KANU News Retention; June 1996 Retention ( 2 of 2)

[MALE INTERVIEWEE]: Advanced voting is really a new concept in the nation and especially in the state of Kansas as well. If I can give you a little background to begin with, Congress has passed some new measures in 1993 that deal with how we register voters, or the Motor Voter legislation, that allows us to register to vote when we get our driver's license and at a number of other state government entities. My problem with Motor Voter is it gets people on the registration rolls, but it doesn't do a single thing to get people to the polling place on election day. That's the bottom line with advanced voting. Advanced voting is a very simple concept in that what used to be called absentee voting. If you're sick, physically disabled, or out of the county on election day, you had a ballot sent to you at your home. We've taken that same concept, and we now say if you simply don't feel like going to the polls on election day, you can have a ballot sent to you at your home up to 20 days prior to the election. So in this day when it's getting tougher and tougher to get people to attend the polling place, we're now taking the polling place to the people and allowing them to cast a vote in the comfort of their own home. [MALE INTERVIEWER]: I

suppose one big advantage is inclement weather. A lot of folks can't get out when it's raining. Are there other advantages to advance voting? [MALE INTERVIEWEE]: Well the single greatest advantage to advance voting is convenience. And until we can vote with our remote control, we've made voting as easy as we possibly can. [MALE INTERVIEWER]: And are other states doing this that you know of? Are we all doing it, or is it just Kansas this year? [MALE INTERVIEWEE]: We borrowed this from Texas, the concept, and we are among the first three or four states in the nation to do this. [MALE INTERVIEWER]: I would assume because it's so convenient, you would be expecting a higher voter turnout perhaps than in years past. How many people do you expect to take advantage of this early voting? [MALE INTERVIEWEE]: Well, absolutely we expect a higher turnout because of the convenience. And in addition I have to admit we should have a higher turnout this year simply because we've got a lot of interesting races. How many times do we have a candidate for president of the United States coming from the state of Kansas? How many times do we have both United States Senate races up for election? So the interest in the races should be very high this year. In addition to that, because of advanced voting,

I think we are going to drive turnout higher this year. And let's face it, that's the bottom line -- why we introduced the legislation. [MALE INTERVIEWER]: And the best that your office can tell, will this new way of voting -- this early or advanced voting -- affect the way that campaigns are being conducted? [MALE INTERVIEWEE]: I think so, absolutely. It is changing the face of campaigns, because the advanced voting process is 20 days long. Campaigns are going to have to be prepared for that and have their literature in the homes 20 days prior to the election. Now we may see a cutback in some of the negative mudslinging campaigns. Because, let's face it, what makes the mudslinging work is when you have that last minute attack on your opponent the evening before the election, and they don't have time to respond. Well if you do that 20 days out, your opponent's going to have time to respond. And if you wait to do it the day before the election, half the electorate's already voted. And so we may eliminate some of that negative campaigning, and just like everyone else I would love to see that happen. [MALE INTERVIEWER]: I assume the vote counters in your office and across the state will be getting a

substantial number of ballots back early. Will those results be published or released to the media early? [MALE INTERVIEWEE]: No, as a matter fact the votes will be counted on election day, and then at seven o'clock when the polls close, then we'll start releasing numbers. [MALE INTERVIEWER]: Do you still expect a large number of people to get in the spirit and go to the polls on election day, maybe if for no other reason than because it's tradition? [MALE INTERVIEWEE]: Oh, I think so. In my estimation, this year we may see 25 percent of votes cast by advanced votes, and as advanced voting becomes more popular we may see it grow to 50, 60 percent of the total vote turnout. But that's going to be years down the road. Voting is a very social activity, especially in some of the smaller communities around the state. This may be the only chance, you know, once every couple of years to see some of your neighbors. And because of the social aspect of it, I think we're going to see that there are always going to be those folks who go to the polling place. I know myself, I enjoy the opportunity to pull that lever. ***** [MALE SPEAKER]: The burning

of over 30 black churches in the South was the subject of a conversation I recently had with a friend. We both expressed disgust with the cowards who carried out the burn-and-run attacks. It gave me the occasion to tell him about a civil rights march I participated in in Forsyth County, Georgia, which is just a few miles from Atlanta. There were 20,000 of us marching in a county where Black people could not fish in the lakes or buy a home without being beaten or worse. As we marched, young children and adults yelled, "Nigger!" or, "Nigger lover!" and other obscenities. A van with "KKK" painted on the side and with Confederate flags flying drove up and down the highway with those inside hurling insults. Stones were thrown, and one hit me in the back, but no damage was done. Thankfully, 2,000 National Guard troops protected us. My friend said

that he was thankful that those problems only existed in the '60s. He was astonished when I told him the march occurred in 1987. Of course there has been progress in race relations, but not nearly enough. I often ask myself how can a nation with a strong Christian and Judeo-Christian ethic continued to have such turmoil, not based on the character of an individual, but on the color of one's skin? There are too many answers to that question to comment on all of them in this brief commentary. Unfortunately, there is no national Black leader of the stature of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Black leadership has been engaged politically, but it has lacked direction and purpose, and it has had more division than unity. The vast majority of our white political, religious, and

social leaders have never lived in a ghetto, experienced prejudice, or been denied access based solely on the color of their skin. They can pontificate until hell freezes over, but it won't make any difference. Even if a Black person found a cure for cancer, he or she would still be judged on skin color in the majority of social circles and country clubs in our country. Little wonder that the anger is once again building to a state of war. Abraham Lincoln said, "A nation divided cannot stand." That is still true. ***** [FEMALE SPEAKER]: My friend Janey had a pet goldfish, Gus. He lived with Janey all through college and her first four years as a single career woman. She loved Gus. She told him her problems, and he never talked back. But one morning, Janey woke up to find Gus floating on his side. "I just couldn't flush Gus!" she told

me. Instead, she took him to a park six blocks away and buried him. Maybe you're hiding a smile as you think about grieving for a goldfish. But Gus mattered to Janey, and in losing him she experienced one of life's little griefs. They pop up like small, dark knots in our tapestry of living, and few people understand or give proper sympathy to them. Yet little griefs can cause emotions as intense as those produced by bigger ones. Maybe your feelings don't last as long, but they can run as deep. Maryann, a longtime friend, told me how awful she felt when a jelly glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the kitchen floor. "Ted gave me that glass filled with champagne after he proposed and I said 'yes.' It was like a symbol of our love." That's just it. The pet or the glass or whatever represents something else, the security of childhood or your self image or love or even freedom, as I discovered when I went to see my 87 year old mother-in-law the day she got turned down for a driver's license. I found her sitting in her bedroom in the dark, weeping silently --

her old license clutched to her breast. No matter what we've lost, if it wounds us enough to trigger the grief stages -- shock, disbelief, bargaining, anger, despair, and finally acceptance -- then we must allow ourselves to mourn. Counselors warn us that if we don't, if we're not permitted to suffer and share our sadness, if we minimize our sorrow or ignore it, we won't absorb our loss in a healthy way. How often have you said to yourself, "Oh, this isn't that important. I'm silly to feel so sad." Instead, give yourself permission to claim your own feelings. Feelings are neither right nor wrong; they just are. I remember a cartoon caption I saw, "We shouldn't wallow in self pity. But every so often, it's ok to swish our feet a little." Yes, I think small griefs need rituals -- nothing with the melancholy grandeur of a funeral, yet a ceremony to mark the passage. Ritual makes something real to us and gives our private grief a public face. It doesn't always require an audience. You might write a

letter that expresses your pain, read it out loud, and then burn it. Or do as one friend did -- play music and dance out your grief alone in your living room. Plant bulbs in your garden, daffodils, perhaps, to symbolize hope. T.S. Eliot wrote, "I have measured up my life with coffee spoons. It's in small moments that we live life." Little griefs are real -- let's pay attention to them. Out of our acknowledgment will come acceptance. Then those dark knots become part of life's rich design. ***** [TOM AVERILL AS WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN OLEANDER]: Folks, a new activities director at the senior center in There, Kansas, tells us that writing poetry about our lives will help us cope, and I reckon she's right. Tommy and Hattie Burns, who lost their wheat crop to the winter drought this year, went to the center to help serve lunch and ended up so proud of their poem that they marched into the Here Co-op and held forth. "Dry. Bone dry like sandy mouth, like Carrie Nation's axe coming down on wheat."

"Not a very long poem," said Claude Anderson. "It's a haiku," said Hattie. "Just 17 syllables. Five, then seven, then five." "I like it," I said. "I have a bunch of Kansas dust poems." "You mean all of the poems written during the Dust Bowl?" Well, folks, I had to answer Tommy's question with poetry, so I invited the Burnses to my house for a reading. I started with a stanza from "The Drought" by Celeste May. "The sun beat hot upon the withered grass that crackled underfoot like molten glass, and there was heard no note or call of bird. Instead of cooling zephyrs' breath, the southwest brought but death." "Boy," said Tommy, "those Dust Bowlers had it hard." "Well listen to this," I said. And I read from Solomon Long's "How I Lost My Farm." "Prices for the things I raised kept lowering all the time, and for the things I had to buy, kept always on the climb." "Gosh," said Hattie, "economics were tough in the '30s."

"And then there's how people felt," I said, and I pulled out lines from Allen Crafton's "The Prairies Possessed" and P. Roy Brammell's "Desert." The first, "Oh, I saw no hope in your eyes, I heard no song in your sighs. I beheld no God in your dust." And the second, "God, the waste! The quivering waste! Where things grow up to die!" "I guess you won't put our poem in your collection," said Hattie. "It's not about the Dirty '30s." "Not so quick." I reached for a copy of their "Dry." "You just thought my drought poems were from the Dust Bowl. Those poems are from 1886, 1890, 1924, and 1927. I'll add your 1996 poem to help me prove what I've always thought was true." "What's that?" asked Tommy. "Well that the Dust Bowl was an extreme and extended time, but that dust, drought, crop loss, and hopelessness were a part of Kansas from

the beginning and still continue today." "Well Here certainly had its driest winter since they've been keeping records," said Hattie. "And," I said, "I believe Kansans are as apt to write drought doggerel as they are to wring their hands and worry." "Why, that describes us perfectly," said Tommy. "Do you want me to sign that poem?" And he did. No doubt I'll see Hattie and Tommy Burns next season when they write their flood poem. I collect poetry for that part of the Kansas cycle, too. ***** [BEEP] [LOIS]: My name is Lois. I'm from Topeka. And I don't think the spouses should have to play any role at all. It's their mates who are trying to get elected, not them, and I think dragging them into the election process is just an indication of the old role of the wife being the supporter and part of her husband's life, when she really has a life of her own. ***** [BEEP] [DAVID]: David, Silver Lake, Kansas.

I believe that both females will play essential roles in forming and shaping different policies throughout the year 2000. I believe that they will be outspoken, but they will also be nurturing and keeping an open mind about different roles of women changing here in the 1990s. ***** [BEEP] [PAT]: My name is Pat, and I'm from Merriam, Kansas. The First Lady of the United States should be what any good wife is to a good husband -- giving him a sympathetic ear, perhaps a few words of encouragement or caution, her own input about his ideas. In other words, be a supportive sounding board -- a partner in all things, as should any spouse. If she chooses to continue her career, that is between she and her husband and no one else. We elect a president, but that does not mean we own the First Family. ***** [BEEP] [FEMALE SPEAKER]: I don't think the spouse in the next administration should play any role, except a supporting

role of a spouse to his or her spouse. ***** [BEEP] [JULIA]: My name is Julia from Lawrence. I think the role of the spouse in the next presidential election should be the husband. ***** [BEEP] [ALEXANDER]: My name's Alexander, Kansas City, Kansas. I think the spouse's role should be secondary, not primary. An example of that would be as Barbara Bush was with President George Bush. She was very elegant. She brought attention to herself, but did not take attention away from the president and his efforts. I think the next First Lady should complement her husband, but should not distract from him. She should be a silent partner and try to make his job and his appearance greater than what it is. ***** [BEEP] [MALE SPEAKER]: First spouse should have no role in the coming elections, or if elected, should have no role. They do not get elected, and should not have any responsibility as far as voters are

concerned. ***** [BEEP] [JENNIFER]: This is Jennifer from Topeka. If you think about the structure of a presidential administration, there are a lot of positions that aren't approved by Congress or the voters, such as the press secretary or the chief of staff. And those are often key advisors within an administration. And if a president feels that the spouse's advice is germane and intelligent and useful, then it should be just as valid as someone who is not married to the president. [BEEP] ***** [MALE SPEAKER]: After Val Smith's thyroid came out, he was fed by IV -- and he had a flash. The IV was the stream of nutrients, and his body was like a lake. Smith was a longtime student of lake ecology. He knows about the battle for life that goes on within lakes. If you change the level of various nutrients, some life will prosper, while others barely scratch a living. For example, if you lower the nitrogen, blue-green algae bloom like crazy.

So after his hospital revelation, Smith came up with the idea that has guided his research for five years. Maybe doctors could give the friendly cells and bacteria inside their patients an edge over invading bugs by changing some nutrients in IV bags. Smith, who directs the University of Kansas Environmental Studies Program, boned up on bio-medicine. He found two natural resources inside the body with impacts comparable to that of nitrogen and phosphorous on a lake. Those resources are iron and glutamine. Invading bacteria happen to love iron. When it's around, they multiply quickly. On the other hand, an abundance of glutamine, one of the building blocks of proteins, gives the human-friendly forces an edge against the bugs. Now he has taken a crack at drafting a theory about the relationship of disease and nutritional resources. He and a colleague, Bob Holt,

will publish the theory in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Disease or health, they say, is a result of whatever food the contending forces can lay their mitts on during the battle for health. One of the theories is that the body is overall a Sahara Desert. We don't set out much food. For example, a lot of our iron is locked inside the molecules that transport oxygen all over the body, and that's where germs can't get at it. Part two of the theory is if an unfriendly critter like salmonella actually reaches the gut, it then falls into competition for food with other bacteria like E. coli. Part three of the theory is that if a bad bug gets all the way into the bloodstream, it then winds up fighting for dinner against the wrath of immune system assassins, like our B-cells and T-cells. What's novel here is Smith's effort to take what he's learned about resource competition in lakes and apply it to sick bodies. He's something of a mathematician, for he's working to formulate equations useful in the fight against disease. He says, "If we had the right equations, I should be able to predict exactly how much glutamine you could give a patient, and you could adjust the precise amounts of other nutrients

to wipe out a population of a given bug inside the body." And that, I reckon, will make people lying in a lot of hospital beds pretty darned happy.