0 OPINION Page 4 Tuesday, October 29, 1985 The Michigan Daily I Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Missing the point of protest Vol. XCVI, No. 39 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board Abortion funding rerun If at first you try, try again ... There's no sense fool about it." don 't succeed, and then quit. being a damn -W. C. Fields L EADERS OF MICHIGAN'S "pro-life" organization have been pretty damn foolish about state funded abortions these last seven years. On Wednesday, when the Michigan legislature voted not to overrule a veto by Gov. James Blanchard of a bill doing away with medicaid funded abortions, the group failed for the fifteenth time .since 1978 to do away with such funding. The group was able to pull 72 of the necessary 74 votes to override the veto, but the tally was the same last year. Although anti-abortion leaders claim they will try again this year to override the veto, there is no indication they will have any more success. The issue of medicaid funded abortions ought really to be separate from the moral questions surrounding abortion itself. While there is still a debate raging on whether abortion is murder, doing away with state funding avoids the question altogether. Instead, abortions remain a legal option for middle-class and wealthy women, but not for poor ones. While the law simultaneously maintains that it is legal for a woman to have an abortion, and that it is the state's responsibility to insure all its citizens are provided with health care, it is patently unjust to deny that health care to a particular segment of society. In addition to threatening discrimination, the repeated effor- ts to pass the bill are wasting valuable legislative time. With countless bills never being discussed in session at all, the resources involved in considering and reconsidering the medicaid funding bill could better be used to consider environmental, social, or educational concerns that presen- tly go unaddressed. But the anti-abortionists seem inclined to continue the game, and they are already making plans for a sixteenth try before the end of next year. Some, probably, are even getting ready for a seventeen- th after that. By Sandra Steingraber and Brian Burt In the 1960s, attending college protests to renounce U.S. involvement in Vietnam was nearly as commonplace as attending classes. In contrast, recent protests here on campus to renounce U.S. involvement in Central America have generated a great deal of apprehension, anger, and confusion. Judging from recent letters to the Daily and from conversations with our own students, the value of protest as a vehicle for social change is at the heart of the con- troversy. From our informal survey, objec- tions to the recent protests on campus usually take one of three forms. Many students express concern that the disruption of a protest violates the right of the speaker to free speech, as in the demon- stration during George Bush's com- memoration of the Peace Corps. It is an im- portant concern, but in this case is underlaid by a misunderstanding of the spirit in which the First Amendment was written. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech to private citizens, en- suring that this right will not be "abridged" by the laws of Congress. (Indeed, the First Amendment encourages private citizens "to petition the government for a redress of grievances.") The First Amendment was not intended to protect governments from their constituents. George Bush spoke on our campus not as a private citizen but as an official representative of our government with unlimited access to the national mass media. Therefore, in this case, the disrup- tion of the protest did not violate a private citizen's right to free speech. A second and more frequently voiced ob- jection to both the Bush demonstation and the Today show demonstration is that they were "rude." This is true. These protests would not have won any awards from Miss Manners. We are intrigued by the increasing value placed on etiquette and decorum by the younger strata of American society. And, indeed, as instructors, would certainly welcome a greater concern for civility during student-teacher interactions. Atten- tion to manners during human exchange Steingraber is a graduate student is Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Burt is a graduate student in English. protects people from our nastier instincts and is a sign that we respect the dignity of others. But there are situations in which the adage, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" contributes to - rather than prevents - human misery. All those polite Germans who said nothing while cat- tle cars carried away their Jewish coun- trymen are one example. But of course, hindsight makes all things clear. It is difficult to recognize at what point an ongoing political crisis polite responses (writing editorials) should be augmented by more disruptive objections which attract more attention (interrupting George Bush). This is the issue Carol Bly discusses in her collection of essays, Letters from the Country, in which she evaluates the role of "participation politics" and "protest politics" in effecting social change. We contend that "protest politics" are both justified and necessary for those who believe that U.S. military intervention in Central America is unconscionable. It is justified because our government spends one billion of our tax dollars to prop up repressive unpopular dictatorships which have since 1979 murdered 51,000 civilians (El Salvador), "disappeared" 35,000 peasants (Guatemala) and kept 70 percent of the population in abject hunger and poverty (Honduras). Protest politics are necessary because the U.S. government continues to send military hardware and advisors to these governments in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose U.S. military interven- tion in Central America. Protests are impolite by definition. To those of you who are miffed that the protestors' shouts drowned out Mr. Bush's words, we ask you: how polite is it for a government to refuse to listen to the wishes of its constituents? to refuse to answer to the World Court concerning its involvement in Nicaragua? to dump napalm on Salvadoran villages? The third objection we have heard is that recent protests have been irrelevant. At fir- st, this objection seems reasonable: the Today show came here to celebrate college life, not to discuss its coverage of the bom- bing in El Salavador; the vice president came here to praise the efforts-of the Peace Corps, not to speak on foreign policy. "Why," one student asked, "must the protestors politicize commemorative even- ts?" There is no one answer. The Bush protest, with its accusations of hypocrisy, pointed out to us an essential contradiction: the man who sings the praises of American volun- teers living among the impoverished and dispossessed of Central America is the same nan who channels millions of dollars into the t hands of the business elites and military forces who keep these people impoverished and dispossessed. The function of the protest was not so much to politicize an in- nocuous celebration as it was to unveil a government official's attempt to depoliticize the deeply political. In the case of the Today show demon- stration, it seems to us, lack of relevancy was part of the point. Many students con- * cluded that this protest was an em- barassed failure because it did not, after all that commotion, even appear on the program. We, however, found the disparity between the real life scene on the diag (one of chaotic protest) and the media's por- trayal of that same scene (one of blissful campus life) to drive the protestors' point home in the most horrifying way. If the camera's eye can distort reality and fulfill its own prophesies so completely on the University's diag, is it not also possible that it is not giving us the complete story of violence in El Salvador? In El Salvador, a 1985 congressional study found that 85 percent of U.S. aid for "economic development" went to the military, in contrast to Reagan Ad- ministration claims that two-thirds of U.S. aid was for development. In El Salvador, 30- 35 percent of the population is displaced and living as internal refugees, many as a result of U.S.-backed air war. These are not facts we learn from the evening news. The danger of political protest is that it can, if done habitually, replace thoughtful analysis and become self-serving, another kind of status quo. A protest is not a solution; it is only a disruption of business as usual, a call for attention, and should be employed only in situations of extreme gravity. We believe that U.S. policies in Central America have created such a situation and therefore praise the efforts of the protestors and the bold action of our student gover- nment to oppose George Bush's appearance on campus. The forests of Central America are full of bombs and shallow graves. Until our tax dollars stop subsidizing this violen- ce, we will not be quiet. And we may not be polite. Dangerous trade' Chassy SENATOR ALAN CRANSTON charged earlier this week that. China is helping five countries - Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, South Africa and Iran - build their nuclear programs. In light of that charge he asked that the U.S. not renew its nuclear exchange accord with Peking. China has denied such in- volvement with all of the five ex- cept Pakistan, but it has long traded through middlemen to states such as Taiwan so as to avoid the appearance of gover- nmental contact. As an example, it has used European middlemen to trade enriched uranium to South Africa. Cranston is right to point out that it is inexcusable to give nuclear technology to such pariah states. South Africa and Iran have fanatical leaders who are susceptible to being overthrown in revolutions of their own creation. It is unpardonable that China, a. supposedly socialist country that denounces apartheid as the epitome of capitalism, would sell the white South African minority regime enriched uranium. Long. beforetthe current crisis, the State Department speculated that South Africa might hold all of Black Africa as "nuclear hostages" in the event of revolution. China has come a long way with its reforms as the South Africa trade gives evidence. In the 1960s, China stood back and denounced the U.S.-Soviet arms race from a position of moral superiority. China pointed out that it was the Third World that shouldered the burden of the arms race and that as a developing country, it had no interest in the arms race. Indeed, both the United States and the Soviet Union threatened China with nuclear strikes. Ac- cording to Nixon's memoirs, the Soviets asked the United States for permission to lauch a nuclear "surgical strike" against China during his Administration. While China has since surren- dered its credibility and moral position on the arms race, the superpower conflict is still the cen- tral problem. It is important to remember that it was the U.S. that helped apartheid build its first nuclear power plant and that worked to implement similar technology in the Shah's Iran. Indeed, the United States' arms race with the Soviet Union over- shadows all others. It is ridiculous to expect that non-nuclear nations will stay out of the arms race while the East and West build nuclear weapons that are used to threaten the rest of the world. China is not at the root of the nuclear arms race because it can- not resell what the U.S. does not sell it. Cranston's charges properly focus the real blame on the United States. The United States must cease nuclear aid to all countries, in- cluding allies such as China. The case of China shows that there is no stopping nuclear proliferation once it is started. The more nuclear sales that occur, the more likely it is that an Idi Amin or an Ayatollah Khomenei will obtain nuclear weapons, as South Africa's floundering government might already have. i N SREDUCE THlEWEAPONS GOT A MATCH . d'N~ , , a wS r'll I I ' LIh llll 1111 11' irs I 4I&A Nl LETTERS: Daily should drop military advertising To the Daily: "Beware Another Vietnam" (Daily, Oct. 14). written by A. Hernandez Lozano was a terrifying article. It reaffirmed my idea that the United States' military is acting, as in the past, criminally. Something must be done to make our government see this. The protest against Mr. Bush was a political statement that I tons of nuclear powered sub- marine around you, your mission - to preserve the peace." This is frightening propaganda that is believed by too many young, impressionable people these days. We must take moral BLOOM COUNTY responsibility and stop this in- sanity. Justice in the world must start somewhere, why not here? Refuse the military. There are ways to cut your dependence of this evil institution. Colleges around the country are calling The South End, asking how they can stop the ads. I'm suggesting that The Michigan Daily do this, and continue with the ideals of youth and morality, not the ideals of money and hypocrisy. -Susanne Greenlee Oct. 17 by Berke Breathed i I I I 9 r q. I I