Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 7

DETROIT FREE PRESS Monday, March 15, 71 7-A Points of View An Added Dimension Of Insight on the News Please Let Us Heed 6 Red China Unlikely To Step into Laos "Let this column be a medal for Verna Mize. There are so few victories these days." 'Saul Friedman Lake Superior should stop. Around here, however, agreement does not necessarily mean action. "In those two years 40 million tons of waste have gone into the lake," Verna Mize said. "And it's still going in, 67,000 tons a day, every day." She could see in her mind's eye that unending waterfall of gray gunk hitting the lake, as if beating it to death.

In naming the lake, the white men meant to show only that it was superior to all the other lakes, not to the men themselves. They presumed they could demand that it submit to their embrace. The Indians, content to simply live with it, used to call its waterfalls "Laughing Water." Now, the white man's waterfall at Silver Bay brings Verna Mize to tears. Like the Indians who found God in living things, she says: "That lake has a touch of the divine." Prim, brown-haired and middle-aged, with a nasal Midwestern twang, Verna Mize was born and raised in Houghton County, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. And although she and her husband, a retired Marine, do not live there anymore, they return on vacations to see the lake.

"My love for the lake goes back to when I first saw it as a little girl, and the sight of it made me cry," she said. "Now, on vacations, when we drive 02 in Indochina, Washington and Peking have had secret understandings. American and Chinese diplomats have been in constant com-munication in Warsaw. They have managed, in each crisis, to bridge the great gulf between the two nations. True, the Chinese diplomats have been rigid as steel beams.

Often, they have spoken less for the sake of the listening Americans than for the dogmatists back on mainland China who read the transcripts. Still, the formal talks and informal contacts have cleared up misunderstandings, prevented miscalculations and provided a clear channel of communication. Measured by agreements, the Warsaw meetings have been a dismal failure. Yet there has been communication. Even during the long intervals between sessions, the channel remains open.

The Chinese may deliver a protest note, for example, that a U.S. plane has intruded into their air space. Or the U.S. might notify the Chinese that a new satellite is scheduled to pass over their territory. As a diplomatic courtesy, copies of Senate hearings on China were delivered to the Chinese embassy in Warsaw.

After a U.S. plane mistakenly hit Chinese territory across the Indochina border, the exchange of messages was at least circumspect if not conciliatory. At any time, the U.S. embassy in Warsaw need merely pick up the telephone to make contact with the Chinese embassy. Footnote: In 1966, U.S.

Ambassador John Gronouski tried to put the Warsaw talks on a more friendly, informal basis. "Let's forget about Taiwans and Vietnams," he urged, "and sit down and have a few drinks and tell each other about our private lives." The press needn't be told about it, he offered, if this would spare the Chinese embarrassment. But the invitation was declined. si BY SAUL FRIEDMAN Fret Prew Washington Stiff WASHINGTON Verna Mize will not like this. She does not want to endanger her modest government job.

She does not seek personal publicity. So let it quickly be said that she has done absolutely nothing to embarrass her employer, to violate government regulations or to detract from her work. And the publicity she seeks is not for her benefit. It is for her girlhood friend Lake Superior, a vast and beautiful expanse that the Indians, with their instinctive wisdom and their humility toward the things of nature, called "Gitche Gumee," or "Great Water." Verna Mize came to see me on a cold, rainy Saturday when she would have been better off in her comfortable home in one of Washington's suburbs. Like someone appealing on behalf of a loved one, she asked: "Will you help me save Lake Superior?" A couple of years ago she might have been indulged, and ignored, as a well-meaning nut.

But lately, nuts like Verna Mize sweet ladies, longhaired lawyers and our own children have been doing more good for all of us than the rational, parlorizing liberals who take the measure of their enemies with fondue forks. We should all be such nuts. Verna Mize said she wished to put a stop to the pollution of Lake Superior by the Reserve Mining a huge iron-ore producer at Silver Bay, owned by the Armco and Republic steel companies. FOR NEARLY 15 YEARS, over the objections of environmentalists who were ahead of their time, Reserve has been dumping millions of tons of ore waste into Lake Superior. Two years ago, as conservation became politically chic, and when the other Great Lakes were already dead or dying, virtually everyone agreed that the dumping into mm 0 March 3, 1971 Dear Sirs: 1 Isle of Culebra on U.S.

Navy Such Nuts around that bend where you can see the lake for the first time, I still get goose flesh." She was there in 1967, sitting In a boat with a friend and saying how wonderful it was that at least one lake was left where you could dip out a drink of clean water. He told her she would not be able to do that for long. And when she asked why, he took her to Silver Bay. If she could have jumped in and held back that waterfall, Verna Mize would have done so, even as the risk of her life, I think. Instead, she began a lonely crusade to move the Washington bureaucracy to action.

And it became an obsession. She has written more than 2,000 letters to politicians, scientists, newspapers, reporters, federal, state and local officials, and anyone else who could help. She cajoled congressional staff members to spur their bosses to action. She unearthed facts from obscure journals to make her case. And she even submitted a well-thought-out plan for disposal on land of the ore wastes.

Last summer she spent her vacation going from town to town in the Upper Peninsula getting more than 5,000 signatures on her own petition to the President to save the lake. And she carries with her, wherever she goes, a bottle of water from the lake at Silver Bay. It looks like dirty milk, and she uses it in her appeals. In one recent week she spoke personally with the governors of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, when they visited Washington, and with William D. Ruckelshaus, the head of the new Environmental Protection Agency.

Like senators and congressmen who have heard her appeals, the governors and Ruckelshaus could not refuse Verna Mize their pledges of help. And for the first time she has begun to think she will win. If she does and even if she doesn't let this column be a medal for Verna Mize. There are so few victories these days. Dearborn.

an 1 jfo Si. -'y fin ft i nwmn If Vic Tanny can work for Nancy Silveri, we can work for you. WASHINGTON Chinese Premier Chou En-lai's dramatic visit to Hanoi adds new menace to the rumblings that Red China might intervene in Laos as she did once before in Korea. The North Vietnamese have hesitated to bring the Chinese too deeply into the Indochina conflict. Now they are turning openly to i Peking for support.

Nevertheless, the national intelligence estimate, which guides President Nixon, discounts the danger of Chinese intervention. Here is the reasoning behind the optimistic estimate: The North Vietnamese are reluctant to increase their dependence upon Peking, which would upset Moscow, which has furnished most of North Vietnam's military hardware. The Hanoi rulers have always tried to walk a delicate tightrope between Moscow and Peking. The U.S. view, therefore, is that the Hanoi threat to involve the Chinese in Indochina is a bluff.

There has been no sign of military movement inside China toward the Indochina border. Although Peking has deployed a large force in South China, these divisions apparently haven't been reinforced or put on alert since the Laos invasion. The U.S. estimate is that a thaw, rather than a new freeze, is beginning to develop in Chinese-American relations. The hard-liners have been replaced by pragmatists in many key positions in Peking.

There is cautious optimism that Washington's friendly overtures to Peking may bring a positive response. The warnings that preceded Chinese involvement in the Korean War were far more ominous than the current warnings over Laos. There is little doubt in Washington that China would send "volunteers" to stop an outright U.S. invasion of Laos or North Vietnam, but no such operation is planned. Throughout the U.S.

military involvement SAN JUAN Elsewhere ecologists worry about off-shore oil slicks. On Culebra, a satellite-island of Puerto Rico, men worry about off-shore explosives. The U.S. Navy uses the island and its surrounding cays for gunnery and bombing practice. But so many of the shells are still live that the Navy itself calls them dangerous.

Scuba divers or swimmers, poking around for sea shells, may bump into these shells and die. Enter the ecologists. The Navy has been using detonation teams to find and explode the live shells each one of which, now that it is under water, will kill an average of 20 pounds of fish. Ecologists want the shells towed out to deep water, exploded where they will not disturb the shallow breeding areas and reef-patterns. This dispute is one of many focused on this 'tiny island.

Under a 1941 World War II mandate, the Navy has been allowed to use the beaches and out three miles into the water, for gunnery practice, though this is an inhabited island with a yacht basin and many tourist possibilities. The mayor of the island has long protested the Navy's highhanded ways buzzing yachts that get into the area, even when there is no practice going on, clearing beaches, taking down structures that get in their way. The Independence Party of Puerto Rico hit on a form of protest in January which brought some clergy and Quaker teams over to the island. They put up a makeshift chapel on the WASHINGTON It seems hard to escape one of these two conclusions: Either activist college students simply don't understand the American democratic process; or those who talk most about what college students think don't know what they are talking about. They say that most activist students feel that "there is no longer anything they can do to influence public policy." And because the political system has, as these students see it, failed to heed their views, their faith in the democratic process is wearing mighty thin.

A Harvard senior recently summed it up this way: "We've worked in election campaigns, talked to congressmen, staged street demonstrations and even smashed shop windows, but nothing has happened." Another student, explaining why he and his classmates are reluctantly and with some despair going back to their books, contends that they can't begin to participate in the normal political process "until they see evidence that the system will respond to their attitudes." These campus leaders, who say they are dismayed because they have accomplished nothing, simply don't Tealize how much they have accomplished. And what about this proposition that students can't bring themselves to work through the political system until they are sure their views are going to prevail? What kind of democracy would that be if no citizen took part in it unless he could know in advance he would win? But there is absolutely no reason why today's young people, and especially the activist college students, should feel that their tre Tiny Takes System The I'm only 5,3" and small-boned at that, out hjr the tiae I graduated from nursing school last June I vas up to 165 pounds and vore a size 16 dress. site of an old beach shrine, and held interfaith services. The chapel was dismantled by the Navy. They put it up again, and again it was dismantled.

But now the beach had to be cleared with teargas, and the protestors used a molotov cocktail to burn down a sentry box. An eye for an eye the new box for the old chapel. The Navy's attitude, of course, is that this work must be done, to protect "the free world," including Culebra itself. The protestors answer that the freedom they want most is freedom from the shells that zip around their ears, clog the reefs, and bomb the cays away. If the job must be done, why doesn't the Navy shell the shores of Maine, and see how "the natives" up there like it? Tourist books used to talk of "island para-discs' in the Caribbean.

There are none left. No get-aways. No escape from reality. The Bahamas are full of black unrest. Havana is no longer the place for a naughty night out-all the prostitutes and gamblers have moved over to San Juan.

And San Juan itself is racked by political troubles, with terrorist bombings in the tourist section and all around Navy installations. The issues haunt one, wherever one goes, even to the little "offbeat" place like Culebra issues of the military vs. civilians, shells vs. seashells, bombs vs. fish, targets vs.

beaches, sentry boxes vs. chapels, power vs. its clients, imperialism vs. the colony. Life against death.

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Soaetiaes I'd put it right back on. Vic Tanny. So far I're lost 35 pounds, including 6H at the vaist and 5" trom ay hips. I 'a going to lose a few more pounds and inches for the beach this aunaer, hut 1'a already wearing a size 10 with -ease. My boyfriend wust be delightod, he's ay fiance nov.

Please give ay instructors a special pat on the they vere really patient with ae, and often their encourageaent was the thing: that kept ae going. Thanks a lot, Nancy Silver! ing on a younger, healthier figure, you'll find yourself developing stamina and a more responsive body. Now's a perfect time to find out what Vic Tanny is all about. For only $10 each, you and a friend can enjoy 20 visits apiece with Vic Tanny's 2020 Plan. 1971 is the year of the Beautiful Body: join the Club! i -i i Hasn't Failed College Students Detroit Q3 or yourself! mendous exertions to influence affairs have failed.

Today's college students have done more to shape public opinion and public policy on three vital matters than any group of citizens has done in so short a period. Not entirely by themselves, of course. Many adults worked to the same end, but throughout 1968 and 1969 students spearheaded the mass movement which did most to turn the country around on the Vietnamese war, to reform the draft and to bring Congress nearer to experimenting with a volunteer army. That's a tremendous political achievement. Some students seem to think that the "system" failed to receive their views.

They're wrong. One index of how much they won is the public testimony before Congress by Secretary of State William Rogers that President, Nixon couldn't use U.S. ground troops again in Cambodia or in Laos even if he wanted to do so because "public opinion wouldn't permit it." This is impressive evidence of the power of public opinion, generated to a large extent by young people. Our political institutions can and must be made more responsive to public demands, and both young people and older adults are beginning to show it can be done. "What do we do next?" asks the Harvard senior.

There are three things for college students to do next: (1) Help create an articulate public opinion on crucial issues; (2) Work to elect public officials who broadly share their purposes; (3) Keep clearly in mind that the democratic political process has not failed just because it hasn't yielded all they want at a given moment. 2020 Plan all Is available af all clubs except Livonia and Vic Tanny WW Birmingham 647-5800 GrossePointe 881-6161 Dearborn 561-3320 Livonia 476-1314 Warren 751-7100 Windsor 966-0610 Northland Area 541-3100 Pontiac 682-5040.