6 4A - The Michigan Daily - Monday, November 18, 2002 OP/ED c~be irbig~lan: ai1u 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 letters@michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JON SCHWARTZ Editor in Chief JOHANNA HANINK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. Allcother articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE Our country is headed for very deep trouble." - Al Gore, in an interview in this week's Time Magazine in regard to President Bush's economic agenda, foreign policy and environmental stance. SAM BUTLER Tr SOAPBOX v /es- 'srevision~ fascine (fa-sen') n. A bundle of sticks bound together for use in earthwork construction. fascist (fash'ist) n. 1. A supporter or advocate of a governmental system that has a centralized government with strong socioeconomic control. 2. On college campuses, a commonly heard blanket term used to describe any person who disagrees with one's opinion. AND IF YOU DISAGREE WITH THAT THEN YOU'RE A FASCIST! fashion (fash'en) n. 1. The manner in which something is made. 2. A 8~.1Q~~s O5) U eJQA L% al 4 In Africa, you can't take anything for granted JOHANNA HANINK PARLANCE OF OUR TIMES A frica's Ivory Coast is in shambles; rebels control half of the coun- try. We Americans start- ed to pull our people out months ago; now tens of thousands of Africans have been leaving under the auspices of their native governments: 10,000 from Mali, 7,000 from Burkina Faso, 2,000 already rescued by Nigeria, the BBC reported on Saturday. I lived in West Africa for three months this summer, traveling back and forth between Senegal and The Gambia. In July, I was helping to lead a computer-training workshop in Farafenni, The Gambia, a hot, grimy place that had, at that time, been without power for over a month. It was in Farafenni, (a be-sure-not-to-miss, bustling market town, according to Lonely Planet, but really a village that sometimes made me feel like I'd been plopped in the middle of a Sally Struthers "Save the Children" com- mercial), where I met an Ivoirian refugee. He had left when his mother ordered him to: The fighting in the Ivory Coast (which, despite the increased intensity and vicious- ness, is certainly nothing new) had finally reached the capital, Abidjan, and Mom would have no two ways about it. Out of love, she sent him packing. His story was one of the many that I heard that summer that chipped away at my reality and has left me still trying to fit those pieces, reshaped and sometimes unrecogniz- able, back together. Before last May, I'd never been close to war, but in West Africa I learned that peace is nothing to take for granted. In Senegal, there's an active (and deadly) separatist movement that occasional- ly flares in Casamance, the area south of The Gambia; Guinea-Bissau is still far from being the most peaceful or politically stable nation, and the Ivory Coast, well, it's of the lucky one-in-five African conflicts that sometimes makes the news-ticker on CNN. I've been following the war in the Ivory Coast out of a kind of emotionally indul- gent voyeurism. In trying to reconcile how I feel about what I saw this summer, I can sometimes recapture the sensations through the deliberate imagery or the careful adjec- tives of a news article - the distance between what these words conjure for someone who has experienced West Africa and someone who has not could only be described as a world. It's according to that Saturday BBC piece that the refugees, sometimes refugees twice- over (first from their native country and now from the Ivory Coast) have been leaving the country in "bus-loads." This compound alone is enough for pause: to me, it's not a two dimensional black and white phrase, it's a feeling, a Proustian rush. I know what a West African bus-load looks like; I know what it sounds like and what it smells like: danger- ous, loud, bad. When I couldn't get a flight, I traveled between Banjul, The Gambia, and Dakar, Senegal as a member of one of those bus-loads. I made myself part of the problem when I bribed a driver 50 dalasi (about $2.50) to let me on that crowded bus one time, and I became flushed with my own shame, wanting to disappear into nothing, when we pulled away and left a crowd of very disappointed people, surrounded by lug- gage, in the bus' dusty tracks. When I read that the rebels in the Ivory Coast have been shooting at the buses, it's torturous how easily I can imagine the road- side ambush, how I can see the scene of ter- ror washing through a rickety and sweltering vehicle. The last time I made the journey from Banjul to Dakar, when my heart was doing ecstatic backflips at the thought of leaving The Gambia for good, the trip was so dangerous that had I to repeat, over and over again to myself all day that there was only one assignment on my plate: Johanna, don't die. Just don't let yourself die. And the roads that those bus-loads must be traveling on - the roads that I knew painfully well last summer, I also know have been rendered nearly useless by their gaping potholes, potholes so thorough that some- times there's more hole than road and the pavement looks like it was tossed and laid in accidental chunks. For half of that last trip I made, until I reached the border between Senegal and The Gambia - a place where the officialness of the colonial languages is nominal and the hands grabbing at my belongings and my person were the roughest - I rode with 10 other people in a window- less taxi built for 11, squashed in the back seat between the sharp protrusions of the door and a mother with two shrieking babies unseatbelted on her lap. It's impossible to read those articles and project what the little things look like here, in just this case the buses and roads, onto the warfare and bloodshed a continent away. The game has changed so the rules are different: the actors may express the universal lan- guage of human emotion, but the props on the stage could never tell the same story - the privilege of peace and seatbelts. Johanna Hanink can be reached at jhanink@umich.edu. I VIEWPOINT NCAA exploitation must end to clean up hoops BY JEREMY LACKS Like many on campus, my initial reaction to the University's announcement of self-imposed sanctions against the basketball program was one of both anger at the players who brought such shame on the program and admiration toward the University for acknowledging its accountability in the matter. However, after considering the issue further, it has become clear that while the players' actions were cer- tainly wrong, Chris Webber and his cohorts are not alone to blame. Rather, that distinction lies equally with the hypocritical NCAA. Should allegations that Webber received $280,000 in cash and gifts from booster Ed Martin prove true, he will surely be punished for his deplorable conduct. But consider for a second just how much revenue Webber and the Fab Five generated for the University and the NCAA in initiating perhaps the most pop- ular and prestigious era in Michigan basket- ball history. Through television, marketing and ticket sales, Webber and company pro- duced for these institutions a sum of money that easily dwarfs the amount the players received from Martin, not to mention the rela- tively paltry $450,000 the University agreed to repay the NCAA for the violations. And exactly how much of these enormous profits earned by the negligent players did they take home during their collegiate careers? Ironical- ly, the exact same number of games "won" by Michigan in that same era: Zero. "But ours is just an amateur organization," cries the NCAA. "Aside from scholarships, we can't possibly afford to give the athletes any more money." Yet, in the most recent tele- vision deal for the broadcast rights to the Men's Basketball Tournament, affectionately known as March Madness, CBS agreed to pay the NCAA a whopping $6 billion over the next 11 years. Once again that's, $6 billion. Is the NCAA an "amateur" organization? Hard- ly. Moreover, the NCAA can slap an athlete's name on the back of a jersey, put his likeness in a video game or splash his face all over TV without the athlete seeing so much as a dime in return. As former University star Maurice Taylor also implicated in the investigation, says, "The NCAA gets paid off of every major guy in college. How can you be making money off somebody else and not giving any- thing to them?" Simply, the NCAA and the University exploited Webber, Taylor and the rest for millions and as a result of the sanc- tions, all the players have to show for their time as Wolverines is their names scratched out of the record books. Of course, the NCAA's sanctions might be justified if in fact they had any deterring effect whatsoever. However, in most cases, by the time the violations are uncovered and punish- ments handed down, the athletes have long left school and are free of penalty, provided they aren't lying to a grand jury. Instead, the sanc- tions merely punish innocent coaches and ath- letes who had nothing to do with the actual violations. And while the NCAA has been coming down harder on major programs in recent years, these kinds of violations only seem to be occurring more and more frequently at schools across the country. Seeing as current penalties are not an adequate deterrent, the only solution is to provide an incentive for student athletes not to accept illegal payments. Obviously, the way to do this is to spread some of the vast wealth the NCAA amasses every year to the athletes who produce that wealth. Of course, these payments need not reach the astronomi- cal levels of those in professional sports. Instead, a standard wage scale based on class standing to supplement scholarships for basics such as food and clothing might suc- cessfully dissuade athletes from turning to more illegitimate sources like boosters. Furthermore, paying college athletes would help curb the other mounting problem facing college basketball: undergraduates leaving school early for the pros. Certainly, the allure of millions of dollars is the number one reason college players forego their educa- tion for the NBA. But if the athletes knew they were at least being moderately compen- sated for the revenue they generate, they would likely be willing to stay in school longer. At the very least, paying college ath- letes would make a possible NBA rule against drafting underclassmen easier to swallow. The time has come for the NCAA to own up to its responsibility towards the athletes that it profits from. Instead of hypocritically punish- ing players for taking money they do not earn, the NCAA must fix the problem by compensat- ing its athletes with the money they do earn. If not and this dangerous trend is allowed to con- tinue, we might one day look back and discover a year with no NCAA Champion because every school has forfeited its wins. On that day, somewhere, maybe even in federal prison, Chris Webber will be smiling. Lacks is an LSA sophomore Ir LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 4 Zahr's rhetoric can only lead to retrenched hatred TO THE DAILY: I feel I must respond to a quote in the Nov. 14, 2002 article Activists urge reappraisal of Middle East Conflict (11/14/02). In this article, Amer Zahr, a prominent figure on campus, is quoted as saying "Violent resistance is probably the only way to effect change in Israeli policy. Colonial societies never give up land for benevolent reasons ... either over, and the result would be a lot of dead Pales- tinians. One must remember that the Israelis rarely show constraint in military action against the Palestinians and if the conflict were stepped up, there would be no difference. 2) Even though they would eventually be defeated, the Palestinians do have every right to resist oppression violently. Zahr says however that "The most likely way to end the occupation is to make the Israeli people suffer..." A resistance focused on purposely making the enemy suffer rather than defending yourself is no longer rightful violent resitannor aw fighting for freedom. This (11/12/02) on road expansion, sprawl and conges- tion. These everyday issues are not the gut- wrenching, visceral ones that normally excite or even interest students and it was a pleasant sur- prise to read such a thoughtful considered piece. As you elegantly stated, the endless addition of road capacity will temporarily contain but never solve the problem of traffic congestion. Until we have more walkable and bikable communities, Mixed-use zoning and good public transit, we are doomed to greater and greater automobile depen- dency, which already runs to over 10 trips/house- hold/av iin subu1rbia. until we have eY~aslifle and F'71-.._ - --- T1 - - - -- - - -- ----------------------------------.- ;a