"News editors bid fond (?) farewell"

News editors bid fond (?) farewell

Today’s News is the last issue for senior editors Bruce Larrick and Lee Stephenson. Tuesday’s news released the new ’70-’71 product.

By Bruce Larrick Editor (ret.)

Four years of "aesthetic" involvement with BGSU are about to end for me. And the only thing I can think to say to my to my fellow students is a paraphrase of what Frank Zappa once said to an audience:

If your children have any brains at all, they’ll murder you in your sleep.

A revolution is sweeping the country. It has come about because intelligent and perceptive people have recognized that our society's institutions are no longer viable.

These institutions have become their own reason for being and no longer serve the people; they repress them.

The legions of the revolution are the blacks, the young people, the chicanos and the Indians. But the typical Bowling Green student seems somehow immune to this revolution. The Bowling Green student is rooted in the tradition of the student of the 1960s, when everything was fine and you went to college so you could get a good job.

You're thinking right now, "But what about last week. What about the New University? Haven’t we shown we’re committed to change?"

The sad fact is it took the deaths of four Kent State students to shock you from your lethargy. And chances are after this quarter you’ll return to your inanimate form. How many deaths will it take next time? Four? Ten? Fifty?

There’s a goddamn world out there, and you better come to terms with it. That world is being dominated by an imperialistic country-a country that bombs Southeast Asians with impunity, that maintains colonies known as black ghettos within its own borders, that supports fascist dictators throughout Latin America because it is afraid of the people, that possesses the capability to destroy the world several times over and still produces more weapons, that has perpetrated some of the worst crimes this century has known.

That's your country.

And yet you have a safe, secure haven known as Bowling Green State University to protect you from this world. These four years in this bastion of mediocrity have been the most secure of my life.

You don’t have to make decisions in this haven. You let someone else (usually the administration) make them for you. It isn’t that you don’t have the capability to make the decisions; it’s that you don’t want to.

You are forfeiting the very thing the revolutionaries are fighting for; the right for everyone in this society to make his own decisions and control his own destiny without some idiot known as a politician sticking his nose in.

Right now I'll bet all of our so-called radicals are thingk ,"Oh, boy. He's really giving those straight people hell. Right on!"

I mean the "radicals" more than anyone. Begin radical is more than saying "Right on." It’s more than growing your hair long, smoking dope and cursing the administration.

It's doing something to back up your beliefs, and I haven’t seen our "radicals" do anything since the only radical Bowling Green ever had got busted and left-Charley Tabaako.

Because of this you’re worse than the average student here. You stale certain beliefs, but don’t live them. That's known as being a hypocrite.

Bowling Green students are allowing this institution and others in society to dehumanize them. This dehumanizing process will continue until you are nothing more than a vegetable.

That’s when your children will kill you, although you might as well be dead anyway. That, my friends, is known as euthanasia.


By Lee Stephenson
Managing Editor

Activists here are straining hard to record for posterity the formula which has caused the Bowling Green revelation of the last two weeks.

There is even some hope by an enterprising few that the mysterious substance can be bottled and sold along with testimony from past unsuccessful BG activists. Who could deny the worth of a wonder-potion that would cause a group of thousands to rise from total dormant waste?

The truth is that our leaders (and followers) were here all the time. It took four deaths though, to make the needed impact. For eight months people have shrugged their shoulders unknowingly at the lack of support for important issues, finally deciding there simply wasn’t leadership on the campus. Fortunately that fairy tale has fallen by the wayside.

The leaders and followers have risen, and the result is a product of education in the recent days far superior to everything consumed in two-and one-half quarters.

Unfortunately, a large share of our student and faculty populace feel at rest with the Kent State deaths ( and those occurring in Southeast Asia every day) after listening to their one Williams Hall gathering or carrying their candle. They’ve done their part and now they'll sink back into "Joe college" and "Sally sorority" oblivion. It's too hard to finish the thought kindled by our strike and too easy to slip back from a commitment.



Alarmists have screamed it for so long, the majority find it hard to believe, but can we go on? How can we all slip back to the old and avoid the mass individual
commitment that is needed to rearrange the priorities of this country?

How can our "young ladies" find it so easy to send our country's men to die and how can our graduating males agree to kill? They'll use every out and "screw your buddy" technique they can muster to make someone else die for them but in the end many will go and always for the wrong reasons-thinking they are serving the country.

It's time our people were introduced to the myth.

The myth that this country is really fighting for the South Vietnamese and not for our economy, that our soldiers really believe what they are doing is right (Bob Hope was booed by thousands on his Christmas tour when he tried to defend the war), that our nation's leaders are really the truthful good guys the VFW believes they are.

How can anyone believe a president who nominates two racists for the highest court in the land and when denied by Congress counters saying the Senate is full of bigots who are prejudiced against any man from the South?

Do you all really believe that the President is working "with all due speed" when he realizes by trading a few deaths a day he can save our pig economy? Some of our nation's distinguished Congressmen were quoted at the beginning of the Vietnam War to the effect that a nice small war without too much killing and destruction would certainly be good for the economy and their state's defense contracts.

Do we realize what we’re dealing with? That the same political greed and lack of human value that characterizes "Bowling Green justice" is running our country?

Are we really alarmists or does the existence of a human society hang in the balance, Right Now?

If Spiro is real, if he really believes what he’s saying and isn't just trying to keep the American myth alive, he has to be the most clear-cut warning ever to doubters. Do you want that pig mind and war-monger to run your country?

The point, if it’s not too late for us already, is that you've made a start. The issues are too important to wait- too important for you to finish that Chemistry 100 course so you can go on to a career and make napalm (either literally or figuratively).

The war is only one of a host of problems that will kill this country. Any one is probably sufficient to eventually bring our demise--racial inequality, the environment, the ghettos, our military-industrial complex educational system- but if we can’t rise not to end "death for a buck" economy, it's over.

Please don't stop.