Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 96, Greencastle, Putnam County, 31 December 1981 — Page 8

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The Putnam County Banner-Graphic, December 31,1981

Military manpower: Draft, bonuses aren't necessary, sociologist says

lc) 1981 Chicago Sun-Times WASHINGTON The Pentagon can solve its manpower problems without resorting to the draft or relying excessively on enlistment bonuses and other "cash inducements," Northwestern University sociologist Charles C. Moskos maintains. The solution Moskos has in mind, however, would require a total reorganization of the volunteer force and the adoption of a voluntary national service plan for young men and women who do not join the military. Instead of trying to lure recruits with big enlistment bonuses, Moskos would revive the GI Bill and offer college educations in return for military sendee. At the same time, he would require other college-bound young people to perform some type of national sendee to become eligible for federal higher-education aid.

'B2 forecast: Among other things, baseball season opens in court

Bv JAMES RESTON c. 1981 N.Y. Times JANUARY: Cold and stormy weather ahead in 'B2. Unemployment up for the "truly needy," and even yacht sales down for the “truly greedy.” But why worry? Polish crisis postponed pending outcome of Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton college football bowl games. Nuclear arms talks in Geneva suspended pending outcome of pro football playoffs finally won, as usual, by Dallas. Jan. 5: Chancellor Schmidt comes to Washington and explains to President Reagan that West Germany is in Europe, closer to the Polish border and the Red Army than the United States. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina disagrees. Jan. 18: A.A. Milne’s 100th birthday national holiday for everybody to read “Winnie the Pooh.” Jan. 20: First anniversary of Ed Meese, James Baker, Mike Deaver and Ronald Reagan taking over the White House. FEBRUARY: Short and even colder. Groundhog decides to stay underground. Democrats decide to come to surface bearing grievances. Harvard holds conference on decline of the presidency: marking Ronald Reagan’s 71st birthday, on the 6th; Lincoln’s on the 12th: Washington’s on the 22nd; not forgetting Bess Truman’s 97th bless her on Feb. 13. MARCH: Crocuses appear in far corners of White House lawn not trampled by television reporters and cameras. Menachem Begin recovers from fall in bathtub and says he will give Washington “one more chance.” Reagan offers to cut U.S. missiles in half in Europe if Kremlin

Obstacles remain Despite year's special designation, nation's handicapped worse off in some areas

By WAYNE KING c. 1981 N.Y. Times SAN FRANCISCO The nation’s handicapped are coming to the end of 1981 designated the International Year of Handicapped Persons worse off, in some legislative areas, than when the year started. Programs intended to help them have been battered by a budget-cutting, antiregulatory administration, by a lack of funds at the local level and by a backlash from politicians who see some of their demands as too expensive. “I got one letter that seemed, to sum it up,” said Dennis Cannon, a transportation specialist in Washington, D.C., who helps oversee programs for the handicapped that involve federal funds. “He said, ‘lnstead of the International Year of Disabled Persons, it should have been the International Year of Dismantling Programs.’ ” Cannon, himself confined to a wheelchair, works in the Office of Technical Services for a small regulatory agency called the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board. It

Presser case set precedent Decision upholding handgun ban rooted in 1886 court ruling

By Lyle Denniston (c) 1981, The Baltimore Sun WASHINGTON century since Herman Presser lost his case in the Supreme Court, but his loss is still the key to the gun control issue. The Supreme Court has never changed its mind since it ruled on Jan. 4,1886, that state and local governments may forbid individuals to own or keep guns. That decision was relied upon heavily Tuesday by a federal judge in Chicago, Bernard M. Decker, when he ruled that the village of Morton Grove, 111., could ban handguns. The opponents of the village ordinance had argued, as did Herman Presser, that the Constitution’s Second Amendment creates an individual’s right to possess a gun.

They would have to serve three to six months, without pay. Moskos, a military manpower expert, made his proposal in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs and elaborated on it in a telephone interview Because a national program of civilian service would be such a “far-reaching step,” he favors phasing it in over five

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agrees not to double the Soviet SS-20 missiles, and is denounced by European mobs for provoking the arms race. The Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, after their amiable fashion.

is responsible for establishing standards for making federal buildings and federally financed facilities accessible to the handicapped. Earlier this month, faced with a move to rescind its rules entirely, the board unanimously accepted a revised set of regulations considerably less stringent, and less expensive, than it had ordered. Earlier, the United States Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia ruled that stringent regulations set down by the Department of Transportation, requiring such things as wheelchair lifts on buses and elevators on subways, exceeded the in tent of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That act, regarded as something of bill of rights for the handicapped, declared that “no otherwise qualified handicapped individual shall be denied the benefits of any program receiving federal financial assistance.” The two actions, the drastic scaling down of rules applying to accessibility to federally financed buildings, and the softening of the Department of Transportation’s guidelines that evolved from the court ruling, represent a sharp shift in

The amendment, adopted in 1791 as part of the original Bill of Rights, says: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the

years. It would be administered by volunteer local boards, akin to Selective Service boards during the draft. The recruiting of civilian volunteers would be handled by welfare agencies, non-profit institutions, schools and recreational facilities, Moskos said. The young volunteers could care for the aged in nursing homes, assist teachers, work in

LARRY GIBBS Publisher

APRIL: Despite all the pollution, the star magnolia tree flowers at the northwest gate of the White House, and the park behind the Interior Department blazes with flowering trees and shrubs.

the government’s attitude toward the handicapped, resulting primarily from the growing cost of programs to benefit them. Even while cities are buying special equipment to allow access to handicapped people, the easing of rules has enabled them to cut back drastically on plans for further changes. The elimination of proposed rules that would have required renovation of older transit facilities and federally leased buildings, including thousands of postal facilities, would save hundreds of millions of dollars each year, federal officials estimated. The Postal Service said its savings alone would amount to S6O million to S7O million a year. The proposed regulations, 34 pages in the Federal Register, covered a wide range of areas, from elevator design to the maximum thickness of carpet pile, cushion and backing. “The board softened a number of the requirements in the big-ticket items,” said Carl Goodman, a spokesman. He said the eased requirements included “some of the transportation items, elevators in newly altered subway stations and the like.”

people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Presser, a Chicagoan, thought that provision had been violated when he was accused of a crime for carrying a cavalry sword and his followers for carrying rifles when they marched under the banner of their own little military group, the Lehr und Wehr Verein. He was convicted and fined $lO for breaking a state law forbidding civilians to carry arms in an unlicensed military group. That law, he argued, is an un-

ERICBERNSEE Managing Editor

museums, take the handicapped shopping even monitor safety on mass transit systems. “It is within our grasp to establish a comprehensive youth program to serve national needs without compulsion, without creating a massive bureaucracy and without burgeoning costs,” Moskos wrote. To encourage enlistment in the volunteer force, he proposed setting aside the maximum educational benefits for those who enlist, rather than those who volunteer for civilian service. Volunteer force recruiting has been hurt by the expiration of the GI Bill in 1976 and the tremendous expansion of federal assistance to college students, he pointed out. In 1980 alone, the government dispensed more than $5.2 billion in grants and loans, without any military-obligation strings attached. “In effect, we have created a GI Bill

...SLASH MEDICARE/ -CUT SOCIAL SECURITY/ ...PEOPLE OVER' 65 ARE A DRAIN ON THE BUDGET/ ».UH, LETS REPHRASE THAT LAST STATEMENT^

Good Friday and the Jewish Passover. Israel turns over the rest of Sinai to Egypt, after a tussle. Baseball season opens, not in Cincinnati or Yankee Stadium, but in the Supreme

Although the Rehabilitation Act has been in effect since 1973, it has only been in the last few years that it has been interpreted to mean that any facility that caters to the public and that gets federal funds, must be designed so as to allow access and use by the handicapped. While the act includes aids for the blind and deaf, the greatest cost, and thus the greatest controversy, surrounds requirements that facilities be accessible to people in wheelchairs. Organizations for the handicapped point out that for those in wheelchairs, life in a normal setting is a series of obstacles. They cannot, for example, go up or down stairs, climb curbs, enter revolving doors, board buses, enter many doors or use most toilets. All of these facilities, and dozens of others, would have to be redesigned to accommodate the handicapped. But such changes in public places are of no use to a chairbound shopper who finally makes it to the grocery store which is private only to find that those steel posts that keep people from stealing grocery carts also keep him out of the store.

constitutional exercise of state power. Rejecting his challenge, the Supreme Court declared that the Second Amendment “is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and not upon that of the states.” The only way that the amendment could now be used as a check upon state, county or city laws would be for the Supreme Court to conclude that it had been wrong in 1886. Advocates of an individual right to have a gun have been hopeful for years that the court would do just that, and rule that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “due process” absorbed the Second Amen dment and applied it to the states. Such a process of absorption constitutional scholars call it “incorporation" had gone on actively during the years

without the GI,” Moskos asserted. He endorses the Reagan administration’s idea for a new GI Bill, but his proposal for making the troubled volunteer force work does not stop there. “The armed services should set up a two-tiered personnel and compensation system,” Moskos said. They should make a distinction between a “career soldier” and a “citizen soldier,” he said. Career soldiers would enlist for a minimum of four years and be trained in the technical skills of modern warfare. They would be entitled to diverse education benefits, improved housing and full reimbursement for family moving expenses. To help solve the retention problem, bonuses and significant pay raises would be given to those who reenlist. Under Moskos’ proposal, citizen soldiers would enlist for two years of active duty,

Court of the United States, with Reggie Jackson testifying that the “truly needy” free agents cannot be free at less than $2 million a year, also arguing that this should be tax-free. Yet life goes on. Harold Stassen celebrates his 75th birthday, preparing for another run at the presidency in 1984. Clare Boothe Luce, back in Washington and saucy and pretty as ever at 79, regards the Reagan counterrevolution against the Democrats as the greatest thing that has happened to the Republic since the British were defeated at Yorktown. MAY: Most beautiful month of the year in Washington: the Japanese cherry blossoms flourish despite economic difficulties with Tokyo. Secretary of State Haig says Moscow’s failure to invade Poland is not a relief but is “ominous.” Begin proposes boycott of all Arab oil everywhere. Congress rejects president’s budget. President threatens to veto Democratic budget. Reagan differs with Schmidt. Schmidt differs with President Mitterrand of France. Mitterand differs with Prime Minister Thatcher of Britain. Sen. Scoop Jackson is 70, Jack Javits toughs it out at 78, and Archibald MacLeish, maybe the best of them all, is 90. JUNE: Mitterrand, tired of the differences within the alliance, arranges secret conference of allied leaders and proposes moratorium on all negotiations, sanctions, radio broadcasts, television news broadcasts and newspapers at least until the beginning of September. Presidents Reagan and Brezhnev agree. JULY and AUGUST: Total silence; no

Thus the public remedies are often not only expensive, but so little utilized that the cost per handicapped user seems exorbitant. Dr. James Cherry, president of the National Center for Handicapped Rights in Atlanta, said that although the general public was more aware of the rights of the handicapped, he had noticed a “greater negativism” on the part of governments. In San Francisco, debate swirls around a proposal to install wheelchair ramps outside City Hall. The two ramps, each 70 feet long, six feet wide and made of granite, would extend half the length of the ornate 66-year-old building’s historic facade and require modification of the entrance. The project, to cost some $600,000, drew a storm of protest. Preservationists objected to the ramps on esthetic and economic grounds. However, handicapped groups bitterly rejected alternative proposals such as elevators or ramps on a less obtrusive entrance as relegating them to “second-class citizenship.”

when Earl Warren was chief justice and the Supreme Court was very liberal on civil rights. For example, the Warren court ruled that the Fourth Amendment protection against police searches applied at the state level, too, as did the Fifth Amendment right to silence when police question a suspect. During the Warren years or earlier, in fact, most of the Bill of Rights has been made applicable to state and local laws. But that process has not yet included the Second Amendment. While that amendment remains a check upon federal power, the Supreme Court has not used it to strike down gun control laws passed by Congress. Rather, the court consistently has upheld those laws against constitutional challenge. The key to that approach is a Supreme

the same term of former draftees. They would be assigned primarily to clerical jobs, low-skill shipboard duty or the infantry. They would earn only two-thirds as much as first-term career soldiers, he said. Except for the GI Bill, they would not be entitled to off-base housing allowances or other benefits. If they took advantage of the GI Bill, they would enter the reserves, some of which are badly understaffed. Moskos said the all-volunteer force, “if it is to survive, must attract middle-class and upwardly mobile youth who would find a temporary diversion from school or work tolerable, and perhaps even welcome. “Rotating participation of middle-class youth would leaven the enlisted ranks and help re-invigorateethe notion of military service as a widely shared citizen’s role.” “The grand design,” he said, “is that the ideal of citizenship obligation ought to become part of growing up in America. ”

contention. No argument. No speeches. No meetings. No wars. After prolonged strike, baseball season starts, but nobody shows up. SEPTEMBER: Back in business, the governments renew their old habits. Congress blames Reagan for economic recession. Reagan blames Congress but insists recession is over. Begin annexes the West Bank of the Jordan River. Reagan offers to stop telling the truth about the Soviet Union if Moscow will stop telling lies about the United States. Brezhnev says “Nyet.” OCTOBER: Congress recesses for the November election. The Statue of Liberty celebrates its 96th birthday, and Jimmy Carter is 58. NOVEMBER: Democrats pick up 26 seats in the off-year House elections but fail to gain control of the Senate. Reagan celebrates second anniversary of his election. In major speech from Oval Office, he says State of the Union is pretty darn good, inflation and interest rates are on the way down, and U.S. relations with the allies have never been better, with the possible exception of West Germany, France, Britain, Canada and Mexico. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing this production on his 88th birthday, says the acting was better than the substance and gives it a “medium hello.” DECEMBER: Cold again and everybody goes away for Christmas. But there are some celebrations: Gen. Jimmy Doolittle is 86 and former Sen. Margaret Chase Smith is 85. And that wonderful old colleague, Max Lerner, is 80. But not to forget Mortimer Day Adler, who also comes into his 81st year.

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Court ruling in 1939. in the case of U.S. v. Miller, saying that the amendment onlyprotects the right to have a firearm when that is necessary to arm a state “militia.”A militia is now generally considered to be something like the National Guard an official state organization set up and armed to keep the peace statewide Thus, the amendment is understood to mean that states have a right to arm, but individual citizens do not. The last time the court upheld a federal gun control law, in 1980, Justice Harry A. Blackmun remarked for the court: “These legislative restrictions on the use of firearms ... do not trench upon any constitutionally protected liberties.” The issue was so well settled that that comment was made in a short footnote, referring back to the Miller decision in 1939