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8The Daily Tar HeelWednesday. April 4 1984 Ji I I Hiday. r.W ()IL RkOADWAY. Minain'o Editor Mk HAH TOON.. Editorial Pay Editor Frank Bkuni. Aime Editor Ki 1 1 y Simmons. ( 'uiversity Editor KYI I MaRSMAM , State and National Editor Ml I AN II Wi l is, City Editor VaNCI. TRI I I TMtN, Business Editor STUART TONKINSON, News Editor Frank Kennedy, Svro Editor Jl I F GROVE. Arts Editor ClNDY DuNLEVY, Features Editor CHARLES LEDFORD, Photography Editor Jl FF Nf.UVII.LE, Photography Editor Of blue moods and black clouds Batltt 92nd year of editorial freedom The day of reckoning (Part 1) For a week now, the Finance Commit tee has been whittling on the budget pro posals from campus organizations; those groups include, for example, The Phoenix, The Black Student Movement, WXYC and the Carolina Athletic Asso ciation. As is usual, the groups want more money than the committee has to give them, so the committee has had to care fully examine every line of every budget proposal, discuss and trim those requests that seem unnecessary, and recommend how much each group should get. This year, though, there's a twist. With more than a week and a dozen organiza tions to go, the committee is out of money. Unless something drastic happens, many groups some of them so estab lished that they're taken for granted will for the first time ever get no money from student government. A fixed student fee rate, excessive Cam pus Governing Council allocations and a financially disastrous Carolina Concert for the Children last year all combined to put the Finance Committee in its present predicament, making it extremely difficult for the committee to fund every organiza tion adequately. This year's budget of ap proximately $210,000 will only cover 61 percent of all the organizations' and publications' budget requests (about $340,000). Despite an qbsen'v rf funds to nllortp the budget hearings wi'l continue as scheduled until next Tuesday. Then the committee must, in a sense, go through the entire process once again, appraising which groups deserve money most. There's room for innovation, however. CGC member Tim Newman, who some how finds himself chairing the Finance Committee, has said that rather than hold an unappropriated balance ($15,000) to be allocated during the coming year, the com mittee may elect to allocate some or all of that balance now. Another "innovation," perhaps the most ticklish the committee could examine, is whether to fund all groups (despite the fact that with so little money to distribute, many groups would be reduced to mediocrity), or whether to fund adequately those organizations deemed most essential while eliminating those deemed important, but superfluous in comparison. As the available funds dwindle, a great debate is taking shape in the CGC. There are those who will argue that every group must get some funding, regardless of the amount and the result. Others will argue that, this year, it is inevitable that some programs must be dropped. But when the smoke clears, and some organizations are gone, one truth will emerge: There isn't .enough money to go around, and the students will hurt because of it. The foul winds of war The carnage that bullets and bombs can create is appalling, but much more grue some are the effects of gas warfare. In re cent months blinded, blistered and dying Iranian soldiers have arrived in Western European hospitals for treatment follow ing Iraqi mustard gas attacks in the 43-month-old Iran-Iraq war. Iranian troops still at the front increasingly have to fear nerve gas attacks. By vigorously and outspokenly striving to end the use of poison gas in the Persian Gulf war, the Reagan administration is looking beyond immediate national security interests to pursue a wise and moral policy. Understanding the Iraqi use of chemical warfare requires a glance at the evolution of the war. Iraq started toward its present fix when in 1980 it invaded an Iran weakened and divided by the Shah's removal. Under pressure from an invading army, Iran united behind the Ayatollah Khomeini and fought back with such fury that the Iranian army now occupies some Iraqi territory and has reportedly massed a million troops. In desperation Iraq has re sorted to weapons banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and not used in large bat tles between modernly equipped armies since World War I. The probable kind of nerve gase that Iraq is developing can be used on civilian populations and produces vomiting, temporary blindness, tremors, convulsions, and, in fairly small doses, fatal paralysis of the lungs. A U.S. tilt now toward Iraq could be justified strictly on the basis of power politics. Support or even outright aid to Iraq could check the military advance of Iran's brand of radical Shiite fundamen talism and prevent Iran from diverting resources to the overthrow of moderate Arab states. But to side with Iraq would be to associate with a ruthless, totalitarian regime, the crimes of which extend beyond the use of universally abhorred weapons. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein runs one of the world's most brutal police states some of the hundreds of political prisoners are executed on mere suspicion of opposi tion. Numerous techniques of torture are employed on citizens. The Reagan administration cannot cure all of the war's ills, but it can and is taking concrete steps to try to curb the Iraqi use of poison gas. By banning the export of five chemical components used to make nerve gas, by releasing U.S. intelligence data on the Iraqi construction of nerve gas production and storage facilities, and by successively denouncing the Iraqi use of mustard and nerve gas, the United States pursues moral diplomacy. When it comes to chemical weapons, half measures and weak stands cannot be tolerated. I have a friend on the West Coast who is wor ried. She is afraid that someone she knows will commit suicide. When she called me recently and shared her fears with me, I was perplexed. But after listening to her reasons and later thinking about what she had told me, I came to see how valid, how compelling her concern is. The root of her concern was a magazine article about the suicide of a college student attending a rather distinguished university. Although she couldn't remember some of the most seemingly pertinent details his name and age, for example she recalled other information about him, the kind of information that inevitably interests us jpiuch more than biostatistics: the kind of car he drove, his father's profession, his academic stand ing, the nature of his romantic life, what he did with his spare time, what he liked to eat. My friend managed to glean even the most obscure of details from the article she read, but that's not so sur prising. As any of us might be, she was concerned for herself, for those she knew about what type of person would sink into a depression so deep that he would contemplate, and execute, his own suicide. What my friend concluded was that this young man was not much different from her, or from me, or from any number of college students. And if he was different at all, it was in that he seemed to boast greater advantage and distinction than most college students. Why, then, his suicide? It is the question that undoubtedly plagues his parents and friends, and it is a question that now plagues me. I, like my friend, am scared by the news of the stu dent's suicide. I am forced to wonder if there are people close to me, people who maintain a facade of contentment and fulfillment, who might be teetering on the edge of the kind of hopelessness and sadness that triggers self-destruction. 1 am forced to wonder where, among the often for midable frustrations of everyday living, the line be tween coping and giving in exists, and I wonder how easily that line is traversed. Perhaps most intriguing is the nature of depres sion itself. We all suffer from it, some of us more frequently than others. And while depression is sometimes rooted in an incident as traceable as the end of a friendship or the failure to achieve a very specific goal, it is usually less easily comprehended. The most seemingly trivial of things can cause it: a Frank Bruni The Ferret's Wheel stubbed toe, clouds. We expect depression much as we expect rain. We know it will come, although we don't know when. And when it does arrive, we simply try to ig nore it, to work around it. Usually, the formula works. Sometimes, it doesn't. It hasn't for a young man I know who now oc cupies a room in the mental health ward of a Massachusetts hospital. It hasn't for a former schoolmate and family friend who suffers from agoraphobia, a psychological illness involving fear of open places and, in her case, a fear of leaving her home. And it didn't for the student whose pro file came under the scrutiny of my friend on the West Coast. In each of these three cases, the root of depres sion remains buried. Friends and doctors offer possible explanations emotionally charged home atmospheres, low self-esteem but these are elements to which at least half of us have fallen or continue to fall prey. So why did they drive these people to, or over, the edge? We can't really know why. That's what scared my friend, what prompted her to call me and many of her other close friends. That's what scares me. Like anyone else, I occasionally find myself in de pressions that last days, depressions that cannot be cured by a pint of ice cream, hours of rigorous ex ercise, or a day in bed. Without fail, the sadness lifts, as unpredictably and incomprehensibly as it first settled. But what if, I must ask myself, it didn't lift when it did? What if it lasted two more days, even two more hours? Would the feelings of futility and frustration that accompany such de pressions grow powerful enough in that extra time to overwhelm the will to live? Could my firm belief in the impending end of my depression evaporate? These are questions almost all of us could honestly ask of ourselves. Each of us knows what it means to be depressed and how difficult living in a depressed state can be. We can only imagine, then, the impossibility of life for the person who is ) perpetually depressed. We can only imagine the grim life of the young man who committed suicide. We say that his is the most unlikely of suicides, but that is a lie, and we all know it. His is the most typical of suicides baffling, senseless. Like a great many of the people who commit suicide each year, he "had everything." He had blue eyes, blond hair, height, nice clothing, a high grade point average, a roommate he liked, a favorite study spot in the campus library. His suicide is incompre hensible to us because he had the strength of reason the reason that applies to the world of the emo tionally healthy rooting for his happiness. His suicide is terrifying because he could be any one of us. Frank Bruni, a sophomore English major from Avon, Conn., is associate editor oThe Daily Tar Heel. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Take the risk for equality To the editor: Because we live in a complex and at times confusing world, it is often easy to disassociate ourselves when we should be working to affect positive change. It is convenient to concern ourselves only with that which we im mediately see planning class schedules and weekend parties and to leave the resolution of "greater issues" to those who we think really make the decisions. We know this isn't right. We have social cons ciences. But, for whatever reasons we have, we do it anyway. Sadly, we end up making a dif ferent kind of decision an indeci- Needed: SCA U editors To the editor: The Student Consumer Action Union is now choosing editors for four of its publications: The Franklin Street Gourmet giyes information and reviews on every restaurant and bar in Chapel Hill. Get a group of reviewer friends together and hit the town! It's a fun publication for which the editor will have to recruit good writers and graphics personnel. The Carolina Underground Course Guide is a new guide to classes that will give information and critiques on selected courses and pro fessors. The review will be an older brother guide written by advanced undergraduate students about their major departments. The editor will be responsible for the creative shap ing of a completely new publication. The Southern Part of Heaven gives information on apartment ren tals in and around Chapel Hill. It also contains ratings of services and managers. The editor will select a small staff to help compile the booklet from survey responses and to assist in writing an introductory sec tion on off-campus living. The SCAU computer will be used for data analysis. CASH provides information on all banks, savings and loans and credit unions in Chapel Hill and Car rboro. It compares the interest rates, account benefits and locations of in stitutions. The editor needs to do a little leg work (visit approximately 10 banks) and write the pamphlet in chart form by the end of April. Applications are available at the Carolina Union desk and SCAU. The positions are open to all freshmen, sophomores and juniors. Any ques tions? Come by Suite B in the Union. The application deadline is April 6. Kevin Wolf SCAU director of publications sion. By focusing narrowly on our own more tangible concerns we have in effect decided to let others shape our future and run our lives. Now is the' time to make a new decision to decide that we alone shape our future that it is up to us to determine what kind of world is right for us. This can be done by broaden ing our perspectives and concerns and by deciding right now that it is time to do something. We can do something today by ac tively supporting and encouraging the tireless efforts of those who strive for racial and human equality. On this 16th anniversary of the .assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, a man who was willing to take risks and make differences, a host of campus organizations are sponsoring the Martin Luther King Dream Day. The day at UNC will in clude speakers in the Pit, workshops, a panel discussion and a speech by Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. Each event will focus on the status and future of race relations in America. The pain and injustice that racism even in its most minute forms confronts us on a daily basis. It is time for us to make a decision together to stop, listen and think. See you in the Pit. Paul Parker Student body president Defense spending Going through the motions By ASHLEY OSMENT The March 25 election in El Salvador has given the Reagan administration a new equation in its pursuit for increased military aid to El Salvador: Elections equal democracy. Unfortunately, democracy in El Salvador is traditionally reserved fpr the tiny ruling oligarchy and its protective military, and there is no indication that the election will disrupt this tradition. However, in the United States the impact of the Salvadoran election may prove to be more meaningful, as public opinion is swayed by a fantasized image of Salvadoran democracy promoted by the Reagan ad ministration and espoused by the American media. The obvious purpose of the election was to give the Salvadoran government an aura of legitimacy, thereby increasing its chances for U.S. military aid. The obvious audience was the American people, 'or more specifically, Congress. The strategy may be working. After joining an official team of U.S. observers sent to El Salvador for the elec tion, House Majority Leader Jim Wright described the election as "impressive." Am bassador Thomas R. Pickering called it "a striking display of Salvadoran determina tion." And President Reagan issued one of his typically distortive, yet wonderfully glossy, statements at a White House luncheon, calling the election turnout "another victory for freedom, of liberty over repression and courage over intimida tion." Of course, the president did not clarify where a main source of repression and intimidation originates in El Salvador the Salvadoran government. Voting is required by law in El Salvador and a major concern to Salvadorans is get ting their national identity cards stamped to prove they voted, thereby escaping customary government-repression against those who fail to vote. As one Salvadoran was quoted in the March 27 New York Times. "People here (in El Salvador) are very well-trained to vote." Years of state terror have hardly induced an atmosphere of democracy in EI Salvador, but have entrenched a climate of fear incompatible with free elections. But when U.S. military officials drop in on the election-day scene in EI Salvador and find long lines of dedicated voters at each poll, rumors of Salvadoran democracy inevitably circulate among North Americans, who are either unaware of or indifferent to the reali ty of institutionalized terror in El Salvador. Perhaps with the exception of tumultuous Guatemala, El Salvador suffers from the most extreme government violence in Cen tral America. Salvadoran armed forces and death squads equipped with U.S. weapons deny through terror freedom of speech, assembly or press. For example, since 1979, over 30 journalists have been murdered by army death squads and the two independent newspapers have been closed by state violence. Concerning freedom of speech, 1,090 Salvadoran students and 224 Salvadoran teachers have been murdered by Salvadoran armed forces since 1979. If the same percentage of students and teachers were murdered in the United States, 49,050 American students and 10,080 American teachers would be dead. In addition to students, teachers and journalists, political leaders from center to left, labor leaders, human rights workers, religious leaders are all distinctly targeted by the Salvadoran army and death squads. The election in El Salvador cannot alone put an end to the death squads and govern ment repression by the armed forces. As long as 1 percent of the population owns over half the land in El Salvador and as long as that extremely cohesive oligarchy con trols the Salvadoran armed forces, students and others who demand economic reform will be violently repressed. Further U.S. military aid will simply accelerate that repression and strengthen the oligarchic grip on El Salvador's economy. The U.S. must realize that instability yes, revolution is inevitable in El Salvador. If the goal is enduring stability and real democracy for El Salvador, the oligarchy will have to fall. As a result of the March 25 election, Jose Napoleon Duarte, the U.S.-backed Chris tian Democrat, is favored to defeat Arena's Roberto D'Aubisson in the May run-off, but it is unlikely that Duarte can control the Salvadoran armed forces that historically are accustomed to ruling El Salvador. D'Aubisson, known to be a leader of the Salvadoran death squads, has been called a "pathological killer" by former U.S. Am bassador Robert White. It is likely that D'Aubisson and the death squads will con tinue to terrorize El Salvador even if Duarte wins. Some ever fear a D'Aubisson coup in the event of a Duarte victory, a particular fear of the Reagan administration because it knows Congress will not appropriate military aid to a bloodstained D'Aubisson government. Whether Duarte or D'Aubisson, U.S. military aid can do nothing but protect the interests of the oligarchy until the oligarchy is dissolved and no longer controls the Salvadoran military. Frankly, the picture is grim. The "stabili ty" that the U.S. backs in El Salvador is the violently repressive oligarchy. It is "stabili ty" that allows no free debate; the guerrillas did not whine "sour grapes" and boycott the last election, Salvadorans politically left of center are murdered in El Salvador. Op position groups cannot participate safely in negotiations or elections. The March 25 election did not produce 1.2 million happy Salvadoran voters, it summoned 1 .2 million Salvadorans most of them landless, hungry and war-weary and requested that they walk through the motions of democracy for an American au dience. It was a mockery of democracy, designed and paid for by the United States. It was a stage set to guarantee increased military aid to an undemocratic, violently repressive Central American country. If the United States is truly concerned with democracy, it will deny military aid to El Salvador. It will recognize that the Salvadoran peasant has been stripped of social, economic and political justice. It will change its foreign policy to sincerely pro mote democracy by actively promoting social, economic and political reform in El Salvador. Until then, elections in El Salvador will mean nothing. Ashley Osment is a junior peace, war and defense major from Sylva. To the editor: I am writing in response to the let ter submitted by Wayne Boyette ("Hunt's Beliefs," DTH, March 27) concerning the alleged confusion over Sen. Jesse Helms' campaign commer cial. I must have missed the point of confusion: All I see is a relentless ef fort on the part of the N.C. senator to lower the election strategies to a mere mudslinging campaign. Perhaps if Boyette had been more aware of the facts concerning this issue of "hypocrisy," he would have been able to more clearly understand Gov. Jim Hunt's position. At the beginning of the campaign, the governor sent a letter to the senator inquiring as to whether or not they would accept donations from out-of-state, believing both campaigns should have equal access to funds. However, when Helms failed to reply and continued having out-of-state fundraisers while also receiving out-of-state donations, Hunt realized that he would need to accept these out-of-state contributions as well, in order to compete with the vast resources available to Helms. The Hunt for Senate Committee has had only four or five out-of-state fundraisers. It is merely that people from outside North Carolina are so supportive of Hunt's campaign that they continue to send donations. Should the Hunt for Senate Commit tee turn away these funds? I do not think this would be a viable option in regard to the tactics Helms has adopted. . Why can Helms not have a positive campaign? Because he does not have a positive career and is therefore us ing Hunt as his target of a vicious political attack in a desperate attempt to remain in office. None of Helms' campaign ads reveal any positive aspects of the senator. Rather, they reveal only his perspective of Hunt's supposed weaknesses. I am afraid one does not need to "look for fault in the Senator." The issue is rather that one must look (search, in fact) to find some justification in Helms' repeatedly negative and issue-avoiding state ments. A now-famous question pos ed by Helms is, "Where do you stand, Jim?" There can be no doubt regarding his insinuation that Hunt should not be soliciting funds from out-of-state, yet Helms could surely account for the majority of his ap proximately $15 million campaign budget from states other than North Carolina. I would therefore dispute the claim by Boyette that Hunt has adopted a "pious, holier-than-thou attitude" but rather point instead to the defen sive posture that Hunt has been forc ed to take. Sandra Boyd Staff volunteer Hunt for Senate Committee To the editor, Wayne Boyette and Sen. Jesse Helms misunderstand the criticism that Gov. Jim Hunt has made re garding out-of-state campaign fun ding ("Hunt's Beliefs," DTH, March 27). There are two points to be made on Hunt's behalf. First, the governor would prefer not to have to depend upon out-of-state contributions to finance his campaign. Helms' tremendous out-of-state resources have forced Hunt to increase his own fundraising efforts outside of North Carolina in order to offset Helms' monetary advantage. Second, Hunt is committed to represent lNoriti Carolina interests first and foremost and therefore has limited out-of-state contributions to no more than 40 percent of his total campaign funding. Helms has no such commitment. So far around 75 percent of his support has come from outside our state. While Jesse leads in total fundraising, the governor leads in N.C. fundraising. Hunt's criticism is not hypocrisy. He wants the citizens of North Carolina to ask Helms where his primary interests lie and whom he represents. Alan T. Houck , , Chapel Hill
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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April 4, 1984, edition 1
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