Drake University - Quax Yearbook (Des Moines, IA)

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Compus SIT Could We Compleiely The Drake Mound adorns the front campus lawn in front of the Olmsted parking lot. It was added to campus as part of a project to make the campus more identifiable and accessable for visitors of Drake. The Olmsted parking lot was converted this year into a paid parking lot. This created controversy among the student body, especially those women living in the Moorehouse resident hall. Only time will determine the effectiveness of the lot and whether or not it is cost effective. The Elmwood elementary school was demolished after serving Drake as storage space for the last several years. The space will now be used for extra parking. The lot where the school building stood will be sold to a business. hioh I ' e Do Without? S+:

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esscay ulvlosquiios Don'T was returning from a weekend trip to the west coast, headed back to school in Iowa, wishing for another day in Northern California. I had spent four days in the company of old and new friends, progressive people with an ope- ness to the world. As I ventured down the Dallas airport terminal, an electric passenger car announced, Please step to the side. I dodged the cart and found myself directly in front of a white sheet of mural paper which read in big black letters, Quarantine AIDS victims, mos- quitos don't wear condoms. I found the sign irritating as well as amusing. Could these people really be- lieve this? I felt well read on the disease as I had completed a mini-course on AIDS at school. I knew mosquitos wer- en't probable mechanisms for transmit- ting the disease. It became clear to me that some people were still making as- sumptions based on ignorance. Even reputable research groups like Master's and Johnson were leading the American public astray. I spotted the small group of people responsible, they were attempting to se- duce weary travelers into signing a peti- tion calling for the quarantining of AIDS victims. Where did they think they would send them - some Leper's colony in Hawaii? On the sideline, I was able to interpret the argument to quarantine stemmed from the belief that all AIDS victims were homosexual, immoral scoundrels who didn't deserve rights to a normal life. It occurred to me this quasi- religious group had a distorted concep- tion of saving humankind. I crawled in- side their minds for a moment and heard their logic, Isolate persons with AIDS and destroy the decadence of the zorh century, AIDS, the root of all evil. I-Iardly. I walked past the sign and then stopped. I felt the need to defend my point of view. I felt a calling to illumi- nate the closeminded assemblage with an educated rebuttal. I wanted to set the record straight for them - for myself. Foolishly, I thought they would at least listen to meg and, with some blind faith of my own, I hoped they might come to accept their blunder and might stop ex- ploiting their nonsensical notions. I hesitated, unsure if I had the confin- dence to take verbal action. Then some- thing inside me nudged. I did an about face and headed back in the direction from which I had just come. A rather tall, plain-looking woman stood expression- less in front of me. I approached her in a low key, unthreatening way, prepared to stand up for myself and those with the disease. I opted to get straight to the point, and in a one sentence statement politely said, Ma'm, it isn't possible for mosquitos to transmit the AIDS virus. She looked straight through me, refus- Weor Condoms ing to make eye contact and said, That's your opinion. My hopes that she might listen vanished. To her, I was invisible. I lost my energy to continue further with the conversation. I knew she wouldn't hear unless I agreed with her. How could she push more hysteria into an already confused public? She and the Master's and Johnson report! I didn't hate her, but I did hate what she stood for - an un- willingness to open herself up to the fact tthat she might be wrong. Suddenly it dawned on me the importance of receiv- ing new ideas receptively. Roots of un- derstanding remain buried until we or someone else uncovers the soil which buries them. We may then choose to ig- nore the overturned soil and let it dry, in effect killing the roots. Or, we can culti- vate the soil and grow in it. Growth is derived through understanding. Until then, we are ignorant. Ignorance feeds fear, and fear leads to fallacious action. The problem lies not in the unknown, but rather in untangling the overwhelm- ing amount of roots available to us. But once the roots are uncoiled and digested, we are then led toward enlightenment. I remembered what my friend had said to me when I saw her a few months earli- er. She had recently graduated from Stanford University. Educated yes, but still naive in some areas like anyone else. She recounted to me a trip she took to New York with friends that year. They stayed in an apartment which belonged to the lover of one of the friend's de- ceased uncle. She said to me, Nobody actually came out and asked how he died, but we speculated. We were thankful to have a place to stay without having to pay for a hotel, but we couldn't help thinking her uncle had died of AIDS. I felt weird being there, like if I touched something, I might get AIDS. I reassured my older friend that she was safe and would not find herself infected. I shared with her what I knew of the mysterious disease, and she was glad to better understand some of its fal- lacies. I played her sage and felt triumph knowing I had helped to assist in the giving of understanding. But less than a year before, I had been as green as the next. It was June, 1987 and I was working in the mountains of Yellowstone National Park. I had become friends with a 27- year old man from California. We were playing basketball one afternoon and he seemed unusually fatigued so we sat down for awhile. I-Ie put his hand behind his left ear and felt a small lump. Shortly thereafter, when he told me about it, we half joked that he had AIDS. I-Ie wasn't gay, and as far as I knew, he wasn't a user of IV drugs. We laughed at our de- mented diagnosis. The next morning he came to work with dark circles under his eyes and what looked like a bad case by Carla Weiner of adolescent acne on his face. It was obvious something was seriously wrong. I-Ie came over to me and said, I feel awful. I'm really tired, I've lost weight, I have a rash all over my body and a lump behind my ear. I think I better go to the health clinic. My heart stopped. My God, I thought to myself, he really does have AIDS. I had lightly skimmed through brochures on the disease, and his ailments fit al- most perfectly into the list of symptoms. At noon-time the clinic called the restau- rant and reported his condition. He did have disease. I-Ie had the Chicken Pox. I was eased with the knowledge of a sickness I was familiar with. But seconds later my paranoia - society's paranoia - crept back inside of me. I began envi- sioning that his bout with the pox was the first sign of his immune system breaking down and that he had AIDS as I initially feared. It didn't help that I was reading The Metamorphoisisn by Kaf- ka at the time. I wasn't thinking ratio- nally and most of all, I didn't understand what it meant to have AIDS. I was hesi- tant to go and visit my quarantined friend. I had drawn premature conclu- sions based on ignorance which, in this case, falsely fed off the fact that Geoff was from California, a state known to have many reported AIDS cases. A day later, another waitress came down with the chicken pox. I still think about the episode. I played a large role in caring for Geoff, able to empathize with the discomforts of ill- ness away from home. To this day, I don't know how that lady in the Dallas airport could justify shipping a bunch of sick people to some foreign land where they undoubtedly would suffer and die alone. I never probed her with the possi- bility that someone close to her could someday acquire the disease. I regret that I didn't question her more. I-Iowever, through her ignorance, I learned some- thing about myself. She unburied my courage to challenge, exposing my own roots, which left me both vulnerable and victorious. I have one question now about the in- cident at Yellowstone which, I am not completely able to answer. It is this, if Geoff would have been diagnosed as having AIDS, how would I have treated him differently? With ignorance and fear, or with understanding and compas- sion?

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Where VVe're from ond I-low Much We Spent to Get Here 5 Geogroohio Breokdown -v-Q fm X 1 International ioverseasi 102 Q . ' at ,O 0 N Source: Home address tile ot current students ii A as ot 2!23!88-Ottice ot the Registrar. The Rising Cost of Droke Tuition 193565 001000 tees-ev 310100 1987-ee 0 10 000 1988-ee 0 11 000 09K S 9,500 310K 310,500 5511K 311,500 5512K