Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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JIM FARRELL EDITOI LUCRETIA JONES DAVE LUNDGREN MANAGING ED AD. MNGR. 1%01 EDITORIALS Senate masque With Halloween over and the traditional season of thanksgiving coming up, thanks are appropriately given to the Student Senate here at USC. This governing body has done us all the favor of never cen suring the State of South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag over the State house even after the GAMECOCK erroneous ly reported that it had. We would also like to thank them for the example of leadership in their resolution to welcome Josh McDowell and then their astute judgement of reversing their initial decision and un welcoming him. This body also affirmed student support of the President of USC-well after it would have any effect on the man's position. And finally we would like to thank the student senate for their great leadership in the recent election. Due to them, there will be no answer to the trying question concerning every student that lives and breathes on this campus; whether or not there will be a secretary to the student body in the future. Thanksgiving is coming up, but Halloween is a lot closer. ("Pin the..."" Halloween has just past and the perverts in the area have done it again. They have attempted to strike out against the youth in their normal, abnormal way. What ever happened to the old water balloon tricks and the old molasses in the bag gag? Even the Ex-Lax trick is better than putting pins in the candy that these young children will consume with the satisfaction of having gotten of their own free will and hard walking. Yes, they put pins in the candy for the little kids to choke on. This was reported by Richland County Sheriff Frank Powell in a public service bulletin run on one of the local television stationt yesterday. Who knows what else they had in the confections?. Is it so much to ask of t.ese idiots that the kids of today enjoy the same type of Halloween that they hd? 0l* ~OO O "Qo 0 Hor By MICHAEL BALL Columnist Two black women, one in terested, one angry, both intense, sat in the editor's office rapping down white ignorance. Stereotyping Jim and I as hostile honkies, the two Tuskegee, Ala.,, graduates laid it downi about whites learning myths and stereotypes of blacks. "We've been taught your culture from grade school..." and "White students need to be informed of black cOlture-we have a very rich culture..." they said. They had come to talk about a nationwide holiday--Black Solidarity Day-in its second year. "I found it surprising that Blacks here do not hold the holiday; everything you find, USC is just behind." "There are no regular black activities on this campus: everything here is whitey. "Yeah, they could have black dance, groups, black plays, even black speakers." They called the arts and sciences black history course "Just pacification." "What we need is a course in black consciousness. Now the assistant dean is trying to hire a black instructor." "The Our times Kenned By SMITH HEMPSTONE In aligning himself with the Green Panthers of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has demonstrated yet again that in Irish affairs his passion is matched only by his prejudice. The Massachusetts Democrat, in a resolution co-sponsored by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, D-Conn., who may be forgiven if he sees the gunmen of the IRA as a Gaelic incarnation of the Stern Gang, has called for the "immediate with drawe' of (14,000) British troops from Ulster and the establishment of a united Ireland." The six counties of Northern Ireland, Kennedy states, are ''becoming Britain's Vietnam"~ and "Ulster teeters on the brink of a civil war that threatens to engulf all of Ireland." If only Britain will pick up Its marbles and go home, Teddy asserts, Ulster's Protestants and Catholics more than likely "will work together in a new Ireland, to create the sort of political and social arrangements under which both can live and work in peace together, with full and mutual respect for the rights of all." Beautiful. To prove his point, Kennedy, whose mathematics apparently are as weak as his Spanish, asserts that the Republic of Ireland's history of tolerance toward Ii "300,000 Protestants" (there are in fact, less than 175,004 - shows that there will be no trouble tkie dei (present) course just can't reach students. It is mainly elective and voluntary; the majority of the stdents are black. You need to enlighten every student." When asked about the Day, neither knew where it started for sure, neither had any concrete plans for it other than in corporating it- into Black Week here, neither knew any of the mechanics for spreading the idea. None of that is an important as the idea itself. A day of absence. A day of protest. A day when black people won't go to work. A day for the goal of obtaining political and economic power. The physical result they hoped for here was column space to in form students of the holiday, to explain the goals. Their stereotypes brought them into the Gamecock office expecting to be denied their first amendment rights. They were correct in saying that it is time white students were taught black culture in grade school and college like the blacks have. They were incorrect in assuming that whites know little of black life. Like no other state I have ever seen, South Carolina whites and y's Irish if only the horrid British will go home. Any examination of the present and future of Ulster must begin with one undisputed fact: For the past 50 years, Northern Ireland's one million Protestants have grievously discriminated against the province's 500,000 Catholics politically, socially and economically. But Kennedy, in his examination of the situation, chooses to ignore certain salient facts. Among them: (1) While almost all of Ulster's 500,000 Catholics undoubtedly would welcome unification with the republic, its one million Protestants are equally fervently opposed to any such development and, presumably, they have the same right to self-determination as Catholics. (2) As to Ulster being "Britain's Vietnam," surely it is at least worth noting in passing that Northern Ireland is. as much an integral part of the United Kin dgom as Scotland, Wales or Corn wall an# has been so for con siderably longer than our own ;Southwestern states, which we took from Mexico, have been American. (3) As for those Protestants "who feel they could not live in a united Ireland," Kennedy urges that "Britain could open its arms" to them, thus studiously ignoring the fact that the Protestants have been in Ulster for 300 years, which is to say considerably longer than t'h'e-'Ken'nedys have 'beeh 'i Mabnachusetts. --- 5ts blacks borrow heavily from each other. Like no other state, the races owe much of their per sonalities--thought processes, language, food, etc.-to each other. People who speak of racial peace here-being able to accept race as merely a reality not a conlusion and working on other problems would do well to take advantage of the similarities in the people here. If the whites can be made to see how heavily they owe the blacks for the things they are proud of, South Carolina may be the first state to lessen irrational tensions, stereotypes and myths. Those two- women who came here will pr6bably be among the few who will start to build a basis for liveable lives. But their work will go a lot better and faster if they learn a little more about the realities of USC politics and take advantage of the weaknesses of the opposition. And if they are always prepared to back up their political assertions to anyone, like having a column in hand when they come into an ewtor's office and being able to do -justice to a just idea. )rejudice (4) British 'troops were dispat ched to Ulster in 1969 to protect the Catholic minority from Protestant toughs. Since then, IRA gunmen, infiltrating from the republic (where the organization also is banned), have indulged in an have indulged in an indiscriminate orgy of sniping, nail-bombing, arson and high-explosive attacks which have resulted in the deaths of 128 persons on both sides of the barricades. (5) Under British prodding, the provincial government in Belfast has set in train a series of reforms which ultimately will go far toward eliminating many if not most of the inequities which Catholics have enduring in Ulster. Finally, the intellectual process by which Kennedy determines thatby which Kennedy determines that the United States has a right to intervene in the internal affairs of the United Kingdom is Interesting. He simply states that, because the "Irish yield to none In their con tributions to the peoples and culture of America," the principle of non-Intervention "is utterly without application." Under this reverse Brezhnev Doctrine, presumably the United States has an equally "irresistible" right to intervene in the internal affairs of Germany, Italy, Poland or any of the many other nations which have made weighty ethnic and cultural con tributions to America. Or perhaps those nations have the right to intervene in our domestic matters, since they created America.