f Editorials
The war is over-isn't it?
Today is Moratorium Day—again.
Not many people know that and even
fewer care. It is safe to assume that the vast
majority of people who read this will merely
shrug their shoulders and glance up to see if
the professor is saying anything important.
There will be little reaction to the
Moratorium. After all, isn’t President Nixon
“winding down” the war? Sec. Laird is
reducing draft calls isn’t he? John Chan
cellor, Harry Reasoner and Walter Cronkite
hardly even mention the war any more and
the parade of death across our color TV sets
seems far away, when it appears at all.
Our own internal problems plague us.
Students and their parents are more worried
about where their next meal is coming from
than about a war that no one understood in
the first place. Dock strikes and price freezes
fill our minds.
But today, couian i we pause iui juoi «
moment, even if it is only between badminton
and English Lit., to remember that the war in
Indochina is still going on and the pain and
tragedy it creates is still with us?
Fewer than 30 Americans were killed in
Indochina last week. Are their lives less
precious to us just because they did not
number 100? And what of the Indochinese
people that die each week because the war
continues? President Nixon isn’t winding
down their death rate. Enough Indochinese
people are killed each week to populate the
town of Oakridge, Oregon. Too many.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “The
worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not
to hate them, but to be indifferent to them:
that’s the essence of inhumanity.”
Just because search and destroy is no
longer the order of the day, doesn’t mean that
all is over and done with and suffering is at
an end. Each time an American bomb is
dropped over Laos or Thailand or Vietnam
we kill people in the most inhuman of ways:
by proxy. Technology has just removed us
one step from the killing but everyone still
has their hand on the trigger.
Of course everyone is tired of the war
and the protesting that it spawned. It would
be so nice to push the reality of the slaughter
to the back of the American conscience and
simply remember it as a bad dream. This is
impossible to do as long as even one human
being dies because he or she was considered
less important than a football game or a
chemistry experiment.
There is a march tonight to protest the
war. some win uxjiv uu it ao a uuwunw,
will look on it as unimportant. What it really
is, though, is a chance for those who can still
feel for others to tell everyone that they still
consider the war in Vietnam as horrible and
inhuman as it always was and will be until it
is truly over.
Let us all hope, for our own sakes, that
there are still some people like that left.
A humanitarian vote
University President Robert Clark was
one of three university leaders within the
Pacific-8 Athletic Conference who voted last
week to count games played by the
University of California in conference
standings.
The vote came as an aftermath to the
suspension of Cal by the NCAA for playing
Isaac Curtis and Larry Brumsey—two
football players who had not been given the
proper examination upon entering college.
The test they failed to take is supposed to
indicate whether an athlete is capable of
maintaining at least a 1.6 GPA in college.
Both players have maintained more than an
adequate GPA, but because of the foul-up in
red tape at Berkely, they became ineligible.
When Clark voted to count Cal’s games in
a telephone poll taken last week, he was in
the minority of a 5-3 vote to not count cal s
games.
Only Clark and the chancellors of
Stanford and the University of California
voted to count the games. The leaders of
Oregon State University, UCLA, Washington,
Washington State and USC voted to not count
the games.
Clark said he voted in favor of counting
Cal’s games becasue “Isaac Curtis was a
victim of bureaucracy and ought not to be.”
In these days of college sports as big
business, it is refreshing that at least one of
the eight leaders within the conference was
able to take the humanitarian view-point of
putting the rights of the individual before the
glories of the gridiron.
It is unfortunate that more presidents
and chancellors did not vote with Clark.
Statistics, statistics
A study conducted by the American
Psychological Association at Wayne State
University stated that “At any given instant
in the college lecture hall, 20 per cent of both
men and women are thinking about sex and
only about 20 per cent are paying attention to
the professor.”
Keeping this fact in mind, answer the
following questions: 1) Now do you think the
Emerald was right about the number of A’s
being given out at the University? 2) What
are the other 60 per cent thinking about? 3)
Why is such a great percentage of students
listening to the professor? 4) Wouldn’t you
like to know just how that study was con
ducted?
Footnote
War is a racket.
—Smedley Butler
Commanding General, U.S. Marine Corps
1934
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