GARY LONGSINE
Bush theory holds no answer
I was standing just off the traffic
flow in my favorite downtown
pub, contemplating the nature of
the function describing the number of
ping-pong balls it would take to fill
the expanding universe, when I felt
fingers in my back pocket.
Because the fingers of my left hand
were on the bar in front of me and
those of my right were wrapped inti
mately around a vodka sour, I de
cided to investigate.
The guest fingers left my pocket. I
turned around and saw two lovely
young women on their way to the
restroom in the back of the bar. A
pocket inquiry revealed that one of
them had deposited a french fry.
What could this mean? After
drunken consideration and prompt
dismissal of the gesture as a sign of an
intense desire to copulate, I pondered
the likelihood that one of the women
thought I looked hungry.
I looked at the fry. It was cold, one
end was bitten off, and I wasn’t very
hungry. I put it back in my pocket.
Most likely, I decided, she must
have been wondering what to do with
the french fry, short of dropping it on
the floor. It was an act of environ
mental desperation — there were no
trash cans. She didn’t want to risk
stepping on it herself and getting greasy
potato remains on her shoe as she left
the bar. In my contemplative mood, I
must have looked as though I wouldn’t
notice or wouldn’t mind.
The course of my thoughts thusly
derailed, I turned back to the bar. An
open newspaper brought to my atten
tion a thoughtful analysis of the prob
lem with drugs in America. President
Bush, in a rare and brilliant moment
of lucidity preceded only by his in
sight that Reaganomics was voodoo
economics, declared that drug use,
suicide and teen pregnancy are merely
a symptoms of a broader societal
problem. __
His analysis didn’t stop there. In
fact, it was so insightful that I found
myself wondering whether Bush had
been to the Maharishi aiid returned
with The Truth.
“In the fourth year, ye shall come
face-first, and behold the dragons
before your eyes,” the Maharishi spake.
“People think the problem in our
world is crack or suicide or babies
having babies. Those are symptoms.
The disease is a kind of moral empti
Bush’s brilliant
analysis was killed hv
a prescription as limp
as the saggy french
fry, now somewhat
flattened in mv
Basket,
ness.” Right on, Bush.
“We cannot continue producing
generations bom numbly into despair,”
he said.
What a beautiful phrase.
Such a deft summary of the plight
of our generation and several before
it was worthy of the greatest of mod
em poets. Charles Bukowski would
be proud to call it his own.
But then it fell apart. Bush’s bril
liant analysis was killed by a pre
scription as limp as the soggy french
fry, now somewhat flattened in my
pocket.
Bush, hinting at his own despair,
said: “If I, as president, had the power
to give just one thing to this great
country, it would be the return of an
inner moral compass, nurtured by the
family and valued by society. A strong
conscience is more irresistible than a
crack pipe.”
What does that mean?
Does it mean cutting the funding
for two national surveys on sexual
practices in the United States? One
was designed to gather data about
teens, the other about adults. The
intention was to help researchers in
the battle against AIDS by giving
them accurate demographic informa
tion on sexual activity. The $10 mil
lion for the adult survey was diverted
to programs conceived to convince
teenagers not to have sex by just
saying no.
These programs are premised on
the idea that young people are doing
self-destructive things that they know
are bad for them and don’t want to do.
If we give them the encouragement to
just say no, teen pregnancies and social
diseases will just go away.
This analysis makes a fundamen
tal mistake, and applying Bush’s the
ory of moral emptiness will help us to
see what it is. Most young people are
not participating in sexual relations
because of peer pressure. They have
sex for the same reason we do — it
feels good in a world where many |
things feel bad. P
Generations bom numbly into I
despair don’t want to give up one of L
the few pleasures in life powerful m
enough to wash over the painful dis
tance between people and who they
want to be. Everyone can be a poet, or
an artist, or even happy, with their
lover. Everyone can have some power
over how they feel. Everyone can be
a success.
So instead of teaching them how
to enjoy it safely and wisely and in
vesting in their future safely, we
moronically tell them to “just say
_ _ »♦
no.
Bush didn’t order these cuts di
rectly . He merely stood by while Jesse
Helms, the man in Washington with
The One True Morality, led the battle
to replace the quest for knowledge
with the preaching of dogma. Just say
no to blind faith, Jesse.
The moral emptiness theory can
be applied to the way our country
interacts with other countries as well
has how we deal with our own moral
issues. Is moral emptiness a driving
force in our foreign policy? Or does
the way we treat others make us feel
empty?
The U.S. Army during the Persian
Gulf war used tank-mounted plows to
bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers in
more than 70 miles of trenches. Live,
dead and wounded were buried be
neath tons of sand by giant plows
running down both sides of the trenches,
while armored vehicles drove ahead
firing into the trenches. Not a single
American was killed during the as
sault.
I pulled the french fry from my
pocket and looked at it, numbly. I was
hungry, so I ate it, in despair.
Longsine is a senior international affairs
and economics major and a "Daily Nebraskan
columnist.
<\t this age, you can
do a lot of damage
:o your body.
...
WERE FIGHTING FOR
VOUR LIFE
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Speech class most valuable
While attending the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln in the early- 1970s,
I found some classes that helped round
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I remember wishing that my other
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