Opinion
Lawrence Journal-World l LJWorld.com l Wednesday, March 19, 2014
EDITORIALS
Facing facts Mistakes happen, but state legislators should place a high priority on basing their decisions on correct information.
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egardless of the ideological slant Kansas legislators bring to their work, state residents have a right to expect their lawmakers at least to get their facts straight. Legislators get a lot of information and it’s understandable that, from time to time, they might get some wrong information or misconstrue some information they receive. However, when their presumed facts are called into question, they have a responsibility to double-check that information not simply double-down on their mistake. Sen. Tom Arpke, R-Salina, probably isn’t the only person guilty of doing this, but he recently provided one vivid example of such behavior on a Kansas University issue. In a subcommittee meeting last week, Arpke led the denial of $2 million for a proposed drug-development institute at KU and directed that money toward a scholarship program for low-income students. That fund usually is split half and half between students at public universities and those at private colleges. However, Arpke said he wanted 75 percent of the $2 million to go to private schools. At least part of his justification for that move is his continuing assertion that the graduation rate at private colleges in Kansas is far higher than at public universities. Unfortunately the graduation rates he is quoting don’t represent an apples-to-apples comparison. Arpke has said private schools have a 71 percent four-year graduation rate while KU’s four-year rate is just 32.2 percent. However, 71 percent is the percentage of the private school graduates who received their degrees within four years, while KU’s figure is the percentage of the entire freshman class. The comparable four-year graduation figure for private colleges actually is 31.4 percent, slightly lower than KU’s. Given this information, Arpke refused to acknowledge any problem with the comparison he was making and said he was simply working off reports he had been given. It’s uncertain whether he planned to look into the matter any further. Misinformation, no doubt, abounds in a legislative session, and a fair number of faulty facts seem to be swirling around the discussion of state university budgets. It’s good to note that a group of state legislators is reviving a caucus aimed at advancing higher education. One of the key goals of those legislators should be to share dependable information with their colleagues and clear up any misconceptions that arise during discussions of higher education legislation. There certainly is room for honest disagreements on any number of legislative issues, but those disagreements should be based on the facts, not on faulty assertions. LAWRENCE
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Stalin genocide spurs no nostalgia “Boys from another school pulled out the severed head of a classmate while fishing in a pond. His whole family had died. Had they eaten him first? Or had he survived the deaths of his parents only to be killed by a cannibal? No one knew; but such questions were commonplace for the children of Ukraine in 1933. ... Yet cannibalism was, sometimes, a victimless crime. Some mothers and fathers killed their children and ate them. ... But other parents asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: ‘Mother says that we should eat her if she dies.’” — Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (2010) Washington — While Vladimir Putin, Stalin’s spawn, ponders what to do with what remains of Ukraine, remember: Nine years before the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the Nazis embarked on industrialized genocide, Stalin deliberately inflicted genocidal starvation on Ukraine. To fathom the tangled forces, including powerful ones of memory, at work in that singularly tormented place, begin
George Will
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georgewill@washpost.com
U.S. policymakers, having allowed their wishes to father their thoughts, find Putin incomprehensible. He is a barbarian but not a monster, and hence no Stalin.”
with Snyder’s stunning book. Secretary of State John Kerry has called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a 19th-century act in the 21st century.” Snyder reminds us that “Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific numbers in the middle of the 20th century.” Here is Snyder’s distillation of a Welsh journalist’s description of a Ukrainian city: “People appeared at 2 o’clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until 7. On an average day 40,000 people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would
cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. ... The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. ... Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear.” This, which occurred about as close to Paris as Washington is to Denver, was an engineered famine, the intended result of Stalin’s decision that agriculture should be collectivized and the “kulaks” — prosperous farmers — should be “liquidated as a class.” In January 1933, Stalin, writes Snyder, sealed Ukraine’s borders so peasants could not escape and sealed the cities so peasants could not go there to beg. By spring, more than 10,000 Ukrainians were dying each day, more than the 6,000 Jews who perished daily in Auschwitz at the peak of extermination in the spring of 1944. Soon many Ukrainian children resembled “embryos out of alcohol bottles” (Arthur Koestler’s description) and there were, in Snyder’s words, “roving bands of cannibals”: “In the villages smoke coming from a cottage chimney was a suspicious sign, since it tended to mean that cannibals were eating a kill or that families were roasting one of their members.” Snyder, a Yale historian, is judicious about estimates of Ukrainian deaths from hunger and related diseases, settling on an educated guess of approximately 3.3 million, in 1932-33. He says that when “the Soviet census of 1937 found 8 million fewer people than projected,” many of the missing being victims of starvation in Ukraine and elsewhere (and the children they did not have), Stalin “had the responsible demographers executed.”
Putin, who was socialized in the Soviet-era KGB apparatus of oppression, aspires to reverse the Soviet Union’s collapse, which he considers “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century.” Herewith a final description from Snyder of the consequences of the Soviet system, the passing of which Putin so regrets: “One spring morning, amidst the piles of dead peasants at the Kharkiv market, an infant suckled the breast of its mother, whose face was a lifeless gray. Passersby had seen this before ... that precise scene, the tiny mouth, the last drops of milk, the cold nipple. The Ukrainians had a term for this. They said to themselves, quietly, as they passed: ‘These are the buds of the socialist spring.’” U.S. policymakers, having allowed their wishes to father their thoughts, find Putin incomprehensible. He is a barbarian but not a monster, and hence no Stalin. But he has been coarsened, in ways difficult for civilized people to understand, by certain continuities, institutional and emotional, with an almost unimaginably vicious past. And as Ukraine, a bubbling stew of tensions and hatreds, struggles with its identity and aspirations, Americans should warily remember William Faulkner’s aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” lll
Author’s note: I wish to apologize to The New York Times for inadvertently reproducing without attribution 12 words from an October 2007 Times story describing the 1971 Bon Vivant botulism and bankruptcy episode. — George Will is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
Kansans should reclaim power It was reported this week that during a hearing on a proposed bill to ban judicial lobbying, Craig Gabel, from Kansans for Liberty, said that he was testifying on behalf of the “common citizens” of Kansas. When I read this, I immediately began to wonder about how the “common citizen” of Kansas actually gets heard in the Legislature. Indeed, I began to wonder whether the views of the ordinary Kansan are heard in Topeka anymore. On one level, of course, ordinary citizens’ views are heard through their elected officials or, at least, that’s the theory. In recent years, however, voter turnout in many parts of Kansas has been abysmally low. I have, in the past, questioned whether some of the bills introduced in this legislative session have really represented the beliefs of ordinary Kansans. To my mind, the problem with our current system in which so few Kansans go to the polls is that elected officials often represent the views of a vocal minority of voters who are motivated to vote because of specific “hot button” issues. The majority of Kansans often don’t vote in elections, so to say that elected officials represent the “common citizen” is really not accurate at all. These legislators often represent minority views allowed to prevail by general voter apathy. It is certainly true that the average citizen, if motivated enough to take the time and effort, can testify before the Legislature on various issues. I have done it and it’s a great deal of work, but well worth it to be heard by those in the
Mike Hoeflich
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I think that those Kansans who are unhappy about legislative actions should stop complaining in private unless they are willing to take action themselves.” corridors of power. But I wonder how many Kansans actually do this. My sense is that very few ordinary Kansans actually testify before our Legislature. On the other hand, anyone who visits the Capitol during the time when the Legislature is in session knows that the building is filled to the brim with lawyers and lobbyists often representing groups with patriotic and inspirational names that, in reality, represent small, special interest groups. I really cannot think of very many lobbyists who really represent the ordinary Kansan. Then there are the polls and the so-called “objective studies.” We seem to be overrun by these. But, here again, one has to ask whether these are truly objective. The very fact that most of these polls and studies seem to reflect the political and economic views of the groups that pay for them suggest that they are not truly objective at all.
I’m afraid that I have to conclude that we don’t really know what the ordinary Kansan thinks about most issues that come before the Legislature. Indeed, I suspect that the ordinary Kansan knows little about most of the bills that go through the Legislature each year. And that’s a pity. It’s a pity because I believe that the ordinary Kansan is a decent person who cares about his neighbors and about the state and those views need to be heard in Topeka. Unfortunately, the ordinary Kansan doesn’t care enough to vote regularly or to take the time to tell his representative what is important to him or to actually come to Topeka to tell the Legislature directly what he thinks. I think that those Kansans who are unhappy about legislative actions should stop complaining in private unless they are willing to take action themselves. Ours is a state with a proud history of populism. We the people are not powerless. We can speak and we can tell our leaders what we want and what we value. But there is only one way that ordinary Kansans will be heard in Topeka: through the ballot box and through personal involvement. There was a common slogan in the 1960’s that I think Kansans need to remember: “power to the people.” It is time for ordinary Kansans to speak out and to act. Only then will we really know what the “common citizen” believes. — Mike Hoeflich, a distinguished professor in the Kansas University School of Law, writes a regular column for the JournalWorld.
PUBLIC FORUM
Expand Medicaid To the editor: Help is available for the tens of thousands of hardworking Kansans through Medicaid expansion. Right now, these Kansans are caught in the middle because they make too much money to get health care coverage through the existing Medicaid program, but not enough to get assistance through the health insurance marketplace. There are about 20,219, adults between the age of 50-64 in Kansas who have lost jobs or are working in jobs without health insurance. In addition to providing needed coverage that will pay for their care in a health care crisis, expanding Medicaid will give folks access to preventive care. Expanding Medicaid, and accepting the federal funding will boost the economy at no cost to the state, create jobs and help hospitals with payment not previously available. The federal government will provide 100 percent of the cost of the expansion coverage for the first three years (beginning in 2014) and 90 percent after that. As a health care professional, I feel the need to speak out and encourage folks in our community to call or write to your legislators and governor to allow Medicaid expansion. Health care coverage should have bipartisan support for the sake of our Kansas citizens. Judy Bellome, Lawrence