls in its first days of operation. Army Secretary Togo West said the Army would investigate about 550 complaints.
Obviously, skills in firing a weapon are not the only thing some in the military have to unlearn.
When the military eliminated separate branches for women in 1973, it took precautions. New toilet, shower and sleeping quarters were constructed. Enlightened sensitivity training methods were devised. But it was not enough to change the military's predominately male warrior culture. Now, the Army has its own version of Tailhook, the 1991 debacle in which Navy officers assaulted women at a convention.
Fortunately, it looks as if the Army acted more quickly and decisively to
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
root out this scandal than the Navy's officers did. But what changes need to be made?
must be prepared to take them seriously. One Army enlisted woman at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md., offers a poignant example of what went wrong. A reporter asked her why she had not reported her complaint earlier.
The military can begin its reforms by better protecting women. Avenues for communicating and investigating complaints must be improved, and commanders
"Who could I report it to?" she asked.
Four drill sergeants and a captain at Aberdeen were charged with rape or sexual harassment of at least a dozen female recruits. Newsweek reports that a 1995 Army survey found that 4 percent of all female soldiers were victims of actual or attempted rape or sexual assault within the previous 12 months — 10 times higher than the civilian rate reported by victims surveyed the same year by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Who. indeed?
None are so blind as those who will not see.
With that in mind, Secretary West sounded astonishingly naive discussing the Army's growing sex scandal on CBS' Face the Nation.
"It is the worst we have seen, and we never expected it." West said.
In the short run, an investigation
must find out, among other things what the Army's commanding officers didn't know and why they didn't know it. In the long run, the military needs to think deeply about how its macho culture might be brought out of the Stone Age. For one thing, the military's regulations need to be modernized to be taken seriously. For example, the blanket edicts against fraternization (socializing between individuals of different ranks) and against sex aboard ship, even when it is consensual, are often discounted because they are so extreme.
The military might take some lessons from the civilian world: Nothing is wrong with men and women having consensual relations. Military people in similar circumstances should be given freedom to date. Then everyone can focus on eliminating serious sexual assault and harassment.
Many will insist that the Army sex scandal shows enlisting women in the military is feminist folly. But, on the whole, women have been more of an asset to the military than a liability. The presence of women in the ranks has accompanied the rise of the best-educated, best-disciplined military that America has ever seen, as shown by the success of Desert Storm.
Still, too many men hold themselves back with wrong-headed notions about manhood, male sexuality and male social roles. Real men don't beat up women. Real men respect women. Unfortunately, many of our soldiers and sailors still have a lot to unlearn, as do quite a few civilians.
Clarence Page is a columnist for The Chicago Tribune.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Kansan should print controversial opinions
I am writing in response to Brian England's letter to the editor in Monday's Kansan. My difficulty is not with England's opinion on the issues of vegetarianism or chalk writing, but with his view that it is "irresponsible" of the Kansan to publish a column. I have ridiculed the Kansan many times myself, but always for its lack of view-points, never its presentation of one. What makes the column in question such an interesting one is that despite one's stand on either issue, the column was challenging and outspoken.
In other words, this wasn't the typical milquetoast "Crime is bad" or "Kids ought to be smarter"
columns that we read in the pape almost every day.
There was a time when the paper would print one or two really opinionated viewpoints a week, until other students got angry about the paper actually having opinions.
While his actual beliefs may be wrong, the publication of those beliefs has generated a dialogue in the paper that this campus and the Kansan should be proud of. Any person who thinks the writers should not attack the views of other people belongs in a petting zoo, not a university.
It is neither irresponsible of the paper nor abusive of Andy Ober mueller to print a column stating a real, controversial opinion.
Chris Wiswell Overland Park senior
Are you opinionated? Become a contributor to the editorial page
Applications for editorial board members, columnists and cartoonists/illustrators for Spring 1997 are available in the Kansan newsroom, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. Applications are due by noon Dec. 9.
New staff members will be announced by 4 p.m. Dec. 11.
All majors are welcome to apply. No experience is necessary.
Questions may be directed to Kimberly Crabtree, 864-4810 or kcrabtree@kansan.com.
Tossing money in a kettle won't solve problems
I hate the holidays.
They mean treks to Overland Park. Ah...the land of milk and honey, filthy excess and the epitome of life in a country in which we spend billions of dollars electing politicians to make decisions about what to do with our nation's impoverished, our sick and our elderly. Of course, most of our elected officials have never gone hungry.
This holiday trip was particularly disheartening. I went to the emergency room on the day before Thanksgiving. I had bronchitis and
couldn't be inconvenienced to wait for an appointment with my physician.
EDITORIAL EDITOR
As I sat on the hospital bed waiting for the doctor, paramedics wheeled in an old woman. She had fallen and injured her neck. Although I wasn't totally able to discern everything
she was telling the nurse, she apparently spends eight lonely hours each day at the hospital. Doing what, I don't know. But before she had even settled into her bed, the nurse was shoving Medicare and Medicaid papers onto her lap.
She began to cry. Tears rolled down her wrinkled cheeks. She stared at me from across the aisle. No one had bothered to pull the curtain around her bed. "I'm cold," she said. "I'm hungry."
My heart sank. I got that nauseated feeling I get every year about this time.
The only thing that matters in this country is money. If you have it, you're a valuable consumer and the subject of social conditioning to spend, spend, spend. If you don't have it, you're nothing. That's it.
As taxpayers, we argue about whether our taxes should be raised to pay for food, clothing, shelter and medical care for citizens our system uses up, then shakes off as undesirable. And we send people to Washington to decide whether we should build more weapons or feed people.
This holiday season, we'll donate money to charitable organizations. A few of us will volunteer our time. Then we'll pat ourselves on the back for the great deeds we've done for society.
But what we really need is a values overhaul. We need to realize that we've produced a system that throws people away when they cease to be as productive as our corporations want them to be.
A week later, I'm just angry. Angry at the audacity of people such as me, the haves in this country who come down off of our high horses each year to shove some money in a bell ringer's kettle as we race into Wal-Mart to consume junk and distribute it to our loved ones in celebration of Christ's birth. It puts things in perspective, having a lonely old woman tell you she's hungry. As students, we spin our wheels about chalk messages arguing about what to eat, not the fact that many people go hungry in this country every day.
"I'll never forget that woman's face and the pain I felt when she looked at me. I'll never forget that I'm part of a system in which people are crying, "I'm hungry." And it hurts.
People aren't disposable. But when you start talking about real change, people get nervous. It's easier to muddy our minds with lofty debates and television commercial slogans than to take responsibility for our role in creating this wasteland we live in. It's sad when it takes a brush with someone else's struggle for people, including myself, to realize what we are and what we've always been—selfish.
Happy holidays
Nicole Kennedy is an Overland Park senior in Journalism.
HUBIE
By Greg Hardin