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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 23, 1987)
Page 2/The Battalion/Monday, March 23, 1987 Opinion The Battalion (USPS 045 360) Member of Texas Press Association Southwest Journalism Conference The Battalion Editorial Board Loren Steffy, Editor Marybeth Rohsner, Managing Editor Mike Sullivan, Opinion Page Editor Jens Koepke, City Editor Jeanne Isenberg, Sue Krenek, News Editors Homer Jacobs, Sports Editor Tom Ownbey, Photo Editor Editorial Policy * The Battalion is a non-profit, self-supporting newspaper oper ated as a community service to Texas A&M and Bryan-College Sta tion. Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editorial board or the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Texas A&M administrators, faculty or the Board of Regents. The Battalion also serves as a laboratory newspaper for students in reporting, editing and photography classes within the Depart ment ofjournalism. The Battalion is published Monday through Friday during Texas A&M regular semesters, except for holiday and examination periods. Mail subscriptions are $17.44 per semester, $34.62 per school year and $36.44 per full year. Advertising rates furnished on re quest. Our address: The Battalion, Department of Journalism, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4111. Second class postage paid at College Station, TX 77843. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Battalion, De partment of Journalism, Texas A&M University, College Station TX 77843-4111. We're still waiting When he signed the prison management law into effect last month, Gov. Bill Clements promised that inmates released under the new law would be sent to halfway houses before they were allowed to return home. Last week, however, 121 prisoners released under the new law happily bypassed halfway houses on their way home. Not only are Texas prisons’ bars bulging beyond constitutionality, Texas halfway houses also are filled to capacity. Of the 261 prisoners released un der the law, just 140 were sent to halfway houses. Clements’ general counsel and prison expert, Rider Scott, said, “The majority of the 261 would have been released from prison within a few days even without the prison act.” John Byrd, executive director of the Board of Paroles, echoed Scott’s sentiments, only with a little more precision about the number of prisoners who would have been paroled even without the law. Co incidentally, Byrd said 140 of the 261 prisoners needed to go to half way houses, and exactly 140 spaces were available for them. But no matter how hard state officials try make their efforts look successful, it’s going to be diffcult to make prematurely released pris oners cooperate. “A burglar paroled last week from state prison kidnapped and raped his parole officer . . .,” the Houston Chronicle reported Satur day. Certainly, these things will happen even under the best of cir cumstances, but one can’t help but wonder how often they will begin to occur while we wait for an intelligent solution for the overcrowd ing problem to be implemented. li Jen spi ble area A Bmp ‘brie aecc Bicat lion © WRl. Spcakc nei ii lean, beg; mer [moi mag jstori [pub D Istud Parents deserve combat pa\ I was traveling down 1-35 Satur day >n my way back to College Station from Dal las, when a station wagon in the next lane caught my at tention. You know the type, luggage rack on top, lots of vacation stuff in the back, dad and able in the car. Paula Vogrin mom in the front seat, and the kids tak ing up every other inch of space avail- The babies still have proud parents I glanced over to get a look at the va cationing family, and a girl about 10 years old grabbed her brother, who looked about eight, and started choking the stuffing out of him. As I watched the little boy gasping for breath, an other girl, who looked about nine, climbed over the back seat and adminis tered what looked like the Iron Claw on her sister. The way I saw it, these three kids were engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Then, just when I was sure the boy was turning purple and going into death throes, they all turned, looked di rectly at me and burst out laughing. auto bingo. It’s just like regular! except instead of numbers in iki squares, there are pictures of i airplanes, policemen, dogs, picnU bles, bridges, etc. We watched i other like hawks, making suren:i covered something they didnt see. Mom always had a prize forthe> ner, but nobody could win more: the others because she bought ane; number of prizes for everybody. IbutK Throughout my life, my sister has taught me many lessons. As befits a sibling who’s older, she often instructs by exam ple. Rather than have a child her self, she said there licized, what will be the effect on a kid who learns that one parent was com pelled by the other to give her up? were too many un wanted children in the world and so Richard Cohen she adopted one. This is how the sweet and delightful Lillian came into my life. No one knows the answers to these questions. Surrogate motherhood is too new for conclusions to be drawn and, anyway, we still know relatively little about human behavior. I have talked to a former family-court judge, a child pys- chologist who specializes in custody cases and a psychotherapist. For my questions, they had nothing but more questions. The Talmudic tradition lives in the field of mental health. nito. Whose child is this we are getting? Will it be bright? Will it be dumb? Will it have my ear for music, my zest for danc ing? Will it have grandpop’s gift for math and grandma’s cutting wit? Will it be like us? I drove past the family feeling a little sheepish — I should have known better than to fall for that old trick — my two sisters and I used to pull it all the time while on own family vacations. These are tough questions. But what have they to do with love? What have they to do with wanting a baby for its own sake? What have they to do with the hard and true lessons of parenting — the demands on time, the need to share, the slow comprehension that even our “own” children are not ours but are unique unto themselves? I looked in my rearview mirror in time to see them do the same thing to the car behind me. They brought back a slew of memories from my family vaca tion days. I admire my sister for what she did. I admire her even more because I am not sure I would have done the same. If my wife and I could not have conceived a child, I might have tried something other than adoption. I might have re sorted to a surrogate mother. I can understand the urge to have what is called “your own” child. I have one of my own, and one of our plea sures is to talk about his ancestry — the Keons of Poland, the Fitzgeralds of Ire land. It is even a greater pleasure to see some of my wife and some of me in our son — and also, sometimes, to see my fa ther’s smile on my son’s face. Anyone who does not understand that is discon nected from humanity. But the former family-court judge did raise the issue of ownership, what might be called procreative capitalism. Some people want a child that is theirs, that they “own.” They seek a clone and want to treat the child as an extension of themselves — a statement of who they are. In this sense, children become a consumer good, like cars. They an nounce status. For some people, the perfect child is one who behaves the way they would like, attends the “right” school and then has a career that com plements those of the parents. These are the universal experiences of parenting. The people I know who have adopted children love them no less because they are not “their own.” In some ways, maybe, they love them more. Whatever the case, they love them. God, how they love those kids. When we moved to Texas from Illi nois, I was four, my sister, Andrea, was two and my youngest sister, Lisa, was just a baby. Six months after we arrived in Texas, we took our First family vaca tion. We went to Padre Island. I don’t know how my parents did it — 10 hours from Dallas to Padre in a station wagon with a pesky preschooler, a whining tod dler and a screaming infant — some va cation. But from that year on, nothing could stop the Vogrin family from tak ing to the road and burning rubber all over the southern United States. When she was all out of prizes, C onti would have to devise some other*; entertain us. We played the licensed game, where the one who sees the: out-of-state license plates wins' played build-a-word, where theone; makes the most small words outofi large word in five minutes wins used to bring coloring books withunj lethic til the time the jumbo box of Cravi “It the one with 72 crayons and a sharpt: |P res > in the back, melted all over thebacU |J LK of the green station wagon. Needle say, no coloring books appeared^ car from that day on, and mysisterst I had a hard time sitting down forai hours following my father’s discoveni the mess. Tic-tac-toe, hangman i connect the dots also were popular* us. And so it is with the realization that the blessed should hesitate to lecture the deprived that I nevertheless wonder about the practice of surrogate moth erhood. It raises many disturbing ques tions. What happens — as in New Jersey — when the surrogate mother refuses to surrender the child? Which parent de serves custody when the claims are bi ologically equal? If the tug of war is pub- All of this is understandable, al though not necessarily admirable. We all know people who see their own status on the line if their child is not admitted to a certain school. We all know the Little League father who doesn’t recog nize that it is his child — not him — who’s up at the plate. We all know the parent who wants a child to “marry well” — an ugly phrase that has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with status and wealth. I go back and forth on the issue of surrogate mothers. I empathize with people who seek children in this man ner. They want what I already have. But if the insemination of a stranger was achieved in the usual way, we would be a lot quicker to say what we think — and maybe disapprove. It hardly helps mat ters that money also changes, with the well-off paying the less-well-off to have a baby. Adoption limits those possibilities. For the parents, it means going outside their own gene pool into terra incog- But the world is awash with unwanted babies. They are mostly black, brown or yellow and to some people that makes a diference. This can be a difficult route, but the outcome is sweet: a child. A child as good or bad as any other — as unique as a snowflake and, in a hug, no different at all. This is how the sweet and delightful Lillian came into my life. She is the lesson my sister taught me. My parents took us to Padre Island every year for the next 14 years. And that wasn’t the only place they took us; it was just the regular trip. We went to all the great Meccas of family tourism — Disney World, the Grand Canyon, and Carlsbad Caverns, to name just a few. We saw mountains and oceans and prai ries and deserts and fields and forests and swamps and lakes and rivers and mesas and hills and every other geo graphic formation you can imagine. I can’t begin to calculate how many hun dreds of hours of road time my family amassed during our vacation years. But during those hours on the road I know my sisters and I put our parents through more grief, aggravation and to tal hell than any human being deserves. We soon tired of mental, sitf games like auto bingo and tic-t# and turned to more physical entei* ment. One of our favorite games* Feet Fight. We’d crawl into the ‘4 back” (the area of a station wagost yond the back seat) and kick each# in the feet and legs as hard aswecoi We played Play Fight, the samep: those kids I saw on 1-35 were plan) The “way-back” also was a good plait' play Statues. In Statues, you had to! sume a silly-looking pose andstaycoi pletely still until five cars passed. M we tired of Statues, we’d makeiS faces at the people in other cars." never tired of making the univeii “Honk Your Horn” sign at ever)!, wheeler we passed. Copyright 1986, Washington Post Writers Group My mother had the job of creating ways to entertain three girls, aged two years apart, with attention spans of 45 seconds or less. Her first solution was When we ran out of things to do8 games to play, we’d get cranky. We'di cuse each other of taking up moreih the allotted third of the car andt would inevitably lead to real 1$ We’d be hitting and punching when! dad, with his eyes still on the $ would reach over the seat and starts^ ping anyone within arm’s length * learned to avoid this by using ourj 1 lows as shields, and in the end wed' end up laughing and making facet him behind his back. He’d always* 1 that in the rearview mirror and* those immortal words every child# trip hates to hear. Mail Call Open mind EDITOR: I would like to thank Melanie Shouse for her letter in the March 11 Mail Call. It is quite refreshing to find that there is at least one student on this campus whose mind has not been sealed shut with concrete. Her attitude of tolerance is one that should be adopted by everyone. We live in a world with more than five billion people — each one unique and very different from the next. We cannot hope to coexist if we cannot even accept the diversity of the human race. It may take some time, and certainly much effort, but I believe that if we make the attempt to tolerate all those people who “irritate” us, this tiny planet will be a much more pleasant place. Come on, Ags! Give it a try. Instead of complaining about things that you cannot possibly change, learn to accept them as just another facet of our existence —just as I try to tolerate those who don’t accept me for what I am. Dave Martin Vice President, Gay Student Services A&M's OK by them EDITOR: Our son is a freshman at A&M, and during the past months I have contacted the financial aid office, the Registrar’s office and the Department of Agriculture several times. I have spoken to both male and female employees and/or employee/students, and have been very impressed and GRATEFUL that all my calls or letters have been hassle-free and have provided me with the information I have needed. In this day and age, this is unusual, unfortunately. Persons I have related this to are always amazed and impressed. We are very proud our son is a Texas Aggie! Your institution of higher learning is to be commended. Mr. and Mrs. Curtis H. Urban Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit letters for style and length, but will make every effort to maintain the author’s intent. Each letter must be signed and must include the classification, address and telephone number of the writer. “Am I going to have to pull this* over?” ‘No, Dad, we’ll be good, we protui* “I mean it girls, one more time at* am pulling this car over.” He never pulled over. By the time this happened, we^ all ready to read, sleep or lookout 1 * window, and my parents nerves left alone f or an hour or two. But"* get bored gain and the whole profl would start all over again. My par# deserve a special award for takingu* many places. I think that when 11# kids I’ll let the neighbors take theff family vacations. Paula Vogrin is a senior journal major and a columnist for The Bat*