EDITORIALS
Never Forget That These Editorials Are The Opinion Of One Man
. And He May Be Wrong
Medical Care
One school of thought insists that it is
the duty of each citizen to make his own
arrangements for medical care, and at the
other extreme is the feeling that all med
' ical care should be the problem of the
government.
Somewhere between these extremes con
gress is groping for an answer to the cer
tainty of bankruptcy that haunts the aver
age person suffering any prolonged period of
bad health.
Few will argue that it is possible for any
but the very wealthy to make provision for
prolonged illness, and perhaps a few more
will insist that the “general, welfare” phase
of the Constitution extends to complete
medical care for every citizen.
Men of utter good faith on both sides of
this issue have been trying for a long time
to come up with an answer to this problem.
So far that answei* ‘his not been found.
Doctors — at least the vocal majority —
violently oppose government medicine, but
they, who are closest to the problem, have
offered no proposal worth serious consid
eration.
In the past generation modern medicine
and general national prosperity have made
it possible for doctors to earn a great deal
of money. The general practitioner of not
so-long ago made a living but not much
more than a comfortable living, and his fees
were based largely upon his patient’s ability
to pay.' A generation ago the relationship
between doctor and patient t^as Such tbk$>
few secrets — financial or medical existed
between them.
The doctor of that era treated a large
percentage of his patients in their home,
avoiding the expense of hospital care. When
the family purse got empty the doctor kept
coming, handing opt medicine from his little
black bag. Today medicine performs miracles
that those pills from the doctor’s bag could
not a generation ago, but they are expen
sive, if effective, tf , [
Each of us wants nothing but the very
latest and best medicine when we or a
member of our family are sick. This is ex
pensive.
Government has stepped into the ho'spital
program, but the cost of hospitalization has
gone higher in spite of the fact that wages
paid .hospital employees lag behind those in
most other work.
For the veteran and the indigent there
is free medical care already provided by
the tax payer. Equity questions the morality
and legality of a system that gives services
to one segment of the population *while
denying it to others.
Ninety per cent of us are medically in
digent; in that we could not afford a pro
longed illness even with • the most liberal
forms of private hospitalization insurance.
Unless an answer is found, and quickly the
pressure will force congress to move in that
direction most of us fear: Total tax-sup
ported medicine.
_:_ , , - , '
Balance Of Power
One of the worst threats represented by
the blind insistance of General DeGautle
on equal power is the possible return to the
system of fractional power of pre-World
War I times.
Horrible as the thought may seem to some
the balance of power in the world today is
Ijar easier to maintain than a generation ago,
when England, France, Germany, Austria,
Russia and Italy all felt themselves powerful
enough to maintain the peace.
The British for, 200 years had the impos
sible job of trying to maintain the balance
of power in Europe, which had ruled the
power has see-sawed between the United
States and Russia. This had made the task
far easier than when it was pecessary to
get a half dozen, or even at times a dozen
nations. placed in that delicate balance that
preserved the peace
For proud nations
many and England il
bow out and * ’
cently "secor
ns that were so tfr
rate” powers make
shied away
resentat
“install
*;
YoOUg
justice department
».
power for at least two adminlstrations.n
Old Thad, a fanatic from Pennsylvania,
who kept a negro mistress an
beside her in a Lancaster cemetery
Southern negroes “40 acres attd
His plan, which came very near
pushed through congress, was to confiscate
the lands of all Southerners who had serv
ed the Confederacy, give every negro a 40
acre tract and a mule and sell the remain
ing land at auction and apply the money de
rived from this on the war debt - (One can
not avoid contrasting this attitude with that
which has prevailed since the end of World
War II and in which congress has given
our ex-enemies and our sometime friends
more than one hundred billion dollars.)
Stevens was the venal, sick old man who
came within one vote of ithpeaching Presi
dent Andrew Johnson because Johnson re
fused to bow down to such a vengeance
against the South,
This generation s abuser of the Southern
negro is younger, but just as venal political
ly as his direct preceptor. Young Bobby
sends pious, mealy-mouthed racists such as
Martin King into the South to stir up the
negroes and to promise them things that
cannot be delivered —> and always with an
eye to the next election.
This hustler in preacher’s clothing man
aged to get himself in a Georgia jail just
in time for Big Brother Kennedy to make
the noble phone call that swung the negro
vote in time to lick Nixon.
The most difficult to understand aspect
-of the entire mess is die gullibility of so
many negroes. The negro usually has the
the ability to smell through such Obvious
schemes, and t6 recognize automatically
when he is being used by the white Hustler.
Happily, the majority of Southern negroes
do not swallowx this mixture of demagog
uery and greed; since nowhere yet has the
entire negro population followed this Pied
Piper with the political whistle.
Here in our own backyard in the most
recent election a negro candidate who had
swallowed the Washington bait, hook, line
and sinker, got less than one fourth of the
registered negro vote and less than 10 per
cent of the negro population even in the
face of threats against their person and
property refused to go along with an am
ateurish boycott of Kinston merchants that
was staged by this same politician with the
aid of a handful of poorly led school child
ren.'
But the vindictive press of the north,
while ignoring infinitely worse incidents in
their own backyard make glaring headlines
every time this whimpering, Psalm-chanting,
woman-chaising disciple of discord comes
deliberately into the South and provokes
trouble.
Given enough rope; the average hoggish
politician will eventually hang himself. We
have seen this happen to our own brand of
racists in the south, who ..were working the
exact opposite side of the street front
Messrs. Stevens and Kennedy.
These northern bigots, who use the negro
issue as a catspaw to snatch their jobs from
the political fires ''in their home districts,
are beginning to feel the hot breathe of their
own constituencies.
White - people in every city of any size
in the north have been swamped by the
flood 'of Southern'negroes who have child
ishly gone north to collect on the promises
made to them by these Kennedy types.
People who see the equity in their homes,
their investments jn public facilities going
down this welfare state drain are becoming
less concerned with the Southern race issue
and more concerned with the losses they
manufacture instruments of destruction.
Such a happy world is nowhere near, but
all things being equal the danger of a full
scale war breaking outis less now than it
was in 1914 or 1930; when small men with
great ambitions could not really grasp the
power of their enemies. Today this power
'm
r;j
in crime i*
statisticians
Each year more and more law enforce
ment agencies employ either the part or full
settees of a statistician, which means simp
ly that each year the compiled FBI figures
are representing more and more agencies.
One statistic that is missing from the FBI
figures from year to year is: What per
centage of ALL law enforcement agencies
is reportnig? I dare say that there has been
an increase in this percentage each year
that would parallel and possibly exceed the
percentages of increase in serious crime.
I know for a' fact that all sheriff depart
ments in North Carolina do. NOT compile, file
and forward complete statistics to the FBI.
Each year there are more and more sheriff
departments that do so, but the score is
still far from 100 per cent. The same is
true of small town police departments. Lack
of personnel, lack of inclination and in some
instances simply not knowing about such
things as “unified crime reports” cause a
very large percentage of the one, two and
three-man police forces to never make re
ports.
But each year there are dozens of villages
that become towns and dozens of towns
that become cities, and somewhere along the
line the law enforcement agency reaches
that point of professional proficiency where
for its own needs it must maintain flies and
Compile statistics. ‘Generally at this point
they begin sending in their "crimes” to the
FBI.
Of course, it’s best not to persuade one’s
self to be too complacent on this subject;
but it is equally dangerous to over-persuade
one’s self that the world is going to hell on
a handcar. Changes in social mores also ac
count for some increase in reported crimes.
Southern negroes who have swarmed into
northern cities looking for the pot of gold
that the lying politicians have promised them
make a huge contribution to this additional
reported crime.
These same negroes from the cotton
farms of Mississippi, the tobacco farms of
the Carolinas and the clay hills of Georgia
perhaps commit no more crimes in New
York or Washington than they did back on
the farm. But they are in a more sophis
ticated environment, which automatically in
cludes its fair share of statisticians. Rape
at the end of 'the cotton row, might be the
beginning of a.happy marriage; tout rape
in a Washington office building becomes a
“crime statistic.”
My general observation is that people are
no worse than they ever were; it‘s just that
there’s so damned many more of us. And
of course, the fact that we are increasing so
rapidly tends to indicate that at least do
mestically there is occasional tranquility and
cooperation.
In the field of larceny; kids back on the
farm used to get an occasional load of bird
shot in the seat of their flying pants for
raiding a watermelon patch or shaking the
wrong peach tree; but when the children or
grandchildren of this type snatches a melon
or a'peach from a fruit stand he is a juven
ile delinquent, and, I might add, a statistic.
And the felonious assault field; there’s
hardly a farm community where there isn’t
a bitter breech between some families that
has sprung from pa getting hell whipped
out of him for cutting timber on his neigh
bors land, or some other kind of poaching.
In the urban society of today such feuds
cause indictments, and of such are the “un
um <■»,■
IiiNIkK liYl licni AI
JV/IiCaj JV/VxViinLi
■ fSMpf5n?lj& Publisher • -
Published Every Thursday by The Lenoir
County News Company, Inc., 403 West
Vernon Ave, Kinston,^N. C.^ Phone JA 3