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4A • The Red and Black • Tuesday, September 18, 1990
OPINIONS
QUOTABLE
"I'm mady to go If tMNjifwylSaMa
set. Richard Goodson, a reservist on
The Red & Black
Eetabkehed 1893—Incorporated 1980
An independent tludent newt paper not affiliated with the University of Georgia
Robert Todd/Editor-in-Chief
Jennifer Rampey/Managing Editor
David Johnston/Opinions Editor
■ EDITORIALS
Budget bull
“Each budgetary organization head is directed to
determine the areas of reduction which in his judgment
will cause the least damage.”
So declared University President Charles Knapp in
a letter informing department heads of the $8.4 million
in budget cuts the University must make due to a state
revenue shortfall.
Governor Joe Frank Harris’ request comes as Uni
versity enrollment reaches a record 28,000 and the fac
ulty awaits a promised 3.5 percent salary increase.
Salaries make up more than 90 percent of the budgets
in most of the University’s 13 schools and colleges.
The College of Arts and Sciences alone must cut
$1.8 million, and has already increased its student-tea
cher ratio. The budgets for repairs, improvements and
new equipment are being slashed. One of the most out
rageous aspects of this whole mess is that state law
now forces the University to spend an estimated $600,-
000 annually on pre-employment drug testing.
We must face the fact that the governor and the
General Assembly simply don’t want a world class uni
versity system in Georgia.
They want the Olympics, they want the Super
Bowl, they want a regional airport and university for
South Georgia, but they are content with one of the
worst public school systems in the country and a uni
versity system with a solidly mediocre reputation in
most academic areas.
Given proper funding and freedom from the emba-
rassing drug testing law, the University and Georgia
Tech, along with good private schools like Emory and
Agnes Scott, can make Georgia the educational rival of
states like North Carolina, Virginia and Massachu
setts.
In any case, it should be clear to everyone in state
government that education budgets must be hands off.
Georgians just experienced their first tax raise in 18
years. If revenue is so low, maybe it would be a good
idea to cut the support staff and new equipment bud
gets for the state’s General Assembly and constitu
tional officers.
Keep the vendors
The time to act is now. Here it is, only the second
day of classes, and already the students and faculty of
this university must take action to prevent the Athens
City Council from making a big mistake.
The Council’s Public Safety Committee will meet
tonight at 6:00 to discuss a possible ban of vendors
from Baldwin Street. The meeting is open so the Uni
versity community must take this opportunity to speak
out against this ban.
The Council cites “numerous complaints from ped-
istrians, both student and faculty,” related to the ven
dors. One such letter complained of “Bohemian youth
stringing beaded neclaces and headbands and selling
them from a blanket.” This attitude and the ban itself
are ridiculous.
The Baldwin vendors not only serve as a good ex
ample of free enterprise, but also provide needed serv
ices and enhance the university atmosphere. If the
faculty and students truly didn’t want the vendors
around, then they wouldn’t patronize them and these
various street peddlers would go out of business...
That’s how the system is supposed to work.
Even assuming that the vendors create safety prob
lems, there are certainly more reasonable steps to take
than a total ban on sidewalk vending. But then such
drastic measures are typical of Athens’ over-zealous
Council.
At tonight’s meeting, speak up and let’s keep the
vendors on Baldwin.
STAFF
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Gulf crisis keeps ‘weekend warriors’ on edge
As the situation in the Persian Gulf unfolds
stories of men and women in uniform being
called to deal with the crisis abound in the
media; but for every one story shown to the
public there are a thousand others. For every
three minutes of air time, there are weeks and
months of worrying and waiting. Each of the
tens of thousands of troops have their own indi
vidual story.
1 had a unique perspective on their lives this
summer, a ring-side seat to the see the way the
crisis affected individual soldiers. For two
months I attended a cargo handling school in
Virginia for the Georgia National Guard with
23 other active and reserve Army troops.
“I can’t believe this; I just can’t believe this is
happening!” Private Eric Burt, a Guardsman
from Louisiana and a sophomore at Lousiana
Tech, said the day President Bush ordered over
40,000 reserve troops to active duty.
“It’s just my luck that I’d join the Army and
they’d start a war. I didn’t join the Guard to
Fight a war. I joined for the college money and
tuition exemption,” he moaned, putting his
head in his hands. He was sure he was going to
be called to active duty once he got home.
Burt was one of the lucky ones. Being a re
serve soldier (the reserves are made up of Army
Reserve and National Guard units), there was a
good chance he might not go, but all of us re
serve soldiers were nervous. We’d read in the
papers that transportation personnel were
needed, and that’s what we were.
Not so lucky were the 10 active Army troops
that trained with us. Originally scheduled to
recieve 10 days of leave after training, j*11 of
them had their leave cancelled. They all came
straight from basic training and many hadn’t
seen their families in four or five months. Many
of them were assigned to transportation units
that were already deployed or had orders to de
ploy to the Gulf. Labor Day weekend the sol
diers scrambled home to see their loved ones
and to settle their affairs.
That Friday I sat in Norfolk Naval Air Sta
tion waiting for a plane to Atlanta. I asked a
Navy medical coreman dressed in camouflage
fatigues were he was going.
“They said they can’t tell us yet, but it’s
pretty obvious, isn’t it? I don’t want to talk
about it, OK?” he said.
The sailor and his group boarded a plane be
fore I did. Some of them were sullen like the
medic I’d talked to, but others were cheerful
and jovial as they left.
Two of our reserve soldiers found out their
units back home had been activated.
“Just a day or two and 111 be happy; Just a
day or two, that’s all I ask,” said Private
Charles Swann, after he found out his reserve
unit in North Carolina had been activated. He
hadn’t seen his 7-month pregnant girlfriend in
three months.
I myself prepared to keep writing to a girl I’d
been dating before the summer. “I guess I
better get used to this,” she wrote in one letter,
“I think we may be doing this for a couple more
months.”
The crisis wasn’t all heavy and depressing.
Specialist Phillip Gulley figured out an in
genious way to get out of going to the Gulf; he
figured he’d volunteer for duty in Antarctica in
stead.
The day he recieved orders assigning him to
a unit that’d been picked to go the the Middle
East, Gulley began looking into applying for a
6-month tour of Antarctica that was also going
on.
And there were happy endings to some of the
stories. Burt was ecstatic when he found out he
was part of a unit that hadn’t been formed yet
and wasn’t able to go anywhere. And I’m back
at the University safe and sound.
But to the not-so-lucky men and women who
had the crisis interupt their lives: I salute you. I
hope all of America appreciates you, if not our
government’s policy, then the individual efforts
of thousands of our men and women, who battle
not only the heat and sand, but uncertainty and
separation.
Mike McLeod is a staff writer for the Red and
Black.
Oil importance exaggerated by ‘ruling elite’
It has been said that oil is the lifeblood of our
economy. I think this is a telling analogy.
Oil is the lifeblood of machines, not of human
beings. The lengths to which certain segments
of our society are willing to go to protect our ac
cess to foreign oil leave me wondering just how
important machines are to the American way of
life.
By all appearances machines —and the
power derived from their control — are far more
important to America’s ruling elite than are
human lives.
Certainly we place our beloved machines
above such luxuries as clean air and water. The
Reagan-Bush agenda all but ignores the most
profound environmental crisis in the planet’s
history rather than to face even the most super
ficial of conservation measures.
President Bush made it clear where he
stands on conservation when he chose to joyride
aboard his speedboat Fidelity in the middle of
the Persian Gulf crisis. But what could we ex
pect from the heir to Ronald Reagan’s market-
driven energy “policy?”
America now consumes 26% of the oil pro
duced in the world, and our per capita con
sumption is three times that of other industrial
democracies. And as we’ve forsaken conserva
tion and alternative energy sources the amount
of oil we must import has risen to 54%.
Sensitivity equals weakness in the perverse
logic of the Republican Right. If the sky is
falling, they seem to say, we should respond by
investing in umbrella futures.
The hypocrisy of such short-sighted and
greedy thinking is surpassed only by its insen
sitivity to human life. How easily the capitalist
mentality sends its young men and women to
kill and die in defense of so destructive and pro
digal an economy! But today’s mansions are to
morrow’s tombs.
Likewise the desire to reinstate the Kuwaiti
Preston
Coleman
emir has little if anything to do with the demo
cratic wishes of the disenfranchised populace of
the pint-sized remnant of French ana British
colonial retreat.
Theve can be little doubt that Saddam Hus
sein is a brutal and dangerous man.The imple
mentation of harsh economic sanctions backed
up by a multinational air and naval presence
can hardly be questioned.
But to send upwards of 100,000 Americans to
sit in the Arabian desert on the pretense of de
fending Saudi Arabia and the American way of
life, when in fact it is the excess and hubris of
our oil-addicted economy which is threatened,
smacks of the same Rightwing doublespeak
that labeled the Soviet Union an evil empire
and ketchup a vegetable.
The not-so-hidaen agenda of George Bush
and his ilk goes well beyond protecting the
Saudi oilfields and the right to cruise in limos
and cigarette boats. The Right wants first and
foremost to decimate Iraq’s military-industrial
complex. Hussein, like the Shah and Somoza
and Marcos and Noreiga before him, has out
lived his usefulness to the champions of the
American Hegemony; and regardless of the con
sequences to millions of expendables he must
be removed.
Overarching this rather limited goal is the
desire to extend the growing police state within
our borders to the rest of the globe. The decline
of the Soviets as a counterbalance to Western
economic colonialism has left the Helms’ and
Thurmonds’ and Gingrich’s of our nation sali
vating uncontrollably.
Never mind the effects of the unilateral mili
tarism on our astronomical national debt.
Never mind the destabilization of a region that
was already a powderkeg. Never mind the un-
ermining of fragile economies from Eastern Eu
rope to Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. Never mind
fanning the flames of anti-American sentiment
among the lower classes of the Arab world, or
the creation of the largest exodus of refugees
since the “police actions” in South Asia.
And never mind the fact that our dependence
on foreign oil is largely the fault of a pair of ad
ministrations whose policies have favored the
stock portfolios of their elitist benefactors over
the environment or national security.
This is George Bush’s chance to play po
liceman to the world, to play savior to tne blood
supply of industrialism. This is his chance to
jump-start a military establishment threatened
by creeping sanity and ideological convergence.
This is King George’s chance to redefine the
American Way in terms more hubristic and
militaristic and nationalistic than even Ronad
Reagan could have envisioned.
It is also a chance for pacifists and human
ists and environmentalists to stand up to the
knee-jerk jingoism of a nation hungry for a
quick fix of feelgood muscle flexing.
George Bush needs to back off and let the in
ternational community deal with Saddam Hus
sein.
We can’t risk war for the sake of foreign oil —
nor for the sake of Rightwing egos.
Preston Coleman is a journalism graduate stu
dent.
Australian GRSP student values his University experience
This has been an exciting and
adventurous year for me. I am an
Australian university student that
has had the opportunity to visit
and study in your country and at
your university for an academic
year.
UGA is very different from my
university down under. For one the
population is almost ten times that
of my university, The Queensland
University of Technology.
I have had a great chance to ex
perience how your system works
and to be a part of the incredible
atmosphere which exists here at
UGA. My year here will hold very
fond memories for me.
I was fortunate enough to be se
lected for a scholarship which en
abled me to study here. The
program that I am in is called The
Georgia Rotary Student Program.
GRSP brings approximately
sixty students from all over the
world to experience life and study
in Georgia. It brings the students
together both formally and socially
for a single academic year.
1 really want to thank all the
people that have helped make my
stay at UGA, in Georgia and in the
USA great. I urge all of you who
have not had the chance to visit
and really get to know your neigh
bors in foreign lands to do so while
ou are still young. Doing this may
elp you to understand what world
friendship and peace is all about.
Dean M. Howell
GRSP CLASS OF 1989-90
■ FORUM
□ The Red and Black welcomes letters
to the editor and prints them in the
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ters are subject to editing for length,
style and libelous material. Letters
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must include the name, address and
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writer. Please include student classifi
cation. major and other appropnate
identification. Names can be omitted
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ters can be sent by U.S. mail or brought
in person to The Red and Black s of
fices at 123 N. Jackon St. Athens. Ga.