Page 2/The Battalion/Tuesday, October 13, 1987
The Battalion
(USPS 045 360)
Member of
Texas Press Association
Southwest Journalism Conference
The Battalion Editorial Board
Sondra Pickard, Editor
John Jarvis, Managing Editor
Sue Krenek, Opinion Page Editor
Rodney Rather, City Editor
Robbyn Lister, News Editor
Loyd Brumfield, Sports Editor
Tracy Staton, 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 of Journalism.
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.
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POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Battalion, 216
Reed McDonald, Texas A&M University, College Station TX
77843-4111.
Teaching rights
The right of public school students to publish without
censorship has long been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Many school officials, however, are too quick to trade constitu
tional principles for political expediency.
Such is the case with the Hazelwood School District, near St.
Louis, Mo. The Supreme Court today will hear arguments in a
case stemming from the district’s attempt to censor a student
newspaper’s stories about teen-age pregnancy and the effects of
divorce on children.
Hazelwood is only the latest in a long string of districts that
have attempted to prevent publication of stories they fear will
draw fire from parents and the community. Courts from Cali
fornia to Maine repeatedly have ruled that public school offi
cials, as government employees, violate the First Amendment
when they censor the student press.
The decision to censor potentially controversial stories may
be easy in the short run. But by doing so, public school officials
violate the principles the public school system is designed to
teach. In Tinker v. Des Moines, the landmark students’ rights
case, the Court said students do not leave their rights behind
when they enter the school. Unfortunately, many school officials
seem to be leaving their courage at the door.
Searching for the texture
that makes life worthwhile
College is where
it happens. It is a ____________
piaee of j erry
dangerous Do«;iek
struggle on which
the course and
quality of the rest
of our lives may be
determined. This struggle is made all
the more dangerous because so few
people tell us just how critical it is. I’m
not talking about the struggle to
maintain a good GPR and get a good
job. I’m talking about the struggle to
navigate the dark but enormous sea of
possibilities in the curriculum while
resisting the seductive voices of the
sirens in each discipline trying to
convince us to abandon all else for their
sake.
We are surrounded by people,
students and professors alike, who have
found their avenue and abandoned the
neighborhood. They are our old high-
school buddies who haven’t had
anything new to say in years. At our age,
it’s far too early to decide we know
enough and dig in. So the struggle is to
keep from drying up, to not only keep
learning things but to figure out how to
find new things to learn. And college is
where it happens.
Even if we don’t buy the idea that one
or the other thing is all we need to
know, we still feel the pressure to know
it by test time. The struggle isn’t over —
it just shifts locales. Our fear for the
future can drive us at a hectic pace, and
this threatens to dry us up in another
way. Even if we manage to keep in touch
with the possibilities in the curriculum,
we can lose touch with what’s going on
right around us. And in our zeal to give
our lives some sort of security, we can
cut ourselves off from the texture that
makes life worth living.
It’s this second type of struggle that is
giving me trouble. The best remedy 1
have found so far to a world being
narrowed by approaching tests and
paper deadlines is travel. Not just any
road trip will do, either. It needs to be to
someplace we’ve never been before, if
possible where people speak another
language. I know that may seem to be
asking a lot, but I didn’t write the rules.
Anyway, camping trips aren’t all that
hard, and Mexico isn’t all that far away.
I remember my drive back into
College Station at the beginning of this
semester. The sun was setting on a wet
road as I drove west on Highway 105
toward Navasota. The horizon was
bright with a burning orange sunset that
was in motion because the clouds were
blowing through it so swiftly. The
orange light on the blue-gray rain
clouds had turned the sky purple. And
the grass hills rolling on either side of
me were an eerie gray in the dark light.
The whole scene was so beautiful as 1
sped along the wet road, made to look
like a strip of bright orange glass by the
setting sun, that 1 no longer felt I was
driving. I was being carried away.
Then as I came around a long, slow
curve, the sun was momentarily blocked
by the Highway 6 bridge over Highway
105. For a moment, I almost continued
on Highway 105, pursuing the sunset.
But habit and my preconceived
destination took over, and I turned
north on Highway 6.
The sun was still setting to my left,
and the sky was still purple. But it wasn’t
the same. The closer to College Station I
got, the more I began to think about all
the things I needed to do. I had to find a
place to live. I had to register for classes.
Suddenly I realized what was
happening. My windows had fogged up.
My attention had left the landscape
around me and turned inward.
I seriously considered turning
around. I wasn’t ready yet for my
summer to end. I wasn’t ready for my
world to dry up again. But I convinced
myself it would be OK for just one
semester. I decided to turn it into an
experiment. I would see if I could use
the momentum I had built up over the
summer to reacquaint myself with all the
things around here I’d come to take for
granted. That was more than a month
ago, and I have an idea now of how it is
going. I think I’m failing.
The first couple of weeks went well. I
found myself living alternately in two
worlds. One was a hodge-podge of the
new relations I had made to the stuff
around me. It was full of things like
sunsets, train sounds, beautiful women,
casual conversations and thinking about
what other people were thinking. The
other world, founded on cynicism, was
one of fogged windows and tunnel
vision. It was full of things like making
sure I graduate, job worries, casual
conversations, beautiful women and
political beliefs.
Occasionally my cynical eye would
wander through my hodge-podge
world, laying it to waste with ridicule
and tension. But like a quiet phoenix,
the hodge-podge world would build up
again out of new things and thoughts.
This is something I’m glad to see; the
beauty doesn’t confront cynicism but
endures it.
Lately, however, my hodge-podge
world is slower and slower to re-form.
More and more, I Find I am badgering
myself into inattentiveness for the sake
of one project or another. This column
was such a project.
What I’m looking for is a way to turn
the tide, to put my cynicism on a leash
and maybe to find better grounding for
my political beliefs. I’m open to
suggestions.
Jerry Rosiek is a senior physics and
philosophy major and a regularly
appearing guest columnist foi The
Battalion.
Opinion
Restitution, capital punishment
provide key to judicial reforms
When a man is
convicted of
breaking the law
in our country, the
sentence imposed
upon him takes
him from freedom
and shuts him up
in a prison with
others like
himself. He lazily
rots in this
cesspool of
Brian
Frederick
humanity until the time deemed
necessary for him to atone for his
offense has expired.
Our society deems that he has
received his due reward, that the time
he spent imprisoned pays for his crime.
Man, however, was intended to live in
freedom, fully exercising his faculties to
choose how to live and bear the
responsibility for his choices. To place
him in a cell and force him to live a
circumscribed existence in which he
exercises no responsibility and has no
freedom of action is to depreciate his
humanity.
Furthermore, prison does nothing to
heal the wounds he has caused to
others. A punishment that condemns a
man to a mere existence while failing to
assuage the hurts of his victims is an
unmitigated cruelty: to the criminal, to
the victims, and to society.
Even so, imprisonment has been used
from antiquity as punishment for
criminals. But even though prisons
enjoy the sanction of centuries, it is
immoral to use them for any more than
temporary detention while suspects are
awaiting trial.
Why do we put thieves in prison to
fester and learn new methods of
thievery while leaving their victims
bereft of their stolen property? This
benefits no one, and the prisoners are
an added burden to taxpayers who must
pay for their maintenance.
In crimes against property, it would
be much more effective to compel the
convicted thief to make restitution to his
victims. After all, he chose to break the
law by damaging the property of
another and thus incurred an obligation
to restore it, regardless of any attendant
hardship to himself. Unless justice
forces him to compensate his victim, it is
not truejustice.
For those convicted of such crimes as
murder, rape, and kidnapping, there is
another solution: capital punishment, a
penalty far more humane than living
out one’s life in a cage.
Some will object that capital
punishment does not deter crime, but it
can hardly do so when it is but
sporadically applied. For it to be
effective, it must be prescribed by law
when a person is convicted of certain
crimes. For example, if someone is
convicted of first degree murder, he
must be executed: thejudge should
have no choice in the matter.
Only when people know ahead of
time what the law is and what the
consequences of breaking it will be can
that law be effective in deterring crime.
If someone knows he assuredly will (fej
if convicted of murder, that knowled|:
will deter him. Capital punishmemin
our country presently is impotent,foi
only a very few of those convictedof
capital crimes are ever executed.
As reason alone distinguishesusfro[
animals, we must use reason when
dealing with our fellows if wearetobt
truly human. When a man eschewstfe|
use of reason to solve a problem and
instead choses violence, he has
descended into the animal realm. He
has demonstrated that he understands I
only violence, and he must be dealt kfl
accordingly. The only moral thingtoi
is to destroy him as one destroys arc:: I
dog, for he is a threat to other men.
Our present criminal justicesysteEij
immoral, a travesty of justice whi
serves only to exacerbate crime. Putti;|
criminals in prison as punishmentisiil
sweeping dirt under the carpet. It
serves only to hide the problem,whidi I
then festers.
We cannot continue to rely on
prisons to deal with crime. TheydonttI
work, and they dehumanize their
inmates. Only penalties thatforcemel
to face the consequences of their actrJ
will restrain those who for too lot
preyed upon the lives and propertvo: [
law-abiding Americans. RestitutionaEi
capital punishment, consistently
applied, can accomplish what our
prisons have not and cannot.
Brian Frederick is a senior histon ixl
Russian major and a columnistkTsj
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Let the music play
EDITOR:
At last, a part of this University in dire need of help is
receiving attention. The announcement Oct. 2 on the
front page of The Battalion concerning the appointment
of a music coordinator was a long-awaited and welcome
step in the right direction.
Many students who can play an instrument and have
expressed a desire to continue playing past high school
have arrived on campus and ended up lost as to where to
turn. While the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band is world
renowned, the Corps and marching is not for everyone.
There is a definite lack of opportunity for the rest of us.
However, there is one well-organized group suffering
only from low student awareness of its existence. The 80-
member University Symphonic Band was formed in 1975
by Col. Joe T. Haney. It is a student organization
currently under the direction of Bill Dean, former
associate director of the Aggie Band. The Symphonic
Band plays a wide variety of music with about two concerts
per semester. The fall concert, sponsored by the Bryan
Rotary Club, is scheduled for Nov. 19 in Rudder
Auditorium. Everyone is invited to attend.
Support the University Symphonic Band and the
development of a well-deserved music program at this
“world-class” University.
David Hess
public relations officer, University Symphonic Band
Don't abandon 'grode' stories
EDITOR:
I like Midnight Yell Practice. The sexually oriented
stories told by the yell leaders have their roots in A&M’s
all-male past. These stories should remain a traditiond-
objective of the stories is to unite the Aggie Twelfth Mat
against our opponents. I am sure the stories satisfy that
objective.
Chris Warhurst
accompanied by 61 signatures
Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editorial
serves the right to edit letters for style and length, hut will make ever) iff
maintain the author’s intent. Each letter must be signed and must include
sification, address and telephone number of the writer.
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