Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 41, Greencastle, Putnam County, 24 October 1981 — Page 7
'Oh Lord, please! Not me/
New approach to driver education warns teen-agers that carelessness can cripple
(c) 1981 Chicago Sun-Times CHICAGO Do “blood-and-guts” driver education films really scare teen-agers into safe driving? Safety experts in some states have their doubts and are beginning to change their techniques, it was noted here Monday. The trouble with trying to impress young drivers with films of bloody bodies, said Charles F. Hayes, a traffic safety educator from the state of Washington, is that “teen-agers think they’re immortal.’’ Even more than older folks, they tend to dismiss the thought of being killed as soon as the shock of the gory photos wears off. Instead. Hayes and Sgt. Dick Carr, of the Washington State Police, are promoting a new ap-
opinion
LARRY GIBBS Publisher
Handgun Control Inc. gaining momentum since Lennon murder
By JOHN HERBERS c. 1981 N.Y. Times WASHINGTON - In Washington’s world of pressure groups, decline or growth frequently has little to do with broad ideological trends or with who holds office. Consider the case of Handgun Control Inc., the leading organization in the gun control lobby, which by any calculation ought to be down and out in a capital filled with elected officials pledged to oppose further restrictions on pistols. Instead, Handgun Control is riding a wave of prosperity and building a war chest that its leaders hope will at least give it, for the first time, a David’s chance against the National Rifle Association’s Goliath. The organization, which has been getting defeated at every turn in recent years, quite unexpectedly came upon the ingredient needed for winning at special interest politics: intensity. It seems that having most people favor your position is not so important as having a relatively few followers who feel strongly enough about the cause to give money and work for it. It happened after John Lennon was murdered with a pistol last December in New York. Suddenly, Handgun Control’s crowded office on 18th Street had more contributions and telephone calls than it could handle. They came from people in their late 20s and early 30s, many of whom had been turned off to politics but who had a deep emotional attachment to the singer and were incensed at his murder. Their contributions enabled Handgun Control to run full-page ads in 12 major newspapers shortly after the attempted assassination of president Reagan on March 30. The headline read, “The Day the President Was Shot Was an Average Kind of Day,” average because 50 Americans were killed by handguns. More contributions rolled in and Pete Shields, chairman of the organization, says it now has half a million supporters. Half a million people in a nation of 226 million is impressive only against the poor record of the lobby in past years. Handgun Control and others favoring legislation that would restrict the proliferation of pistols could not get Congress to act even when liberal Democrats who favored their position were in charge of the government and public opinion polls showed, as they still do, that the majority of Americans
Tobacco vote: Subsidizing the painful deaths of lung cancer victims
By ANTHONY LEWIS c. 1981 N.Y. Times BOSTON Few of us who are middleaged or older have missed the grim experience of cancer striking a friend or relation. My sense, based on what has happened around me, is that incidence of the disease is sharply increasing. I find that others have the same feeling. That impression is not, in fact, generally supported by medical statistics. The death rams for most forms of cancer in this country have remained remarkably steady over many years. For breast cancer, for example, the death rate was 25.2 per 100,000 population in 1930,27 in 1978. But in one area there has been an overwhelming, an epidemic increase in deaths. That is lung cancer. This year an £sl : mated 122,000 Americans will
proach: If dying isn’t a real worry to most teenagers, being shut out of their peers’ social life is. So Carr is going around to Washington’s 305 high schools these days showing a 15-minute widescreen slide show portraying the very real lives of Dennis and Vicki, two Washington youths who are spending the rest of their lives in wheelchairs. “Dennis and Vicki come from both ends of the spectrum,” Hayes told an audience of 150 high school students at a National Safety Congress meeting at the Midland Hotel. “I don’t think there are very many like Dennis here, but Vicki could be anybody in this room.” Dennis was drunk the night he thought it’d be fun to outrun the cops in Bremerton, Wash. He was going 110 miles an hour when his car hit a tree 7 feet off the ground and Dennis was catapulted out
ERiCBERNSEE Managing Editor
favored tighter restrictions. The National Rifle Association, with almost two million members, and such fund-raising groups as the Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms won through intensity. The gun lobby was able not only to weaken the 1968 Handgun Control law enacted after the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy; it blocked all subsequent control legislation and mounted a succesful campaign to weaken enforcement of the act by persuading Congress to threaten to cut the funds of the agencies involved. “In the campaigns we would go into Congressional districts to hold meetings and organize in behalf of our candidates but only a handful of people would turn out,” said Shields, a former Du Pont executive who was roused to action by the murder of his son in the 1974 “Zebra killings” in San Francisco. The National Rifle Association, on the other hand, turned out enthusiastic crowds of people who worked the wards for their candidates. The difference, Shields said, was not one of organization or numbers but the fact that those who supported handgun control by and large were not one-issue people: they would not vote or work for a candidate just on the issue of gun control, as many on the other side did. The odds against Congress enacting control legislation this year are enormous. Legislation sponsored by the National Rifle Association and signed by 54 of the 100 senators to further weaken the 1968 control act is pending. Congress and the Reagan administration have been moving across the board to get the federal government out of regulation, not give it more to do. President Reagan remains opposed to controls, and the White House recently announced its intention to abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which enforces the 1968 act. Yet Shields and his associates say they see some hopeful signs. The president’s Task Force on Violent Crime recently called for tighter controls, including a ban on importation of parts that go into cheap handguns. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., a longtime foe of controls, surprised almost everyone recently by advocating a waiting period before the purchase of a gun. “We think 1982 is looking more promising,” said Charles J. Orasin, vice president of Handgun Control,
die of lung cancer. And the death rate has gone up by more than 12 times in the last 50 years: from 3.6 persons per 100,000 in 1930 to 44.8 in 1978. The reason for that extraordinary rise in deaths from lung cancer is not in any scientific doubt. The reason is smoking. And we all know it: all except the corrupt and the willfully ignorant. Against that gruesome factual background, the House of Representatives voted Wednsday to continue federal price supports for tobacco. The 231 members in the majority voted to subsidize a commodity that will bring thousands of Americans inexorably to a painful and utterly unnecessary death. The tobacco industry and its apologists growers, manufacturers, advertising agencies, pseudo-scientific institutes and
the rear window. Vicki was driving home from church in Odessa, Wash., when she cautiously edged over to let a passing car by, hit the gravel, rolled the car, and landed on the ground in a jackknife position, snapping her back. Neither had their seat belts fastened. Instead of showing gory bodies, the slides, with bouncy music, take up the lives of Dennis and Vicki after the crash—the blur and glaring lights of the emergency room, the taped-on-location sounds of the orderly saying, “I’m going to give you a little shot now. You’ll feel a little sting.” “We’re going to have to do an operation,” Dennis remembers a nurse telling him, “because your legs don’t work.” Vicki’s father remembers the doctor looking
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KGB documentary can't get air time in U.S.
By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. Universal Press Syndicate A few years ago a team of young producers in Canada released a series on the use by the CIA of foreign installations for the purpose of doing the ClA’s business. The response was sensational, making the front pages of the Daily Worker. Norfolk Communications, in due course joined by Kitson Vincent, another enterprising Canadian, then decided to attempt a documentary on the machinations of the KGB, concerning which they knew little, and were surprised at the almost nonchalant attention devoted to that agency in one or another government document. WHAT EMERGED is the most powerful two-hour documentary on the subject of underground Soviet activity ever put together. It was shown in Canada and received sensational notices. The Detroit News, bringing in the Canadian signal, called it “powerful,” depicting the “real world of Soviet espionage in this continent.” Variety called it a “riveting documentary,” “carefully researched and intriguing.” It has been shown (twice) in Sweden, and will be shown throughout Europe. The problem is that the producers can’t get it shown in the United States. One hears endlessly about the oppression brought on by the Moral
regional politicians have two ways of dealing with the morbid reality of their product. First they throw dust in the public eye, claiming that facts are just “theories.” Second, they say that anyone who wants to do something about smoking is an “authoritarian” stomping on “individual freedom of choice.” As far as I am concerned, smokers should remain free to go on killing themselves. The United States has made enough of a social and legal mess in the field of drugs without trying to outlaw a substance that addicts millions more. Many smokers want to quit: many more than succeed in doing so. The problem is precisely that they are addicted. If the society can do little about them, it can do a great deal to discourage additions to the
BUCKLEY: No full freedom of the press
Majority. Well, the Moral Majority has no objection to “The KGB Connections: An Investigation into Soviet Operations in North America.” What goes on? ABC PUT UP ONE-THIRD of the money for the production, in return for the option to show part of it in the United States. The option time came - and went. An official from CBS showed interest in it - but there followed a lesion of interest. NBC seemed to be interested not at all. Now, “The KGB Connections” would be gripping film fare if it were discussing the means by which the Spartans undermined the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War. But its involvement with real people, existing situations and ongoing threats elevates it to more than mere television drama. It is the story of a huge, and hugely successful, offensive against the free world. It is a Sears Roebuck catalog of the devices,
addict rolls. There again, the facts are known. The smoking habit takes hold when people are young. Some 54 million Americans smoke. And 75 percent were hooked before they reached the age of 21. A society that allows children to be enticed into smoking is engaging in a form of suicide. A 16-year-old boy who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day has a life expectancy of 62 years. If he did not smoke, he could expect to live to 71. And children are being lured into the habit by advertising and social pressure: girls especially, for some reason. The percentage of girls between 12 and 14 years old who say they are regular smokers increased from 0 6 percent in 1968 to 4.3 percent in 1979.
Vicki straight in the eyes and saying, “Basically, I’m a blunt person, so that’s how this is going to have to be. The odds are 1,000-to-l that you’ll never even sit up again.” Most of all, Dennis and Vicki talk about how it is now, being “different” that thing teen-agers dread. “The loneliness really got to me at first,” says Dennis, who used to be macho. “But now I’m getting pretty good at taking care of myself. Actually, I’ m getting to be a pretty good cook. ” "The worst thing,” says Vicki, a charming girl who took part in her high school cheerleading team from her wheelchair, “is that you’re still the same underneath. And you know that you’ll never be as pretty as you were once. And the guy you’re going out with decides he wants to go out with
strategems, techniques, used by the Soviet Union and by its dupes and agents to affect policy, and to commit subversion. THE DIRECTORS bring extraordinary material to the screen for the first time. Here is Hede Massing, one-time wife of Soviet agent Gerhardt Eisler, calmly, intelligently and even coquettishly discussing her role as a Soviet agent, her knowledge of Alger Hiss within a Soviet cell. Nathaniel Weyl is there also, recalling Alger Hiss. The use of vanity, sex, money, blackmail is discussed not fictitiously, but through interviews with defectors. You see them on the screen. You see the results of their machinations. In some cases their faces are blanked out, to give them protection. Castro and his agents make considerable appearances, and we learn of the uses of the United Nations, whose most prominent recent defector calmly estimates the extent to which the Secretariat is penetrated by the KGB. There are wonderful scenes of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and of its aerial contrivances by which conversations are picked up and recorded. IN WASHINGTON the Soviets held out for high land, on which to perch their new embassy - the better to intercept the airwaves. By contrast the United States, which labored for a generation for space in Moscow to replace a dilapidated structure,
How many of the 122,000 Americans who will die of lung cancer this year might have lived if they had not smoked? Of course there can be no absolute answer. But an article this year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, by Richard Doll and Richard Peto, looked at the figures for 1978 and estimated the effects of smoking from known data. The results of their analysis were shocking. In 1978,71,000 men died of lung cancer. If they had not smoked, the authors said, only 6,439 would have died. The same year 24,080 women died of lung cancer; if they had not smoked, the figure would have been 5,454. The terrible statistics of death by smoking were not at the forefront of the
October 23,1981, The Putnam County Banner-Graphic
somebody that can walk. ” When Vicki was told she’d never walk again, her father recalls, “She sort of rolled up her eyes, lifted up her hands and said from the bottom of her soul, ‘Oh Lord, please! Not me.’” There are a lot of safety statistics, the film tells teen-agers, but there’s only one that matters if you don’t want it to be you. Your chances of living in an auto accident are twice as good if you buckle your seat belt. Unfortunately, safety educator Hayes said, the use of seat belts has been going down steadily, with the most recent surveys showing the percentage of drivers who buckle up sinking to about 9 percent.
was given territory on the equivalent of Soviet swampland. At this moment there are two trials going on in which espionage for the Soviet Union is alleged. None of this would surprise anyone who had seen, and reflected on, this remarkable documentary. Why doesn’t Mr. Norman Lear, the famous producer who is so exercised by the intimidations of the far right, come out and sponsor the viewing of this remarkable documentary? But Mr. Lear has been silent on the matter. Why? Because only Archie Bunker believes in the reality of Soviet subversion? Mr. Benjamin Stein wrote a most remarkable book about Hollywood, “The View from Sunset Boulevard,” in which he mused on its monolithic position on social issues. All businessmen and generals are evil. All investigative reports and freedom fighters are good. But not, one gathers, investigative reporters who are curious about the past and present activity of the communist brotherhood, or fighters who fight other than for the freedom of North Vietnam, unimpeded, to tyrannize over South Vietnam. “THE KGB CONNECTIONS” is so striking a drama, so thoroughly newsworthy, so legitimately entertaining, that its absence from the television screen is prima facie evidence that after all it is true -- we don’t have full freedom of the press.
tobacco price support debate in the House. Craven political calculations were w’.iat mattered. Democrats from the Southern tobacco states pleaded with their Northern colleagues to vote for the program. Otherwise, they said, they would be decimated when Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, used the tobacco issue against them And enough Northern Democrats yielded to the plaint to make the difference. What the episode show; is that tobacco has hooked political systems as well as individuals. Jesse Helms is widely regarded, by his colleagues of both parties as one of* the meanest characters in Congress;? members do not want to do him favors. But tobacco has them in his grip Too many in-i terests in the South depend on it.
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