The city limits of Jackson, Scott City and Cape Girardeau touch each other. The combined population of the three cities is currently estimated at about 54,000, All of Cape Girardeau County plus Scott City is about 71,000.

A population of 71,000 would make us the seventh largest metropolitan area in Missouri following 1. greater St. Louis, 2. greater Kansas City, 3. Springfield, 4. greater Columbia, 5. St. Joseph and 6. Joplin.

With a retail trade shopping area of 250,000-plus people ... it's no wonder so many large chain stores have picked the greater Cape Girardeau area in which to expand.

So when people ask me about Cape Girardeau ... I say it is located about half way between St. Louis and Memphis on the Mississippi River and is a community of over 70,000 people. If I really want to extend the conversation, I say it is the "home of 100,000 geese (across the river during goose season) and 8,000 Indians (SEMO Indians, that is). Now you know something about marketing.

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St. Louis' new Citizen of the Year, William E. Maritz, accepted his honor by calling for the reunification of St. Louis City with the county.

Maritz said joining the two would make the St. Louis region vital in the new millennium.

Maritz told the group that if the city and county would reunite:

* The city would become the sixth largest in the nation, with a combined population of 1.5 million people, instead of its current 350,000.

* The city would have the fourth-largest land mass in the country, with 570 square miles, rather than its current 62 square miles.

* The city would drop to 148th place in the nation for serious crime. Currently it is ranked among the worst, he said.

"Instead of being known as a community which is racially and economically divided with profound disparities, why not become a community where we forget race, color, creed and gender and become known as a big, important, open-minded, generous, kind and forward-looking, 21st century American city?" asked Maritz.

"Why not forget our pettiness, our animosities, our anxieties? Why not become one for the benefit of all?"

Maritz, chairman of the board of the performance improvement company Maritz Inc., is credited with creating the Laclede's Landing entertainment district and the former Veiled Prophet Fair, now called Fair Saint Louis. He also was instrumental in keeping the Admiral in St. Louis and creating the promenade on the eastern side of the Gateway Arch.

Maritz said after the speech that he chose this acceptance topic mindful that every other living recipient of the community service award would be sitting with him. -- Excerpts from an April 7 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story by Carolyn Tuft.

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Freshmen conservative on sex: Aside from the predictable bags of unwashed clothes and as yet-to-be-read books, this year's college freshmen may have also brought home some surprises for spring break: conservative views on casual sex, abortion and other issues.

A comprehensive survey of this year's college freshmen finds a host of areas where young adults are taking decidedly different turns on issues than previous generations of students. From the lowest support ever for casual sex and keeping abortion legal, to questions of law and order and even their goals in life, the differences are sometimes wide.

"We have members who are more conservative than their parents," says Chris Gillott, chairman of Pennsylvania State University's Young Americans for Freedom.

Gillott says some of his peers go home and "come out of the conservative closet" to their families, igniting heated discussions on topics from Social Security to affirmative action.

Young adults are looking for a return to religious or more traditional moral values after the legacy left by the baby boomers, he says.

A few examples:

* Only 40 percent of freshmen agree that it's OK for two people who like each other to have sex, even if they have only known each other a short while. That's down from 42 percent in 1997, and an all-time high of 52 percent in 1987, according to the study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles.

* In 1970, 56 percent of the freshmen surveyed showed strong opposition to capital punishment. By 1998, less than a quarter of them believed the penalty should be abolished. Seventy-three percent of freshmen said there is too much concern for criminals -- an almost 50 percent increase since the early 1970s when only about half of those surveyed felt that way.

* Only half of this year's freshmen backed efforts to keep abortion legal -- a record low figure after six years on the decline. Support for laws protecting abortion peaked in 1990 at 65 percent.

"We have pro-choice students on our campus who still say they would never have an abortion," says Ryan Gruber, a senior at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who used to head the school's college Republicans. "Even if they don't want to push their message on others, there is less tolerance on a personal level." -- The Associated Press

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Dishonorable argument: Last week President Clinton compared his efforts to pass hate-crimes legislation, which would create additional penalties for crimes motivated by the victim's homosexuality, with NATO's efforts to halt Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic's atrocities in Kosovo. It is strange for the president to compare the handful of random murders in America each year that are based on sexual orientation to mass murder by government authorities in Rwanda. Even as Clinton lectured against "people who thought they only counted if they had somebody to look down on" and actions that "demonize someone else who is different from us," he sought to associate opponents of his hate crimes proposal with "the old, haunting demons that are hard to root out of the human spirit" and "the persistence of old, even primitive, hatreds."

This is vintage Clinton. Only he would try to explain his blundering Kosovo policy by linking it to a poorly conceived federal bill to treat certain crime victims as more important than others. To make matters worse, the president announced a new "public-private partnership" to "change the mind, the heart, and the habits of our people when they're young--to keep bad things from happening." This "tolerance" education program would target middle-school students with a pro-gay message using the might of, among others, AT&T, "Court TV," the Anti-Defamation League, and the departments of education and justice. President Clinton also announced an order to compel colleges to generate data on hate crimes, claiming, without citing any evidence, that "we have significant hate crimes problems" there.

Meanwhile, thankfully, justice proceeds in Wyoming without such federal meddling. Russell Henderson was sentenced to two consecutive life terms after pleading guilty to last year's kidnapping and murder of Matthew Shepard, a homosexual college student. Attorneys on both sides said Henderson will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison. Wyoming has no special hate-crimes penalties for crimes motivated by a victim's homosexuality. It does not need them. Rather, Henderson will be punished, as he should be, according to the idea that every citizen deserves equal protection under the law. This is the principle at stake in this fight -- the principle that argues forcibly against, not for, hate crimes law. -- Washington Update

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Ballot language decisive? A widespread view inside your state capitol, among both Republicans and Democrats, is this: Defeat for the right-to-carry measure can be laid at the feet of Secretary of State Bekki Cook in her rewritten ballot language. I don't say that with any malice, but rather as a statement of observable fact. The effort was lost when our courts ruled that the secretary of state has the power to write ballot language, even on a bill in which such language is specified, passed by the General Assembly and referred to a vote of the people. (The issue over which language would prevail got as far as the court of appeals before time ran out to take it all the way to the Supreme Court before the election.)

Here is the ballot language we in the Legislature approved when we passed the bill with overwhelming bipartisan support from nearly all areas of the state:

"Shall state or local law enforcement agencies be authorized to issue permits to law-abiding citizens at least twenty-one years of age to carry concealed firearms outside their home for personal protection after having passed a federal and state criminal background check and having completed a firearms safety training course approved by the Missouri Department of Public Safety?"

Here is the Secretary of State's rewritten language the courts said must appear on last week's ballot:

"Shall sheriffs, or in the case of St. Louis County, the chief of police, be required to issue permits to carry concealed firearms to citizens who apply if various statutory requirements are satisfied?

"Because of the discretion given to local law enforcement to verify the accuracy of applications, the cost are uncertain. Application fees are estimated to cover most costs for the first three years. Subsequently, local governments, as a whole, may incur costs from $500,000 to $1,000,000 annually, not covered by fees."

Such a difference is surely worth the bare, two-percent margin between winning and losing, and probably much more. -- Peter Kinder's April 11 column

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Where credit is due: President Clinton is taking credit for the latest report that welfare rolls are shrinking. His Saturday radio address announced that just over 7.6 million Americans were receiving public assistance at the end of December, compared to 8 million at the end of last September and 14.3 million in 1994.

Welfare reform is working, but the president ought to be giving credit to the faith-based and private organizations that are succeeding in helping welfare families without federal intervention. Last year, members of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois repaired and gave away just under 1,000 cars, mostly to single mothers who could not accept job offers without transportation. Project Heritage, a faith-based ministry in Denver, is renovating 63 apartments to provide temporary housing for 200 people moving from welfare to work.

The president, ignoring the lesson taught by these organizations, proposed $1 billion more for welfare rolls. -- Washington Update

ALSO ... it's the state governments, not the federal, that have set the example and created the success stories of reducing the number of people on the welfare rolls. AND ... the unemployment rate is low while employers seek employees.

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.