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Show Monday, August 23, 1982, THE HERALD, Provo, 15 Utah-P- age The Herald, its readers, syndicated columnists and Opinions cartoonists discuss vital issues kill The Herald Comments CherishedQnesI Vlfafch for Our Beginning today, and continuing through the 0 next week, more than children school public will be returning to classrooms in Central Utah 60,-00- school districts. In addition, during the NEVER PAID if I 1MJULL returning or starting fii ,t's ta next month, another 31,000 college students will be classes at either Brigham Young University or Utah Ijpti A PERMANENT Technical College at Provo-Ore- This means more than 90,000 pupils will be travel- ing to and from classes, either by walking, riding in buses, or in automobiles driven by themselves, their parents or friends. For three months local residents have experienced a reprieve from the much heavier school-seaso- n traffic. But beginning today that reprieve ends. More than 28,000 Alpine School District students $1? Paul Harvey Young Want To Beat Swords Into Plowshares I our military draft. The Justice Department in recent weeks sought to scare reluctant young men Into signing up by prosecuting a few who did not. It didn't work. Registration has since declined instead; sharply! There is presently prevalent an antipathy to war like nothing our country has experienced before. And in some other countries, also. In late July Britain held in St. Paul's Cathedral what was intended to be a celebration of the successful recapture of the Falklands. It was no celebration. About There was no stirring martial music, no thanksgiving for the liberation of British subjects from the invaders, not one speech about how Britain "stood alone in defense of international law, freedom, democracy..." Instead the Archbishop of Canterbury referred to war as "a sign of human failure." The Queen, the Prime Minister, all were military leaders present of what tone the at pacifist aghast they had expected to be a victory party. Is there further evidence that war has gone out of style in the - ' 'A About 10,800 alertness for their cherished ones. Among the others who are helping to remind us of the increased need for caution, now that the students are returning, are members of the various law enforcement agencies and parents' organizations. Each of Utah County's three school districts has driving and safety chair- Provo Di- strict students begin classes tomorrow, and Nebo's more than 13,700 will start on Wednesday. By next Monday, all of the public school students in Juab, Wasatch, Sanpete and Utah Counties will be in classes. Those numbers aren't living, just figures-they- 're children and adults. They are our young our grandchilchildren, breathing women. Those chair- women, in cooperation with the Utah Highway dren, nieces and nephews, or brothers and sisters. Or they might be our neighbor's children-eith- er next door or two blocks away. We may not be able to Patrol, havi begun a combined campaign to in- crease awareness of traffic laws and dangers associated with school buses. They are filming public improve driving habits safety announcements for television on school safety. throughout the world, but we can begin by improving our own. And if we expect our neighbors to watch out for our children or cherished ones, we must prac Those announcements stress that all drivers are required by law to stop behind school buses when the flashing red lights and stop signs have been turned on at the rear of the bus. The Utah County Sheriffs Department also is cooperating in the effort. "It's a problem we're very concerned with and our people have written a lot of citations," the sheriff said. "We'll watch very closely this year, especially at the beginning of the year, to try and reeducate the motorists," he added. The Herald applauds these people for their efforts to remind us of the need for alertness during the season, and throughout the school year. The rest is up to each of back-to-scho- ol us who are drivers--t- o watch out for those many cherished ones. Donald Lambro We Are All 'Special Interests' worldwide negative reaction to Begin's bombing of Beirut? In other days his m. tice the same type of return to classes today. WASHINGTON ruthless forthrightness in seeking the total surrender of his nation s enemies would surely have been applauded. Not now. When Interior Secretary James Watt dared imply that Americans might have to fight for Middle East oil, he was tarred and feathered from left and right. Texas Congressman Ron Paul said, "The American people are tired of sacrificing themselves for the world; it never seems to help and the cost is now prohibitive." President Reagan has been stung by the implied criticism in the unanswered question: "How come less money for America's poor and more for El Salvador?" and Americans are George Washington's admonition that we should avoid foreign entanglements. Phil Dessauer says, "Liberate us from any more wars of liberation.. Has television contributed to a wider understanding of the futility of wars? TV has helped us to see that big wars are too devastating to contemplate and small wars are too debilitating to tolerate. - In the thebattle acover government spending, cusing finger is often pointed at the "special interests," a disembodied group that is always up to its elbows in the public trough. The problem with this scapegoat is that we are these special interests. With few exceptions, all of us receive or defend some government expenditure from which we benefit. Which brings us to the Amway Corporation's luxury hotel in Grand Rapids, Mich. Founded by its two brilliant and innovative chief executives, Jay Van Andel and Rich with annual sales DeVos, Amway is truly of mot! than $1.4 billion one of the great American success stories in private enterprise. Both men have been articulate and untiring apostles of the need to curb public spending and strengthen the private sector. As finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, DeVos often denounces federal giveaway programs. And Van Andel, who served as chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, once said that "everything that government gives to the people, it first takes away from them." Yet both men make no secret of the fact that the $38 million hotel and office complex that Amway is building in downtown Grand Rapids was in part helped along by a 1979 $3 million-plu- s Urban Development Action Grant for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. As we have reported, the UDAG program has helped build luxury hotel complexes and other lucrative private developments around the country. A House investigation once developer who quoted a called UDAG grants "the gravy in the deal." ral-esta- te real-esta- te legacy of the Carter admistra-tioUDAG's purpose is to provide cities with funds to help finance parking garages, access roads and other facilities to lure investors into building in areas in need of urban redevlopment. HUD calls this "leveraging" and says it produces jobs and investment that would not occur were it not for UDAG. Wallace Berger, a staff official on the Senate Ap A n, propriations subcommittee on HUD, says: "The intent was to use (UDAG) in cases where the private sector would not proceed without federal assistance." The General Accounting Office, however, has found cases where UDAG-- f unded development projects were committed to go ahead, regardless of whether the UDAG grants were available or not. According to an early HUD summary of the Amway project, "tne funds will be used to build ... a parking garage in the complex" adjacent to a dilapidated hotel Amway planned to refurbish. Renovation of the rundown Pantlind Hotel turned the graceful 1913 landmark into the luxurious Amway Grand Plaza, completed last Aug. 31. Amway's Grand Plaza West, a new hotel, will be finished next year. 700-spa- 390-roo- m According to Amway, the UDAG grant was used only to help build the parking facility, which is linked to the hotel by a pedestrian skyway over the street. Amway spokesman Jack Wilke told my assistant, Joel Thimell, that Amway lent the city an additional $5.3 million interest- - free to complete the garage. However, he says Amway eventually plans to buy it back from the city. Grand Rapids put together the development package that con- vinced Amway to enlarge upon their originally planned renovation of the Pantilind. The deal included a cut in property taxes for 12 years on the new construction, worth more than $10 million, plus the authorization of bonds that enabled Amway to borrow at lower interest rates. Approval of the UDAG grant to the city was also part of the deal. But was the UDAG grant crucial to ensure Amway's participation in the project? Would Amway have proceeded without the grant? We asked this of Liz Amante, an Amway public relations official. "I think yes," she replied. "The project was already underway. The decision (to go ahead) was made before the grant was received." Thus, this UDAG grant was not absolutely essential for this project to be completed. It was, apparently, "the gravy in the deal" for another special interest. pt . Copyright, 1982, United F eature Syndicate, Inc. Lee Roderick K w WASHINGTON Salvador em Recalls Stunning Democracy Display left -to"The threaten the aid everything possible people ... They knew the elections would be their complete ruin, but the people knew that too." Bishop Pedro A. Aparicio, vice president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference in El Salvador, recalls his country's stunning display of democracy early this year. "There were caravans of people on the highways and roads, with happiness, going to vote. Old ladies, pregnant women three were taken from the lines because they were giving birth, but they wanted to vote. It was something splendid, you just can't imagine. "If we Salvadorahs have a right to feel proud, it's of that day, that I patriotism, ... everyone voting.lesa learn should world think the son: that a country small in size and more population many times can be valiant than a country of thousands of kilometers and millions of people." Valiant Indeed is the word. On that day, March 28, a remarkable 84 percent of eligible voters defied guerrilla death threats and went to the polls in El Salvador, some walking a day and a half to get there. The rightist coalition government that emerged was not a happy reward for their courage. In the months since, It has moved at a snail's pace to reverse a pattern of human rights violations by government forces, and has responded grudgingly and belatedly to demands for land reform. Yet, as Congress grills ad- ministration officials on President Reagan's decision to continue U.S. aid to El Salvador, this fact must be kfpt In mind: Whatever the faults of the current leaders to Sao U.S. assistance from them almost certainly would open the way for a worse more repressive and government revolutionary Cuba, not just of revolutionary Nicaragua, oui aiso oi Salvador, removing rWQR TT- revolutionary -? Like it or not, El Salvador must be viewed in the context of the Marxist-le- d ferment sweeping the entire Caribbean region. On the tiny island of Grenada, a huge airfield now is under enstruction which Grenada's leftist leaders acknowledge will be used by Cuban and Soviet Russian anti-aircra- weapons ft already ring the field. Nicaragua totalitarian the fall of Somoza in takeover by aircraft Is fast becoming a Marxist dictatorship, President Anastasio July 1179 and the the Sandinista junta. It is instructive Carter T fScape from j Guatemala, in turn, is bordered on the north by Mexico. You already know who borders Mexico on the north. President Reagan's firmness In drawing a line across Central America, late as It was after Carter's follies, has dealt at least a temporary setback to the Marxist timetable for the Caribbean. But the more fundamental reason for not abandoning the government to remember that it was President Jimmy SZrr Hon- Even as U.S. attention is focused on El Salvador, a nasty border war is heating up between Honduras and Nicaragua. Honduras is bordered on the northwest by Guatemala, which has serious guerrilla problems of its own. to come to more Intractable power. El Salvador, revolutionary Guatemala and duras! -u- nder the same arguments now being pushed on President Reagan regarding El Salvador who cut off all aid to Somoza and opened the way for the second Cuba in our - hemisphere. Then, of course, there is Cuba itself, which spends more than 10 times as much on Its military, per capita, than any other country in the hemisphere. Cuba supplies the guns being fired by the "progressive forces" bent on turning Latin America into one huge, fraternal Marxist brotherhood. Listen to the prime minister of Grenada. Maurice Bishop, speaking In July 1980: "By 1981, we will be able to speak not Just of of El Salvador remains that democratic election early this year. It Is by no means an Ideal governnot even, regrettably, a ment very good one but It is the government freely chosen by the brave people of El Salvador. - - America absolutely should net abandon the people of El Salvador to whatever fate their government chooses to Inflict on them. Washington has every right to demand much greater progress In human rights and economic reforms. But these demands must be weighed against the enormous difficulties of effecting reform In the midst of a fierce guerrilla war. Those who believe these things can be accomplished better by allowing the overthrow of El Salvador's democratically elected rulers are living In a foot's paradise. |
