Wednesday, March 30, 1933
4
Daily Nebraskan
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There are dangerous portents in the
wind. For the most part, our country lias
wrapped itself in enough bureaucratic
nonsense to keep any wild decisions from
knocking us out of kilter. But occasionally
statements pop up that clue us in to the
shocking lack of reason that lurks under
neath all the red tape.
President Reagan made a few such
statements a wliile ago when he hopped
down to Orlando, Ha., lor none other
than the annual convention of the Nat
ional Association of Evangelicals.
His speech was full of fire and brim
stone and pompous boasts about the role
of the United States in world affairs.
"There is sin and evil in the world," he
said, "and we are enjoined by Scripture
and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all
out might ..."
He went on to say that "America has
kept alight the torch of freedom." He
spoke of Russia as under a "totalitarian
darkness" and said that we should "be
aware they are the focus of evil in the
modern world."
It is jusi this attitude that is making
it so difficult for the United States to
find the right place for itself in the modern
world.
President Reagan's so-called modern
world should have faded away long before
Vietnam ever made it painfully clear that
the United States does not have the power
or the right to force itself on the rest of
the globe.
The focus of evil cannot be pinpointed
in Moscow. There arc bits of it all over
the world. A close examination reveals
that we cannot simply divide the world
between wlute hats and black, between
good and bad, between American and
Russian.
El Salvador's government, supported by
U.S. military aid and coached by U.S.
military advisers, has been ranked by
Amnesty International as one of the
bloodiest kiUers in the world today.
Argentina and Guatemala are also
on Amnesty International's list. They
are supplied with arms by Israel, the
spunky country whose chief defender
in the world is the United States.
These tragedies do not exceed those
of Afghanistan or Poland, but they do
equal them. It is completely false and
dangerously unreasonable to ponder
notions that it is we, as Americans, who
can wave "the torch of freedom" in the
world's face.
If we do indeed bask in this light,
then the evils in which our country plays
a part are all the more inexcusable.
Russian citizens have no power over
the government and are, to a large extent,
kept ignorant of its actions. Americans
cannot enjoy such bliss.
In a recent interview, West German
author Gunter Grass spoke of the dangers
of attitudes like those of our president.
"I am convinced," he said, "that in the
United States .'. . strong fascist tendencies
have become apparent in recent years
and that a land . . . that to this day pract
ices racism ... in which I don t know
how many millions live below the poverty
level . . . that relics now under Reagan
on early capitalistic methods of exploitat
ion and develops them anew, that this
land has no right, or has lost its right to
point critically at others."
We have not lost that right completely.
It is the right of any perceptive individual
to point out the truth.
But it is the truth we must keep in
mind, not grandiose visions of the United
States as the hmc Ranger galloping off
into the "totalitarian darkness" with guns
blazing.
When decisions arc made about
increased aid to El Salvador, increased
defense budgets and such, we should
look around us at the world and let
nothing cloud that view.
David Thompson
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My friends live in other places: other neighborhoods.
other towns, other states. When we get together, it is
often our fingers that do the walking from one home to
the other.
l or us, the telephone is a meeting hall, a neighbor
hood, the way we keep our own small community
I.
Ellen
Goodman
together. We advise and consult each other bv dial tone-
we console and congratulate by area codes and digits.
By voice, we do the maintenance that keeps friend
ships alive, and sometimes families. If we have some
piece of news to share, it goes out almost always, almost
exclusively, by word of mouth.
This is called, in our culture, keeping in touch.
Yet I sometimes wonder whether there isn't a hidden
cost to this piece of 'technology, too. I don't mean the
costs of intrusion. It's true that the phone insults our
quiet and insists its way into our privacy. But I will
trade that for this lifeline.
Nor do I mean the cost that shows up on my bill.
I rationalize that easily with friends trom other area
codes : Long distance is cheaper than planes or therapy . . .
or disconnection.
But isn't it possible that this staple of modern life
has had some odd consequences for us. Isn't it possible
that the instrument has actually been an actor in our
culture over a century?
John Staudenmaicr, a Jesuit and visiting assistant
professor at M.I.T.'s center for Science, Technology
and Society, talks about the birth of the phone in 1876
as "the first time in human history that we could split
voice from sight, touch, smell and taste."
What does that mean to us? That we no longer have
to be in the same room to talk to each other. That we
can choose friends across space and keep friends over
distance.
But doesn't it also mean that we can ignore the people
who live in our hallway? In some ways, the same machine
that offers us a handy shortcut through loneliness may
also make it more likely for us to live alone.
"The hometown, the street and neighborhood has also
been eroded particularly by the telephone," believes
Staudenmaier, "because the real relationships in my life
are not the people on my street and not the people in
my apartment building. They can be strangers because I
have 'real' friends connected by electronic rather than
physical bodily connections."
It isn't just the phone that does this, I know. The car
the television set and manufacturing have also changed
us so we live more in the wide world and less on our own
block.
But I suspect that this odd and utterly routine ability
to communicate by sound alone has altered another
piece of our human psyche. We are more able now to
protect and distance ourselves in human communicat
ion. How many difficult conversations today take place
by phone because we won't have to see someone's else
tears? How skillfully have we learned to control our
voices ainl hide our emotions? How often do we use
the phone so we won't have to, literally, face each other?
I know a woman who bought a poi table phone so
that she could garden or scrub the sink or unload the
dishwasher when her mother called. I know a man who
regularly broke up with the women in his life by phone
because it was so much easier.
We have all, at one time or another, ret rated to a
phone to share something personal while we are invisible.
Ve are able to screen our messages, offer less, reveal
less, feel less vulnerable. We can even hang up. The
telephone is wonderfully efficient, and less intimate.
I am no Luddite, raging against electronics. In my
home there are four extension phones, a hundred feet
of cord and one teen-ager. I work by phone, send my
column from one city to another by phone. I maintain -though
I never make friendships by phone.
Yet I tliink it's crucial to remember the limits, to
remember the trade-offs of the technology we live with.
The telephone company encourages us to reach out and
touch someone. Funny, that's one thing we can't do by
phone.
(c) 1983, The Washington Post Writers Group
ll afle of rich people reveal ftlieio discreet chm
Wealth.
To someday be wealthy is, I have no doubt, the goal
of most people here at UNL. Why not? It's a great life
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when one is wealthy. Wealth usually comes along with
power and prestige, so to be able to tell other people
what to do and to have the best kinds of people for
friends surely must be the cat's meow. To be rich is to
be wealthy. To be wealthy usually is to be greedy, but
I know lots of people who are greedy but who aren't
wealthy. They sure would like to be, though.
Today I've included a few rich people stories for those
of you who are planning to be rich. Yet, when I originally
read these stories, I couldn't help but think of Thoreau's
saying that "superfluous wealth buys only superfluities."
For instance, in a recent New York Times story on
investment opportunities, one millionaire got caught ud
m the idea that 1982 was the 800th anniversary of the
birth of St. Francis of Assisi, a profound ascetic if ever
there was one.
Discussing the inflation psychology and whether it has
ebbed, Laurence A. Tisch identified the key questions
Have we changed the style of our country? w e l s"
thmgs-oriented than we were in the 1970s'' Does the
three C-' 3 , a t.urd
Tisch is the chairman and chief executive officer of
muted at $300 million. That would let him buy let's
vf' tn 6' S5000 homes. r about p 000
aKaite r "P rially if TiSCh Hked "b e TV
uoout .500,000 big-screen TVs.
Another example of the discreet charm of the rich
comes from the mouth of Clare Booth Luce In a recent
interview in Geo magazine, she told how her social circle
viewed the world. What about the majority of her fellow
Americans? "I see them as a somewhat spoiled people."
On immigrants from Latin America: 'They're coming
over the border and they're coming in with wives and
sisters and nieces who get pregnant immediately because
they can then become Americans and go on relief." On
why this immigration is different from previous waves:
"But the vast majority of 19th-century immigrants
were of a fundamental culture, -and they were all white.
They were not black or brown or yellow." On the obligat
ions of the rich to those in poor countries: "I do not
know of any other identification I can make, say, with
the condition of the people in the Sahara. I repeatedly
see pictures in the papers of a starving mother with her
child holding out its hand. I think I would be hypo
critical if I didn't say that I would feel a little more
compassion if one of my pet birds had broken a leg in
its cage in my own house."
Continued on Page 5
