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Page 8 -Wednesday, May 5, 1982 The Michigan Daily
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The Michigan Daily
Vol. XCII, No. 1-s
Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom
Edited and managed by students
at the University of Michigan
School prayer
M ORAL MAJORITY types, your prayers
have been answered. President Reagan
wants to give you a new place to worship. No, he
is not going to build a new church for Rev. Jerry
Falwell; he wants to bring back prayer sessions
to the nation's public schools.
The president currently is attempting to
make good on his campaign promises to the
ultraconservative politicaland religious groups
that helped elect him. Prayer in public schools
would go a long way toward making these
groups happy.
This is one time, however, that voters may
complain if the president keeps his campaign
promises.
The Supreme Court declared group prayer in
schools unconstitutional in 1962. The court
based its decision on the First Amendment,
which bars the establishment of religion by
Congress.
A constitutional amendment allowing school
prayer will not destroy the separation of church
and state outlined in the Constitution. It will
merely bypass the issue in a devious way, by
removing it from the Supreme Court's jurisdic-
tion.
The court's decision still allows voluntary
silent prayers and meditation in the classroom.
This concession for religious expression clearly
is enough and is truly "voluntary."
Fortunately, the amendment will require
congressional approval and ratification by 38
states before it becomes law. This procedure
will entail considerable debate, giving the coun-
try.a chance to realize that prayer in schools
under this proposed amendment is likely to be
neither voluntary nor just.
This issue will require the direct par-
ticipation of the people before it reaches a con-
clusion. By opposing the amendment to revive
school prayer, voters have an opportunity to
clearly demonstrate that the Moral Majority
does not have the nationwide support its name
implies.i
Editorials appearing on the left side of
the page beneath The Michigan Daily logo
represent a majority opinion of the Daily's
staff.
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Cam-bodian despair
By T.D. Allman
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA
- Three years after its
deliverance from the Khmer
Rouge, Cambodia still is a land to
make you weep.
The chief difference is that this
blood-soaked country of bleach-
white skulls now occasionally can
provoke tears of joy, as well as
despair.
The sources of despair could
cripple the spirit of any nation:
As many as 2 million people mur-
dered; industry, agriculture and
commerce destroyed; and every
city depopulated. Even now, to
traverse Cambodia is to travel
across a tropical Auschwitz.
As for the sources of joy in
Cambodia, they would be
scarcely worth mentioning
anywhere else.
Near the village.of Puok, for
example, the arrival of foreign
visitors brings scores of Khmer
children surging out of a little
bamboo-and-thatch schoolhouse.
A barefoot doctor shows the
visitors the neighboring dispen-
sary with obvious pride. The little
hut is clean as a whistle, but all it
has to offer the sick is a near em-
pty jar of antibiotics and another
jar, three-quarters full, of anti-
malarial tablets.
"Now we have a new gover-
nment," one villager said. "It no
longer kills us, but it is unable to
help us. We have no tools or books
or medicines, and so we are
obliged to live as you see us
now.'
Cambodia, for many visitors, is
like the jar of antibiotics at the
dispensary. Is one amazed the
barefoot doctor has any pills at
all? Or appalled that the jar is
almost empty?
One of the few surviving Cam-
bodian business executives, now
heading the government
recovery program, in one area,
explains that with steady aid, and
no resumption of warfare, the
province of Battambang-once
the country's richest and most
developed-might return to the
level of industrial and economic
production it enjoyed in 1969 by
the year 2007.
If Cambodia is unlikely to
regain- its former level of Third
World underdevelopment before
the 21st century, it may take
generations for the human scars
to heal in-this land of widows and
orphans.
Such a short time after the
Khmer Rouge imagined they had
reduced the capital city and river
port into just another ruin,
however, Phnom Penh once
again is a lively, fairly populous
city, now back up to about half a
million people.
The markets are thriving.
Bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws
and even a few buses and
automobiles fill the -streets.
But in many ways, Phnom
Penh still suffers great pain.
Every day hundreds still visit the
Tuol Sleng extermination camp
in the suburbs, hoping to find
among the thousands of
photographs of the dead the face
of a relative or friend.
But it is now clear that the
Cambodians have been spared
biological doomsday. In fact
there has been a tidal wave of
new marriages, and the
population is growing fast,
though it still is far below its 1969
level. But it is another thing to
reproduce a nation's doctors,
teachers, engineers, ad-
ministrators, mechanics and
agronomists. The truth is that
almost nothing works in Cam-
bodia now-not just because so
much was destroyed but because
there are so few left alive to fix
what remains.
Both the horror and hope of
Cambodia are overwhelming
from the first moment one steps
foot in the country, but it takes
time to appreciate fully the depth
of both.
The full horror of what the Kh-
mer Rouge did, for example,
cannot be conveyed even by the
photographs of the mountains of
skulls. One has to travel to an or-
chard near the seaside port of
Kampot to grasp what
depravities of the human spirit
were committed here. In that or-
chard, after they killed their vic-
tims, the Khmer Rouge used the
cadavers for compost. One
literally is standing ina garden of
death, with the fruits of death
weighing down every bough.
Yet only a day later, a small
party of Cambodians stands in
the darkness of rural Cam-
bodia-utterly transfixed by the
miracle they are seeing. Out of
the darkness, its searchlight
penetrating the night, a train is
coming.
As the train draws closer, the
soldiers riding the flatcar, the
engineers in the cab, the Cam-
bodians clinging to the
dilapidated freight cars all wave
and cheer. They are ecstatic that
the train is actually running,
that, here in Cambodia, such a
wondrous event could occur.
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T.D. Allman wrote this story
for the Pacific News Service.