Never Forget That These Editorials Ate The Opinion Of One Mon
J. - . , «♦«» »«>»« s
Sincere Thanks
.... -V *■'
me 1VM baseball season tor the Kinston
Eagles ended last Friday night on a story
book note, as the Eagles won the deciding
game in the championship playoff against
the Durham Bulls.
A lot of people had a lot of fun watching
the Eagles in Kinston this year and a lot of
people did a lot of hard work to make all
ot this ran possible.
Space does not permit saying "thanks’’ to
all who took part in this work, or who join
ed in the fun.
Bat we don’t want to let the season dose
without this brief note of sincere thanks, to
the fans, to the players, to the directors, to
the city officials and to the school officials,
whose cooperation made die success it was.
Court Reforms
in November the voters ot North Carolina
will be asked to pass a far-reaching consti
tutional amendment that would permit ma
jor changes in the court structure of our
state. ,
The changes all are aimed at the lower
courts, and the supreme and superior courts
have the same functions, and the same au
thorities that they now have.
The magistral courts are the major tar
get of this court reform program, and this
constitutional amendment if it is passed
would make all magistrates appointive, rath
er than elective. These appointments would
be by the resident superior court judge, from
lists prepared by the clerks of superior
court.
The number of magistrates would he fix
ed for each county by the general assembly
and they woold be placed on salaries, rather
than operating on fees as at present.
We favor putting magistrates on salary,
but we oppose making them appointive.
Magistrate courts handle thousands mote
cases than all the other courts of the state
tambmtd, and removing the magistrate from
the reach of the voter is dangerous, and can
not be supported m logic wader our gum
lected would still go to each county school
fund.
No where in the vast amount of informa
tion that has poured forth on this proposed
court reform have we seen any estimate of
the increased cost to the taxpayer that would
be represented in this plan.
But one can suppose logically on the ba
sis of all past performances that the price
tag for such court improvements is going
to he higher than die present cost. Im
provements generally are expensive, and
court improvements will be no exception.
But much more important than the cost
factor is die removal of those judges who
serve the most people from «1! practical po
litical contact with the people.
The superoir court judge is already labor
ing under die most staggering fond, and the
k>
inflicted or the person who inflicted the
wound?
Men of coId-bto6ded deliberation sit in
executive and judicial safety in the maho
gany-lined places of Washington and nse
their .office to rub even more sore, the age
old scars that had begun to heal between the
races in the South. V1
Who makes the bull gore the toreador?
The bull might prefer to rest peacefully in
his pasture but when the picadors wound
and anger him he charges blindly at every
moving object.
The Earl Warrens, the Hugh Brownells,
the Bobby Kennedys are the picadors in
this great spectacle. They deliberately set
about to HifttMie the bulls of Southern habit
and prejudice- in order to swing blocs of
votes ill the ghettoes of the north. They
couldn’t card less aboht the bloody bull, or
the civil rights toreador in the political
arena below.
j>s;.■'*" 1 .■■■ --
About Face
There was a day, when government em
ployees were referred to asi “servants of
the people.” It would appear that this day,
if it ever existed, has ended.
Now it is the people who are servants of
the employees of government
The average non-government worker in
this part of the woods has to dig hard six
and sometimes seven days to the week to
manage to get enough money together to
pay all the taxes that are levied upon him.
And with the exception of people who
work in monopoly industries the government
worker is the only worker in this area who
Generally enjoys the five-day week.
r #? are m favor of organized loafing,
disorganized loafing and any other kinds
of loafing that there may be, hut we find
it awfully difficult to appreciate somebody
else doing the loafing when we are having
to borrow money to pay their loafing bill.
Brazil Nuts
Even a glance at the affairs of Sooth
Sooth America’s hugest nation tends to in
dicate that all Brazil nuts don’t’ grow on
trees.
Every slick-paper magazine published in
oar country has carried lavish lay
outs on the amazing construction
of. Brazil's new capital, Brasilia, which has
been located in die hinterland, away from
the trade routes and the more baric parts of
the country’s sagging economy.
Some political Brazil nut decided that
what his country needed was a new seat of
government Perhaps the stench of die pov
erty in die hills around Rio de Janeiro
caused him to want to go to a higher climate.
The same kind of iHogic would see our
nation pufl its capital out of Washington
because of die slums flat corrupt its beauty
and go out into the hills of Wyoming and
build from scratch a new capital, in an
area that had no roads, no water supply, no
electricity, no people.
Before Brasilia was nearly rrmgilrlrd it
was abend? surrounded by the same had o1
Sputtnik back in 1957. Although a lot of this
interest has been hardly worth the effort,
ai}d has contributed more noise thin good,
the sum of all the interest is working toward
great improvements in the overall anatomy
of our entire schooling system. -
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the
education story is the almost impossible task
of selling parents on the fact that all chil
dren cannot be nuclear physicists. And even
in some areas of the professional side of edu
cation there is lingering resistance to voca
tional training for more and more students
whose academic capabilities rule out high
er education.
People today are being born with roughly
the same amounts of intelligence that they
always have been. Take a . group of 100
people and you’ll find that they break down
in about the same percentages of IQ levels
that they always have. Or saying it another
way, people today are still being born in
the same patterns of a century ago, but the
work requirements of our time are com
pletely changed.
Today there is a diminishing demand for
strong backs and weak minds, tor all the
millenhuns of history there was always a de
mand for more of this kind of coarse labor
than there was available. But today this is
not so, and tomorrow there will be even
less need for that worker in modern in
dustry.
We have two courses open, since no
amount of schooling or vocational training
ran qualify a worker beyond his limits.. The
first alternative is to handfeed these types,
and the second is to find or create work of
a kind that is within the capability of these
types, and a work that is also constructive
ly needed by society.
An experiment in that direction is work
ing beautifully so far at the Caswell Re
habilitation Center here in Kinston. This is a
kind of work that has to be touched to
be appreciated. Hearing, or reading about
it is not enough. Those boys and girls who
simply cannot move beyond the 5th, 6th,
or 7th grade are being trained to do those
types of work that their aptitudes and atti
tudes indicate they can best do.
This is a tiny program at present, but it
is a program that will be expanded — for
it has to be, and although the program is
now geared to making productive citizens
oat of children in the IQ range from 50 to
80. it will have to be expanded as the de
mands of our civilization become more
severe. In another decade, or generation, the
fwimi with an IQ of less than 100 may
have an extremely difficult time finding
work, or completing academic courses in