c piiioig Page 8 -Wednesday, May 5, 1982 The Michigan Daily .I 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. Wasserman F1A.OW ARICAO, WHEN TI ".i YoU THAT WREN Z SAY WE'RE ON FN' , W-AREN'T ItAW& 0MONEY( BIGGEST CUTTING 4 F OR OLD4 ~4f IS FACTS IC'AT INFLUENCE ALL PUT A STOP' you ELcEGtE OUT OF TO TIlS RONAI-D V~oORlON4 a NAPYSAYIG %4@"/ o 1}EIR gY W\VflN Nor 'mH AC(U SIE ,\ YoUR IRM ol 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. 4 I i T.D. Allman wrote this story for the Pacific News Service.