a6 OPINION Page 4 Friday, April 15, 1983 Thne Mi~chigan Daily Funseeking in 'Pollution land' By Dick West WASHINGTON - It's a ,miserable disaster indeed that doesn't blow, shake, rattle, or roll somebody some good. When the eruptions first started, Mount St. Helens may have seemed an unmitigated calamity. But that was before the federal government designated the catastrophe as a National Volcanic Area, and souvenir dealers moved in. NOW, WITH another vacation season getting under way, it behooves both governmental agencies and private in- vestors to provide more cataclysmic at- tractions. Tourists are a hardy lot. All they need is a little encouragement and even debacles can become Grand Canyons. Thus far, to cite one distressing omission, hardly anything has been done to upgrade the sightseeing poten- tial of Times Beach, Mo., and other communities contaminated by toxic material.. YET environmental adulteration would be an almost ideal leitmotif for a theme park. I am even willing to suggest a name: "Waste World." Here's the drill: The promoters of "Waste World" buy up tracts of land that have been con- demned due to spraying, leakage, spillage or some other inadvertent method of spreading poison. Each piece of property is then developed to carry out part of the "Waste World" theme. I VISUALIZE as a typical unit an amusement park called "Pollutionland." It is built around a towering, Alpine-like structure-Mount Dumpmore-that is composed of barrels and steel drums containing toxic wastes. Fun-seekers willing to stand in line are rewarded by a roller-coaster ride over and through Mount Dumpmore, where they can see the containers rusting and disintegrating, their con- tents oozing into a nearby creek. After that, board an elevated monorail for a trip across the creek to a titles tourists to watch panic-stricken residents being evacuated to tem- porary shelters in churches and public schools. Much of the appeal comes from a requirement that all park visitors wear decontamination suits and headgear, complete with individual oxygen ap- paratus and Geiger counters. Most tourists, I'm sure, would love dressing up like that, particularly the younger members of a vacationing family. It would provide an element of adventure you just don't get climbing the Statue of Liberty, traipsing through the U.S. Capitol or driving through a giant redwood. Upon leaving "Waste World," visitors would passtthrough a detoxification chamber, something like a car wash, in which they would be scrubbed and brushed clean of any con- taminants. What fun! Add a trace of acid rain falling on the food pavilion and, migawd, how the money pours in. West wrote this article for UPI. 6 0 man-made island where a faulty nuclear reactor is regularly venting radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Scouting out sites for "Pollutionland." THE FINAL thrill might be a ride on a simulated railroad that ends with a tank car jumping the track and defiling the surrounding area with a deadly chemical. The single admission ticket also en- 6 - I Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Sinclair N Vol. XCIII, No. 155 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board Base missiles O NE NEED not read between the lines to see that the report issued by President Reagan's Commission on Strategic Forces, which calls for the deployment of 100 MX missiles, is basically the same costly and dangerous plan that Reagan tried un- successfully to push through Congress last December. Gone from the new proposal is Reagan's plan for closely spaced, or densepack, basing for the MX, but the fruitless search for a secure basing mode has yet to be completed. Under the commission's proposal the MX would be housed in existing but reinforced Minuteman 3 silos. This plan was rejected by the Senate in 1981 largely because the silos . could be knocked out by Soviet warheads. It would seem foolish, therefore, to replace one vulnerable missile-basing system with another, particularly at a "'WE M1GHT NOT HAVE cost of $14.6 billion just for building the missiles over the 1984-1989 period. More importantly, though, the deployment of the MX will not serve as incentive for the Soviets to negotiate arms control, as President Reagan believes, but will only cause them to build their own comparable missile system. Which, in the end, only pushes our countries closer to nuclear war. The "window of vulnerability" that Reagan likes to refer to is a myth. Even in the highly unlikely event of a Soviet first strike-one that would knock out all our land based missiles-the U.S. would still have more than enough nuclear warheads based in submarines and bombers to deliver a "sufficient" retaliatory strike. Michigan Senator Carl Levin responded to the Commission's proposal by calling it a "dangerous, expensive fraud." We couldn't agree more. PIKEP% TUE~$TTM II tl ,,r, i I 1. '~.g. r'% OF COVRSE, "IOU LL MVEJ~' Ta .~N UP A t3iT AJtPER... - .e i J / '~--- s --.r~ 0 6 Tciz n u1 4A+' l lt ( TO TRY. ELLINAiIT .-om i." 0 ,,/.,C, . t, ' , f ; T C, T1'1."w. r. T ' 7 l-~ v 4r '!.k"r! f 'fy, . t t .}". !r ' i n i ".," n"A LETTERS TO THE DAILY: Listen to the prophets of To the Daily: Watching the Oscars Monday night, I listened to Sir Richard Attenborough's acceptance speech for Best Picture not just with an attentive ear, but also with saddening hope. Atten- borough spoke of, Gandhi and his teachings with an emotional message to mankind. He com- pared Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. another adherent to the philosophy of peaceful resistance. He also mentioned Lech Walesa, who recently proclaimed that he, too, has released his mind from the chains of the idea that we must fight might with might, and that peaceful resistance offers the only hope for survival. Few college students need to be persuaded that we are facing either an imminent or near- future nuclear catastrophe caused by the newly-fueled arms race. Most of us realize that we are burying warheads and missiles for some real purpose. The question is whether not this strength in the ground and in submarines beneath the sea will ensure peace through detente, or invite intercontinental, button- pushing war, with an orange- flamed Armageddon its hopeless result. that we speak loudly and carry a big stick in dealing with the Soviet Union. This is the philosophy of fighting fire with fire. We incredulously ask how we can idly sit by while the Soviets spend billions on the weapons with which they hope to conquer us. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., felt there was an alter- native: our strength shall be in peace and meekness, not power. The West Germans believe in a similar, however unattractive alternative. In a major poll, an overwhelming majority of West Germans put it simply in their cry for survival: Better Red than Dead. It's difficult for us, who have been raised to believe in the ethic of fighting to the finish, to imagine accepting such a dishonorable, defeatest alter- native. But which would our unborn victims of a nuclear holocaust prefer? Never to breathe the gift of air and life? Or to see their world blackened and destroyed from the result of, as Sir Atten- borough put it, "blowing our heads off?" Where does true honor the competitive spirit drawn for- th from the denths of man's evil selves to open our ears and listen to the prophets of peace. There is a prophet asleep in each of us. And we must somehow find the strength to set them free with the peace hope that man will conquer his own insane urges to realize a stable, however self-deprecating, lasting peace. - Randy Watson April 12 0 Petitions and the real world To the Daily: Now that Brian Sher has ap- parently finished his crusade for "responsibility" in The Michigan Daily, perhaps the Daily could defer to him once a week in column form. His mindless, sor- did picture of the way the world operates would make for en- joyable, albeit frightful, reading. Never, in five years on this campus, have I been so bewildered by the insanity with which a student leader plots his course to fame. Sher honestly believes one can challenge the First Amendment by petition. The Daily went far beyond its call of duty in allowing Sher and his clean-up-the-Daily cronies to air their laundry. Sher says the "writing has improved in recent weeks" in this newspaper. Sher is living outside the real world. To cure the Daily's "woes," his options included organizing a boycott of the paper, bombarding it with a barrage of comment" to reporters. Sororities live in the "good news" world of pledge formals, serenades, and philanthropic projects. God save us if the near- by student newspaper had the gall to examine a "controver- sial" issue. And then there is the blithering bumbling of Scott Schnell, who claims the Daily's exploration of the "Jap" issue would leave a naive observer "prejudiced" against Jews. He obviously ignored the remarks of Margo Pernick and others in the story that added clarity and counter- weighted the remarks made by unnamed sources. He also ignored the one aspect of the story that has gone unnoticed all along-the gist of the story was Jewish women talking about Jewish women. Surely, Schnell cannot 'seriously profer the notion that "Jap" as a social definition is generally foreign to more than a handful of us. Saying that "Japs"