OPINION rriday, February 13, 1981 The Michigan Daily Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Attempting to deal with pain Vol. XCI, No. 115 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board Hwte West was lost The problems began two months ago. I was nestled in the tomblike 9 a.m. atmosphere of my living room when the doorbell rang. The momentarily shattering sonic effect caused me to jerk abruptly upright and out of my chair. I immediately felt a stab of pain shooting from the base of my spine down both my legs. The sensation was like nothing I had ex- perienced before in my life. Clearly, I had knocked something exceedingly out of whack in my anatomy, and the sheer surprise of it was traumatic: After a lifetime of unrelen- ting good health which had included not a single serious illness or injury, I suddenly found myself limping, aching, and quite at a SECRETARY OF THE Interior James Watt has not taken long to substantiate the fears of environmen- talists who fiercely opposed his nomination last month. Watt is now pushing to open up more than one million acres of environmentally sen- sitive California coastal waters for oil and gas exploration. Watt has set into motion a plan that would lift environmental restrictions that protect a large strip of Pacific coastal waters from economic ex- ploitation. Such a move would disrupt, perhaps irrepairably, the delicate ecology of the area. Unfortunately, this may be mterely the first of a number of environmentally disastrous moves on the part of the new Interior Depar- tment, under the leadership of Watt. Watt has made clear his shallow commitment to environmental preser- vation through a life's work against government protection of public lands. In his capacity as chief legal officer for the Mountain States Legal Foun- dation, a conservative, self- proclaimed "public interest" law firm, Watt has served as a point man in the fight for economic protection of the en- vironment. Furthermore, Watt has been a vocal advocate of the "Sagebrush rebellion," a movement of Western anti-environ- mentalists to take vast public lands out of federal government ownership and turn them over to the individual states, which would in turn open them up for development. It is the difficult job of the secretary of the interior to balance carefully the need for responsible energy develop- ment with the need for preservation of America's limited lands and resour- ces. For most administrators, this task would be one of conflicting but mutually valid cross-purposes. Not so for Watt. For him, this secretariat has only one clear purpose-to open up protected public lands for private development and exploitation. Watt has busily set about fulfilling this distorted purpose in his first mon- th in office. Sadly, it appears he may succeed in this effort. His move to lift safeguards on the Pacific coastal waters and free the path for unrestricted private develop- ment is only the beginning. He has already delayed implementation of more than 20 regu.ations and eliminated an order to require labeling of hazardous chemicals, all products of the Carter administration. With a man for whomh the environ- ment is a secondary consideration to immediate energy production at the helm of the very department designated to balance those interests, there is a bleak future for the environ- ment. Those persons with a reasonable ap- proach to responsible energy development without disregard for en- vironmental consequences must rally in opposition to Watt. There is still time to save the environment from the department that used to be trusted with its protection. Coming BApart By Christopher Potter and where to tread gingerly through formerly free-flung routines. You're hit with the sud- den shock that you're not immortal after all, that your body is a perilously fragile mechanism subject to the most arbitrary whims of nature and chance. If one is inor- dinately lucky, physical calamity may keep its distance; if one is among the less fortunate majority, one learns to live with one's fate. Specifically, one learns about pain. If poetry liberates, pain incarcerates. It is the great equalizer, the universal leveler of us all - George Washington's hemorrhoids hurt every bit as much as my grandfather's did. If constant, pain can reduce every other human emotion to a hazy nightmare of distortion. There is nothing enobling about it in the haughty, religious sense of bearing one's bur- den. PAIN IS A wretched little corrupter, providing no insight, only desperation. It elicits a numbing, dimming effect which dulls creative thought, causing the brain to ob- sessively focus on the pain and only the pain, to bargain or plead with it, to wage an'en- dless, three-in-the-morning duel against it while the rest of the world fades away. I'm not yet used to waging such a war. My vocal complaints over my nouveau aches and twinges have lately driven my friends up a wall. It only makes me wonder in amazement how those a hundred times worse off than me learn to tolerate their grim destinies - the terminaltpatient whose universe is a daily exercise in torture; the quadraplegic whose body remains wracked with pain even though he can no longer move it; the arthritic whose own joints and limbs turned deadly, sadistic enemies. Victims who are denied even the hope of a future without suffering, who know full well that the months and years to come will be even worse. I sit and wonder what compels these people, what it is they manage to dredge out of the hidden recesses of their emotions to per- severe as their days wind slowly, grindingly down. It has to be more than mere courage courage without hope becomes contradictory, nihilistic. In some, such tenacity may eminate out of a reverence of life, no matter how hideously it has mutated. Traditional " religious values and fears ("You're going to Hell is you commit suicide) surely play a prominent part as well. YET I SUSPECT what dominates is the simple human instinct to survive at all costs, no matter how dubious one's future. It's an in- stinct ingrained deep in our collective con- sciousness, often transcending both intellect and emotion. Only the truly suicidal among us are willing to capriciously dangle life like a thread; the rest of us cling to it with demonic tenacity, regardless of the agonies attendant. To be is to continue. In the current film Ressurection, the lead character describes her brief experience in a mystic "afterworld" following a near-fatal auto accident. Among other revelations, she joyously confides that "you don't feel your body" once you've entered this strange paradise. I wonder whether such a universe would be liberating or contracting - surely human sensation is as capable of producing ecstacy* as it is torment. Is existence (or perhaps non- existence) as an amorphous presence preferable to tangible physicality? We'll never know until we get there. In the meantime, we will continue to get outof our respective beds in the morning, even though' every muscle, joint, and nerve in our bodies may cry out against it. Our humanity deman-, ds we do no less. loss of how to cope with this abrupt and agonizing new world. I SUBSEQUENTLY obtained diagnoses from practitioners of both the medical and chiropractic schools of healing, who variously defined my malady as muscle strain, muscle tear, and general spinal discombobulation. I then began treatment which will hopefully prove restorative in the long run, yet clearly will not trigger any rapid-fire recovery. My back continues to bedevil me, maliciously pricking its invisible needles into my tailbone straight up through my neck into the base of my skull. It is not conducive to a bustling existence. Though you've been used to running, it now hurts to walk, so you change your habits. You must relearn your patterns in the world, when Christopher Potter is a Daily staff writer. His column appears every Friday. LETTERS TO THE DAILY: Daily ignores MSA strongpoints Beware! Friday, the 13th L OCK THE DOORS. Close the blinds. Huddle in the corner. Trust no strangers-it's Friday the 13th. Unlike other omens, Friday the 13th is unavoidable. You can walk away from a black cat; you don't have to walk under a ladder; and you can be extra careful when you handle a mirror. But no matter what you do, you can't excape this day. Don't scoff. Something bad's going to happen and there will be nothing to blame except Friday the 13th. Wait until you slip on the sidewalk walking to class. It doesn't matter that the sidewalks are covered with ice and you slipped and fell every other day. Today you fell because it's Friday the 13th. When you fail a test today, you'll know that it's not because you haven't opened a book all term. It's Friday the 13th. And when your car doesn't start? It's not because it's so cold outside. It's because the demonic forces behind Friday the 13th are hard at work. Youralarm didn't go off today? It's not because you forgot to set it last night. Those Friday the 13th devils were working early today. In fact, every little thing that goes wrong today you can blame on Friday the 13th. Who cares that its only superstition? Who cares that it's not logical at all? Who cares that nobody's going to believe you?1 It's as good an excuse as any. To the Daily: Your criticisms against the Michigan Student Assembly's endorsement of the February 9 Diag Rally on budget cuts, tuition hikes, and layoffs (Daily, Feb. 11) were extremely irresponsible (even by the Daily's standards). You voiced a strong disapproval of our involvement in the rally, clearly without even having the foggiest notion of what MSA's position is on these issues. The Assembly's views were clearly articulated at the Rally by Legislative Relations coor- dinator Jon Feiger. Unfor- tunately, your Cub Scout reporter ter attributed to Feiger, and hen- ce MSA, the comments of Graduate Employees Organization member Barney Pace. If Mark Gindin had been listening, he would have heard something like this: The Michigan Student Assem- bly acknowledges that budget cut backs are a necessity for the University. However, we have not yet accepted (as you prematurely have) the ad- ministration's immovable endor- sement of the smaller and better strategy of selective discon- tinuance. We believe that the im- plications of "smaller but better" have been insufficiently discussed and are not completely understood. Nonetheless, we feel that there must be real student input into budget cut decisions at every level of the decision- making process. As for your disapproval of the Assembly's endorsement of the event, you should understand that M§A supported the effort Bailey can 't To the Daily: Last week, I learned about the sudden and tragic death of Near Eastern Studies Prof. John Bailey. Since Prof. Bailey taught ad- vanced courses in one of the smaller departments, many members of the University com- munity are probably unaware of this man's life and work. But if we value academic excellence and basic human compassion, then we all owe a debt to Jack Bailey and I think it is important for my neighbors to know something about him. From my conversations with Prof. Bailey and his friends. I primarily because of its strong demand for meaningful student involvement in all budget cut decisions. I believe our position to be an appropriate one, especially given the insignificant role that students currently' have in these issues. I am irritated most by the fact that up until the Feb. 11 editorial, you have totally ignored MSA's organizing efforts on the budget cuts issue. Over the past six weeks, MSA members have been gathering information pertaining budget cuts, independently as well as in cooperation with student groups and have been searching for the most effective student role in the budget cutting process. Already we have expressed our concerns and objections to various budget cuts and their un- derlying intent, by directly con- fronting key administrators with our views as well as by becoming involved with several of the non- academic budget review commit- tees. Yet the Daily has made no effort to cover these actions. On several occasions I have had to literally beg the Daily MSA reporter Beth Allen just to attend our weekly 2-3 hour budget cuts task force meetings. On at least one occasion Allen attended the meeting, yet failed to write about it. As long as you neglect our efforts, students will continue to believe that their interests are being ill served by their elected representatives. Because the issues are com- plex, and the amount of infor- mation to be collected immense, students need time to truly un- be forgotten proach to academics was pleasingly unique; he was a per- fectionist without the common flaw of believing himself capable of perfection. On a personal level, Jack Bailey proved himself to be a remarkably caring individual. Although often stereotypically absent-minded about trivial mat- ters, Prof. Bailey took an abiding interest in the pains and triumphs of those around him. All his friends knew him to be a deeply principled man whose convic- tions were not confined to the classroom. In all aspects of his life, Jack Bailey actively sought to annly his faith to combat the derstand the total budget picture. While MSA is engaged in this task, we nevertheless will con- tinue to demand a direct student role in the ongoing budget cut proceedings. If you really- believe, as you'purpot in your criticism, that student voices should be heard, why don't you focus some attention on the various attempts by some ad- ministrators to exclude student views from the budget cut process. Thus far, Acting Dean John Knott has refused to come forth with a plan for student opinions to be heard in the geography depar- tment review. The Regent's guidelines on the procedures for academic program discon- tinuance clearly state "that there will be maximum opportunity for early and meaningful con- sultation with faculty and studen- ts., Dean Knott, however, has taken the position that the geography review committee has the freedom "to decide however they wish" to solicit student in- put. This suggests to me that with the dean's tacit approval, the review committee potentially could decide to exclude virtually all student views on the geography discontinuance issue. Since you have demanded that "students take a responsible part in the decision-making process", why not accordingly demand that opportunities be provided for students to become' involved in a real and direct way in these proceedings? I suggest, since you have' criticized so severely the Assem- bly's efforts, that you now have a responsibility to report adequately on the affirmative ef-' forts of MSA and other student groups on the budget cut issue.,'if you take the time to cover student efforts in this regard, I am cer tain that you will be pleasantly surprised by the number and' diversity of actions now under-' way. -Marc Breakstone President, Michigan Student Assembly February 12 A 0 U' doesn 't meet bargain HI5 MAY HOTBE AS ZIMPLE A5 IT LIOOK W To the Daily: This letter is a reminder to University officials of their commitment to their students. Tuition payment signifies a commitment on the part, of student and University. A com- mitment implies fulfillment. So far, students have fulfilled their obligations but are increasingly doubtful of the responsibility of their administrators. President Shapiro, if you would like a "smaller, but better University," then admitting the second largest freshman class EVER is not a very appropriate first step, especially when one already has plans to cut academic programs. Students are paying for a quality education but are having difficulty getting the classes they want. Class size ,is increasingly becoming a problem. In view of the further imbalance that more students and increased cutbacks creates, how do you intend to fulfill your half of our commit- ment? --Diane Dulken February 10 S 0 6 '13 .5 Perry and the Hash Bash To the Daily: , Thanks for attempting to do to the Hash Bash (Daily, Feb. 8) what state Rep. Perry Bullard hasn't had either the courage or smarts to try since he was an early supporter of that shameful charade. Of course, you really can't fault Bullard for not lifting a finger af- ter the Bash served his im- mediate purpose; in Perry's political infancy his pitches were targeted at the student vote. Alas for Perry, the students didn't So Perry's sights turned to a group that votes consistantly in every election in any weather on any issue: the retirees. Today is seems that every other scheme Perry proposes has the term "senior citizens" worked into tle text someplace. Probably that act will someday be seen for what it really is - personal political expedience and nothing else. Meanwhile, 'no thanks to Bullard for making any effort whatsoever to clean up the garbage he left behind on the -w , j; AM