By Eric E. Clingan
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 4, 1997

On Wages, Drugs, China, Rednecks and

Arizona Daily Wildcat Eric E. Clingan

From someone who has an opinion on everything and a few grains of salt to take them all with:

If Tucson voters pass Proposition 202, setting the area's minimum wage at $7 per hour, this city will soon give a whole new meaning to the phrase, "Ghost town." Small businesses will close. Potential new businesses will never get started. Jobs will dry up quicker than the Santa Cruz River and taxes will rise like the summer temperature. In other words, if Proposition 202 passes, those who voted for it will be the city's sole inhabitants left here to live with it. The rest of us will call you sometime, from Phoenix.

The best deterrent to drug abuse is the threat that you may one day be tested for it. As a result of today's military and major corporations recognizing this fact, adult drug abuse has decreased significantly from 20 years ago. Still, teen-age drug abuse has shown yearly increases since 1992. If our government truly wishes to strike a blow in the war on drugs, one suggestion is to conditionally award financial aid such as Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans based on the passing of a randomly administered drug test sometime in the freshman year. This would have the added benefit of weeding out the pretenders from the serious students and would greatly enhance the classroom learning environment, while saving the government money that would otherwise have gone to support an illegal and society-crippling habit.

Nushawn Williams may have knowingly infected 28 high school-aged sex partners with the deadly HIV virus. Among the infected is a 13-year-old child. Ultimately he may be responsible for 70 more cases in a macabre, morbid sex-for-drugs spree in upstate New York. This week, PRIDE, an organization dedicated to studying teen drug abuse, released its annual survey showing one in ten kids aged 11-14 and one in four kids aged 15-18 used an illegal drug last month. Parents, brothers and sisters - WAKE UP! Your children and siblings are being pursued by heartless predators. Take a copy of each of these articles from last week's major newspapers and sit down and talk to each other. Indeed, lives depend on it.

The President of the University of Mississippi has prohibited the carrying of sticks into their football stadium in an effort to stamp out the traditional brandishing of the Confederate flag at Ole Miss football games. He should be ashamed of himself. If Jethro and Billy Bob choose to forgo shooting critters in their back yard or watching their weekly NASCAR event in the comfort of their trailer and, instead, decide to wallow in their ignorance by waving some ridiculous flag at a football game, let them. A university president better serves himself and the institution of learning by ignoring such sentiment. While it may be unfortunate that on "Family Weekend" at Ole Miss, half the stadium is rumored to be blood-related, and some local yokels still believe Orwell's Animal Farm is a seedy, pornographic novel, and some student flag-wavers think that the alphabet contains two extra "k's" preceding the letter "elemeno," this country and especially its universities should protect free speech, reject censorship and allow the ignorance of others to remind the rest of us just how far we have come.

Last election cycle the FBI and the CIA found evidence that the Chinese government was illegally attempting to influence some major political races. The current Clinton campaign finance scandal is so riddled with Chinese connections that White House tourists may soon be treated to fortune cookies upon their exit. In addition, many Chinese citizens who figure prominently in this scandal have returned to their homeland and are now more secluded than that country's own political prisoners. And now President Bill Clinton has honored the Chinese premier with a state visit, the first since before the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Coincidence?

Closer to home, our student government has endorsed a referendum which, if passed, will add a $40 per semester "fee" to students' bills. This "fee" is to be used to finance "50 percent" of the renovation of the Student Union. In doing this, our "leaders" proudly exclaim that they received "concessions" from the "administration" that the other "50 percent" of the funding will come from the university bookstore and the Student Union itself. However, since the bookstore and the Student Union will obviously "raise" their "prices" to cover the resulting "shortfall" in their "profits," aren't the students eventually stuck paying "100 percent" of the bill and, therefore, getting the "shaft?" Our "leaders" compare this initiative to the success of the Recreation Center "fee" and the KAMP Student Radio "fee." Yet, students may be refunded these monies if they choose. Since no provision exists to allow the refund of the $40 per semester Student Union "fee," shouldn't we call it what it more closely resembles, namely, a "TAX?" Does anyone not directly connected to our "student government" and the "administration" wonder exactly how much money is being spent to ram this "referendum" through, and why?

Salt, anyone?

Eric E. Clingan is a senior majoring in political science.