North Carolina Newspapers

8The Daily Tar HeelTuesday, February 2, 1988 latlu afar 5i ar 0 editorial freedom Nurture natural The Southern Part of Heaven iust cot more board divine. Or maybe Opinion not. UNCs bas- ketball team is in the Associated Press top 20 poll, the University is on U.S. News and World Report's list of top 20 colleges and now UNC is also one of the top 20 "natural" campuses in the nation. Outside magazine chose the campus for its proximity to the surfing and hang-gliding of the Outer Banks and skiing and camping in the Appal achian Mountains. Ironically, the town that offers access to such diverse outdoor activ ities is in danger of losing its own natural setting to poor planning and development. Streets in the Chapel Hill area are carrying more traffic than they were ever designed to handle. A growing problem with air pollution and annoying traffic jams can't be alleviated by the addition of Interstate 40. Rerouting traffic and even such radical solutions as the Pittsboro Street Extension are not enough to handle the growing population around Research Triangle Park. Rapid development is threatening the picturesque quality of Chapel Hill so lauded bya residents and visitors. Rosemary Square, with its extensive office space and condominium poten tial, would pave the way for uninvited growth in the community. An increase in the knotted traffic pattern of Getting caught In public life, the appearance of misconduct is often as important as the reality. Government officials are guardians of the public trust, and when they violate that trust, they have a responsibility to give up their power and restore public confidence in government. Attorney General Edwin Meese apparently does not see it that way. Upon taking office, he has been involved in a series of legal and ethical controversies that have called into question his worthiness to be the nation's top law officer. He first embroiled himself in scandal when he gave jobs to friends who had given him interest-free loans. Meese also provoked doubts over his role in the Iran-contra affair, and has seen no conflict of interest in having the justice department handle cases in which he may be involved personally. Conflict of interest, of course, is at the heart of Meese's latest woes. On Wednesday, he will testify at the trial of former White House aide Lyn Nofziger. Nofziger is accused of helping to obtain a $32 million defense contract for Wedtech Corp. Meese is testifying because Nofziger and another of Meese's friends. rnon sequitur Solitude, watching the weeks go by Quarantined. Well, not really. Perhaps under house arrest. At least that sounds better, more romantic. And certainly Horacio is searching for something roman tic in all this, in being trapped here for a couple of weeks. Carrier of the plague, or at least of the chicken pox, he wanders through his house, through his world, and he begins to perceive a smaller reality. . The first order of business should be to take all the mirrors away and carefully smash them into small pieces, for he has no need of them and he is not superstitious. And yet, though he does not fear the supernatural, he suspects he is the picture of Dorian Gray sprung to life, and that his double is off cavorting in the fleshpots of Paris, perhaps even with La Maga, and that his doppleganger's pleasures have led to the havoc wreaked upon his body. The one pleasure left to him is that of reading, and so he never leaves his room without a book, and he stays up late, trudging through Tolstoy, wuh only his cat, sleeping contentedly on his chest, for company. He has to read at night, because during the day he dozes off. It's not his fault, for as he struggles to read in front of the fire, which flares every once in a while to remind rgm of its presence, he drifts Jill Gerber, Eor Amy Hamilton, Managing Editor SALLY PEARSALL, News Editor Kristen Gardner, University Editor KlMBERLY EDENS, University Editor SHARON KEBSCHULL, State and National Editor Leigh ann Mcdonald, City Editor MIKE BERARDINO, Sports Editor FELISA NEURINGER, Business Editor HANNAH DRUM, Features Editor Elizabeth Ellen, Arts Editor Charlotte Cannon, Photography Editor CATHY McHUGH, Omnibus Editor environment downtown and the loss of the small town atmosphere are the prices paid for poor planning. To see where Chapel Hill is going, look no further than the East Franklin Street area that's approaching the look of Myrtle Beach. With a gas station on every corner, restaurants hastily thrown up and several buildings placed too near the road, residents potentially can see the Chapel Hill of the future. On campus, unresearched planning threatens the natural setting UNC is so fortunate to have. The decision to place the Alumni Center in the woods next to Kenan Stadium is a mistake to be regretted for years to come. Development of this sort only opens the door to future exploitation of the landscape. If construction continues at its present pace, a tree won't be found within ten miles of UNC. However, this abomination doesn't need to continue. With research and the ability to learn from past mistakes, growth in the Triangle and its cam puses can be paced. Development need not be a sword of Damocles hanging over the Triangle. With it comes cultural outlets and a sophistication not found in stagnating communities, but only if growth is handled carefully. Through adequate planning and thought, development can contribute to the community, not rob it of its beauty. When residents flee to the mountains or the shore, they should think about why they need to escape. in a Meesetrap attorney E. Robert Wallach, came to him for help in the Wedtech matter. Special prosecutor James McKay, who investigated Meese's role in the case, decided not to indict him. More interestingly, McKay unco vered yet another suggestion of cor ruption on Meese's part, finding a memo from Wallach to Meese that detailed a scheme to bribe an Israeli official in return for an Israeli promise that a $1 billion Iraqi pipeline would not be bombed. That plan eventually fell through, but Meese never reported the bribe attempt. McKay has not concluded his investigation, but in a sense, whether Meese is indicted is irrelevant. The attorney general, who should embody the ideals of integrity and honesty that society institutionalizes through law, is instead cavalier about corruption. Meese's only sin may be, as some have suggested, loyalty to his friends, but in his case loyalty is not a virtue. His record is one of continuous bad judgment and blindness to his posi tion. And every day Meese remains in office, he tramples on the public trust and on the laws he is bound to uphold. That trampling must cease. James Surowiecki away, not to Moscow but to one of the last squares on the hopscotch, pleasantly suspended between sleep and wakefulness, and finds reality as he wishes it to be. Not that Pierre or Prince Andrei are boring, but the warmth of the fire is comforting, and so he is content. And yet, though he has been granted a literary vacation, there is no one with whom to share it. He wants to return to where he now belongs. He cannot talk knowingly of post-structuralism and Cortazar, for it is no fun to be pretentious by oneself. If once he welcomed solitude, now he wishes to thrust it away. Though he can imagine himself a monk, alone with his manuscripts (and the second book of "The Poetics" lies hidden in his room), without the long afternoons with her at the Coffee Shop it all means nothing. So he waits, and starts to feel better, to reassemble in his mind the shattered mirrors. He moves on from Tolstoy, and discovers that Madison Smartt Bell's words and John Coltrane's sax go together as purely as do the moon and the sky on the last night he's home, when the moonlight decides to shine through his window and he can feel it and know that he is ready to leave, and finally he falls asleep. Flag t has been 123 years since Appomattox, and still would-be Southern historians .ILfeel obligated to defend the noble lost cause of the Confederacy. In one sense, this is hardly surprising. The wounds of civil war leave deep scars in any nation, and the heart-rending imagery of the Southern soldiery strikes a deep cord in the American spirit. Even today, it seems to some that the thousands of dead cry out for some sort of justification. Surely, such valor and sacrifice could not have been in vain. Southern soldiers fought heroically against odds that were literally impossible to overcome. Surely, such nobility could not have been in vain; surely the flower of Southern manhood was not wasted in defense of a morally indefensible economic institution. I say it was. For the North, if this particular slaughter had a meaning, it was that slavery had become an economic burden it could no longer afford to subsidize and a moral burden with which it could no longer live. It is no coincidence that the moral burden only became unendurable when the eco nomic weight became insupportable; people rarely put conscience before cost. In the inflammatory debates of the times, even Southerners were reluctant to directly defend slavery. Instead they spoke of, and often still speak of, states rights vs. federal dominance. What specific states' rights were under attack? The right to govern civil and criminal procedure? The right to a repub lican form of government and secure borders? No, of all of the states' rights enumerated or implied by the Constitution, only slavery (and the economic and social contortions imposed on the North to keep it alive) was being challenged. At its core, the straw man of states rights both disguised and summarized the premises Arias Plan key to peace To the editor: Last fall, the presidents of five Central American nations signed a treaty aimed at ending political violence in the region. The Arias Plan, authored by Costa Rica's Nobel Prize winning President Oscar Arias Sanchez, seeks to bring oppo sition groups into the political process through democratic reforms and the negotiation of a cease-fire in each of Central America's guerrilla wars. The plan also calls for an immediate end to all foreign support of guerrilla forces in the region. The plan provides the best hope in many years for bringing peace to war-torn Central America. Randall McBride character izes the Arias Plan, written by the president of Central Amer ica's most stable democracy and supported by men so staunchly pro-United States as President Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador, as a "communist attempt to satisfy the American public" ("Contra aid preserves democracy," Jan. 25). If such views were limited to a few misinformed college students, it would be a matter of little concern. Unfortu nately, many of our govern ment's most powerful policy makers view the Arias Plan in much the same terms. While the Reagan administration pays lip service to the plan, it continues to call for continued military aid to the contras, a guerrilla band seeking to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Arias has denounced aid to the con tras as detrimental to his peace plan. In early February, Congress will vote on President Reagan's latest request for aid to the contras. The Carolina Commit tee on Central America is sponsoring a campaign to encourage Rep. David Price, D-4th District, and Sen. Terry Silent vigil Editor's note: "A Look Back" is an occasional feature reprinting past Daily Tar Heel articles. The following editorial was printed Jan. 5, 1967. It shows that the subjects of campus activism have changed, but the 1960s' legacy of peaceful protest has not. The silent peace vigils which started yesterday and are planned every Wednesday until the Vietnam War ends might turn out to be a fairly accurate indicator of the sincerity and dedication and above all the endurance of those who oppose the war in Vietnam. A crowd of 120 protesters gathered in front of the Post Office: The group says it plans to keep up the demonstrations "until Americans stop killing and being killed in Vietnam." The question in the minds of a great many people now is whether, as the weeks roll on, the number of participants will increase or decrease. It strikes us that the number should grow, for we do not foresee any of yesterday's group changing their minds about the war, and we feel certain Readers' Foramro a mark of Southern tragedy Steve Robinson Guest Writer that black people were intellectually and morally inferior to white men, and so, it was moral for the white man to enslave them. In the 19th century, Northern whites were willing to concede the former premise but, with no direct economic stake in slavery, they found the latter difficult to accept. Nonetheless, the states' rights argument was still a fearsome entity because in 1860, to knock it down meant war. The institution of slavery was too deeply entrenched and passions on both sides ran too high for it to be otherwise. The only alternatives were either for the South to admit that the foundation of its existence was a vastly evil institution or for the North to consent to share some of the weight of that evil. , Even 100 years after the war, most Southerners could not admit this, the admission being made all the more difficult by the hundreds of thousands of lives lost fighting to keep slavery alive. Instead, they wrapped the dead in a legend of a noble lost cause against aggression and for constitutional rule. They flew the Confed erate flag from their state capitals and instituted Jim Crow laws to reassure themselves that blacks really were inferior and therefore, the men who sent boys to death and mutilation really had both races' best interests at heart. And in defense of Jim Crow, the old bogie of states' rights was once again invoked to cover premises that really weren't any different from those supporting slavery. Well, it's not 1860. Lincoln is dead, Sherman is dead, the last American born t r""T""" '"""""""" r t- Sanford, D-N.C, to oppose this request. You can support the Arias Plan. Stop by our table in the Pit to sign a letter calling upon our elected repre sentatives to put an end to a policy that wastes millions of American tax dollars and countless thousands of Central American lives. JOEL SIPRESS Graduate History Bush pulls media coup To the editor: If Jill McCartney had taken the time to research the Bush Rather incident, she would have realized that both sides were to blame for the embar rassing incident ("Bush was bushwhacked," Jan. 28). First, the statement McCartney made, "Bush was misled by CBS as to the nature of the interview," is so blatantly wrong it makes me cringe to read it. Bush's campaign was alerted by CBS that the inter view would cover a broad range of subjects. And although Bush may have claimed on the air that CBS ambushed him, last Wednesday Bush aides admit ted that they were prepared for questions about the Iran contra affair. An unnamed adviser was quoted as saying, "We figured Iran-contra was going to come up." Not only were the aides aware of this, they even coached Bush to be aggressive toward Rather and divert the conversation if the subject came up. Second, Bush himself insisted on a live interview instead of the usual taped format. This obviously left him open to spontaneous question ing from Rather. It's true that CBS was well-prepared to try to expose weaknesses in Bush's position, but both parties were guilty of trying to gain an upper hand to undermine the other. Finally, I'm not sure why McCartney is complaining. If anything came out of this event, it's that Bush won the moment. Still, I find it exceedingly irritating when someone in Bush's position abuses the sent a message off peace A Look Back Campus Activism that not everyone who opposes the war was at the peace vigil. This was a unique type of anti-war demonstration. Although it was organized by Quakers, the invitation to participate was extended to people who do not necessarily oppose all wars. In effect, it was not a demonstration by "pacifists" but rather, by people who desire peace in one specific instance where they feel there is no justification or reason to continue fighting. No one during the vigil suggested that we drop everything where we are and bring our fighting men home from Southeast Asia. No one criticized the military as a brutal organization. The hope was expressed, however, that such peace vigils throughout the country might "help to provide a stepping stone ... to which our into slavery is dead and, thankfully, Jim Crow is finally dead, too. Only the vestigial hatreds of an ugly period remain. Which brings me to the point of this essay. Black people don't object to the Con federate flag because it is occasionally waved by the Ku Klux Klan and others of twisted spirit and weak brains. They object to it because they know that ultimately it represents states' rights and the men who fought under it were sent to fight for states' rights, the pretty clothes that dressed the ugliest of ideas. The Confederate flag is a symbol of the denial of freedom, and symbols are important in this world. It is easier to rally people around them than the ideas they represent. I do not intend to denigrate the honor of the Confederate armies. I admire their courage and loyalty as much as I despise the destruction and hatred that the war engendered. But the war will never truly be over until we Southerners admit that the real tragedy of the Civil War was that everything was endured in the defense of an intrinsically evil institution. Let's honor the dead for their sacrifice and, yes, let them lie under the flag for which they fought.The majority of them honestly did not believe they were fighting for slavery. But for God's sake, let's acknowledge that the only nobility to be found in the noble lost cause were the small commonplace nobilities of heroic men and women. The New South will never be more than a public relations slogan until we concede that all the gallantry of the Rebel soldiers and all the blood they shed cannot wash the stain of bigotry from the Confederate flag. It's long past time to haul it down from the seats of our government. Steve Robinson is a data manager for Division TEACCH, Administration and Research in the medical school. ... X Art THE GSFATETrr J wxu be the next nzsib&rr' BRlNCr om Kdppeu x Art tW respect he deserves by con stantly interrupting his inter viewer. Perhaps he was trying to show that he was in control of the situation. I feel that Bush was trying to cloud the issues and to avoid answering vital questions that affect both the public's view of his campaign, and more importantly, his integrity. COLIN LAW Sophomore Physics Letters policy When submitting letters or columns, students should include the following: name, year in school, major, phone number and the date submitted. Other members of the University community should give similar information. All letters and columns must be signed by the author, with a limit of two signatures per letter or column. policy makers can gracefully move." We are convinced there are many people within the University community who believe we should not be fighting in Vietnam. But many of them are reluctant to engage in Y Court cat-and-dog fights between pacifists and military sympathiz ers. Many of them realize that the United States cannot conceivably stop fighting at a moment's notice. So they stay away from all kinds of demonstrations and public expressions of anti-war sentiment. And, in the minds of the public, their silence betokens their acquiescence to our stand in Vietnam. But here is an opportunity for everyone who has learned about and been displeased with our engagement in Vietnam to make their feelings known in a quite civilized fashion. We doubt that the heart of Ho Chi Minh will be touched by the vigils. And we don't expect an overnight change in the direction of American policy. But it can't hurt to let the powers that be realize that there is responsible opposition to the Vietnam war.