Tuesday, January 24, 1934
Pago 4 ' Daily Nebraskan
T7l TI O rt 0 11
.1 1 1 1 i
Mil tQMiy im a&sm
of eLesizoia year
Marines die in Beirut. The Reagan Administration
wants more aid, especially military aid, sent to Cen
tral American countries. The deficit threatens to
put a cavernous crimp in the burgeoning economy.
And Congress returns for an election year session
described in an Associated Pres3 article as "long on
politics and short on substance." That, readers, is
poor timing.
The report said Sunday that Congress' second
session is likely to be uneventful because it is
unpopular to make decisions. Especially in an elec
tion year.
Raise taxes to curb the deficit, which rapidly
approaches the $200 billion-a-year mark, and the
politician angers taxpayers. Pull the Marines out of
Beirut, and a lot of people will be mad. A lot will be
happy, too.
Right now, our elected officials are more con
cerned with courting special interest groups with
hackneyed promises and endless rhetoric. Politi
cians seek votes rather than solutions to the prob
lems facing our country. :
The problem is unique to our democratic type of
government. Election year inactivity cannot be en
tirely attributed to weak character or greed in
politicians. The American political system carries
the bulk of the blame.
A congressman has two years in office. That's
enough time to settle into office and then begin
preparing for the next election. That lag cripples
part of our political system every election year. In a
year when crises abound, the lag creates problems.
President Reagan, although not yet an official
candidate, has been campaigning with down-home
folksy speeches. Even the traditional phone call to
Coach Tom Flores in the winning locker room after
the Super Bowl had a political twist. Reagan said the
LA. Raiders proved "that a good defense can also be :
a good offense."
Campaigning is more arduous for congressmen.
Speeches must be made, press releases written,
money collected.
We can never avoid election-year fear in politi
cians. But electing congressmen for four years
instead of two would decrease the severity of the
problem.
With the deficit rising, our men dying, and Central
'America boiling, we need decisions. Not political
wish-wash.
Chris Welsch
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Time-less lives cry out for more
I met Paul Tsongas once on a late-afternoon flight
from Washington to Boston. The senator from Mas
sachusetts was traveling light that day. No bags, no
briefcase, no aides. All he had with him was a
daughter.
It was rare enough to see a man alone on a plane
with a pre-school child. But Tsongas reason was
1 V M
Ellen
Goodman
even more unusual. He was going to Boston for a
meeting and he wanted to spend some time with his
middle daughter. So he was taking her along for the
ride. Together they would get the late plane back.
I've thought about that scene a dozen times, with
mixed feelings of admiration and poignancy. Here
was a father struggling with the demands of work
and family. Here was a father who had to capture
minutes with his child, on the fly, at 35,000 feet.
This scene, repeated over and again in Tsongas'
life, seems somehow symbolic of a whole generation
of men and women: parents with schedule books. It
is barely even a pardoy of the way many of us cram
work and children into calendars that won't expand
to fill the needs, into lives that cry out for more
hours. Tsongas was one of us, trying to make it all fit
together.
But last October, the senator and father of three
young girls discovered something that wasn't on his
agenda. He had a tumor that was "not benign."
The mild lymphoma that Tsongas has is not life
threatening in the immediate sense. The statistical
average life expectancy for those with this disease,
as he related it, is eight years and he is planning for
more. Many of his political colleagues are given
shorter sentences by the actuarial tables.
But Tsongas decided not to run again. He is com
ing home to Lowell, Mass., and home to his family in
a way that politics doesn't allow.
Continued on Parte 5
Breakup brings breakdown
Phone service lousy5 after AT&T breakup
It has been less than a month since
the breakup of the telephone com
pany, and already things are getting
lousy.
Officials of the various spinoff cor
porations that were created when the
Bell System was broken up will tell you
that nothing of subtance has changed;
Jiff -ZTT-. "
(rv-l) Bob
Tj Greene
that there is no reason why service
should be any worse than it was before
the breakup.
It's just not true. The people I hear
from are telling me ludicrous stories
about problems they've been having
with service' not a day has gone by
since Jan. 1 without at least one call or
letter from a person informing me of a
new telephone horror story. Many of
these stories come from people who
have tried to order a telephone for
their home or business, and have been
bounced along from one person to
another to another none of whom
seem to understand who is responsible
for what under the new telephone sys
tem. I knew we were all in trouble when,
on Jan. 1 the first day the breakup
took effect I tried to call my sister in
California, I tried dialing her number
for four hours; each time a recording
told me that "all circuits are busy."
Now, I realize that New Year's Day is
a holiday, and long-distance lines are
in constant use on holidays. But I've
been calling my sister on holidays for
years; not once, under the old system,
did this kind of trouble occur. Only
'after four hours of trying to get through
do you realize just how good the old
system was. .
Phone company officials, of course,
would argue that the four-hour delay
was just a coincidence; that virtually
nothing had changed in the hours
after midnight Jan. 1. But last Friday I
tried to call my office at the newspaper
from my home. Twice in a row I got an
"all circuits are busy" recording on a
local call. I never heard of all circuits
being busy inside the city before; this
was a new one on me.
Of course, if you've tried to direct
dial New York City lately, you know
what happens as often as not: You
complete your number and nothing
happens. Nothing. No ring, no busy
signal, no dial tone. Just dead silence.
After a few minutes you hang up and
try again usually only to find that
you get a dead line again.
And if these kinds of things are going
on during the first month of the broken
up system during the time when all
. the new phone subcorapaaies are try
ing to impress us all think how bad
they're going to get once a little time
passes by. It vcn't matter if you're in
Ohio, Oklahoma or Nevada every
time you pick up the phone, youH
think you're in Europe.
Of course, there is one segment of
America that should be overjoyed at
the breakup of the phone company.
That is the advertising community.
The contemptible decision that abol
ished the Bell System maybe an abom
ination for the rest of us, but it's a
blessing for the ad folks. All of the var
ious telephone-service concerns that
are vying for our business will be tak
ing out ads anyplace they can buy
them in an effort to persuade us that
one phone operation is better than the
next. And some of them are destined
to be right; after all, if you have 10
companies offering you something, it
stands to reason that one of them has
to be first-best and one of them has to
be tenth-best.
This all comes back to the one thing
that anyone with any sense knew from
the beginning: The telephone company
was just fine the way it was. Sure, it
may have had a stranglehold on the
nation's personal communications bus
iness - but it deserved to. It offered
service that was as close to perfect as
anyining available to the general pub
lie in America: it had the trust rn?
confidence of an overwhelming nslnr
ity of its users; its rates, even in a
society in which prices have run away
with themselves, were by and large
considered reasonable..
If there had been a national vote to
determine what Americans wanted
done with the phone company, most
people undoubtedly would have voted
for nothing at all to be done. Common
sense dictated that a service so many
people liked deserved to remain as is.
But it didn't happen that way, the
judge who oversaw the telephone
company case evidently felt we would
all be better served by killing the Bell
System, and it is to my everlasting
regret that the judge's last name hap
pens to be Greene.
Oh, welL There's no going back now. I
don't know if you've noticed this or not
but on a lot of long-distance calls
now, you get the added entertainment
of listening to one or more other con
versations while you're trying to con
' duct your own conversation. The sounds
of the other folks talking bleeds over
into your line. This used to happen
once in a great while; now it happens
all the time. The officials of the various
new telephone companies would prob
ably call this another coincidence.
We could all complain about this, I
suppose, but who knows who to com
plain to? The people w ho have told me
about their telephone troubles have all
tried to lode comnlaints with some-
nd one in author!"; when they make their
cans 01 compmnt they are mvsnsoiy
told they've reached the wrong culce.
Which is as good a pcxable as any for
the reality of the phone coiispny break
up: No mutter what you did, it's gua
ranteed to 1 2 a wrcr.3 number.
eHI4 Tr&vnt Ce;xny CynIszU, Inc.
