Newspapers / Jones County Journal (Trenton, … / Sept. 19, 1963, edition 1 / Page 2
Part of Jones County Journal (Trenton, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
Stand In VliftNa*i EDITORIALS Nezrer Forget That These Editorials Are The Opinion Of One Man --—And He May Be Wrong,[ Horrible Tragedy None of ns can avoid a feeling of deepest horror and sorrow over the terrible tragedy that mangled more than two dozen children Snnday in a Birmingham Sunday School, leaving four of them dead. But each of us ought to study closely the causes of this tragedy. A mad man with a handfull of dynamite caused the explosion. But other factors created the mad man, and the mad political climate in which such a horror could take place. Americans were revolted by the gas chamber terror of Hitler’s gentle Germans, who cremated alive nearly five million Jews in a half decade of horror. Many of us believed that the stories coming out of Hit ler’s Germany were propaganda. Many of us perhaps still refuse to believe that such a civilized people, such a gentlefolk as the easy-crying Germans could have every per petrated such a monstrous crime upon hu manity. But the Germans did. And Americans are capable of just as shocking behavior. Universal Truths This week United Nations Secretary Gen eral reported on findings from a recent trip to Vietnam. In his report were these un iversal truths: No SS trooper who ever palled the gas lever at Dachau was any more brutal than the man who threw the bomb into the Birming ham Sunday school. Men were animals long before they be came “human**. They remain animals be neath the very thin veneer of civilisation that distinguishes them from the savage. The most terrible man is the frightened, frustrated man; whether he is frightened by a gun or by an unreasonable prejudice matters little. Whether he is berserk from fear of death, fear of injury, fear of loss or from even an unknown peril the end pro duct is the same. The German’s unreasoning hatred of the Jews came from destruction of their pride in World War I, loss of their wealth in the terrible inflation that came with the W'ei mar Republic and as the certainty of defeat in World War II drew nearer their destruc tion of Jews grew worse. There are many lessons applying to the current racial war in the United States that can be learned in a study of the Third Reich. states of Hitler, Stalin and t)ie Kennedy Boys they could none have their way any longer than the masses permit. The history of tyranny is the record of men who believed they knew what was best for an entire people, bat it is also the record of masses of men who accepted this patern alism — whether brutal or kindly with meek surrender. Law is not a magic wand that can whisk away habit, prejudice, logic or illogic. Law is an evolntionary stepping stone toward justice, bat when law becomes the tool of venal individuals, who use it to work their own selfish ends it not only becomes a danger to itself, bat is as well a danger to the entire body of law that has been slowly chiseled oat through centuries of compro mise and wisdom. which is j«st around a couple more corners. All professional economists except those in the hire of the government predict a faster rise in prices, in late ’63 and early ’64 than the country has had for the past two yeafrs. v .■' / Congress and the campus theorists have attempted to write safeguards into law to prevent runaway inflation, and to a degree they have been able to put the economy tfhder some kind of control, if not perfect control However, there is a perfect control, and is the. control that ultimately has to halt all inflation. That is rite ability and the will ingness of the public to pay the price. In a nation glutted with surpluses of ev erything from “Aal to Zygaena” the price of any item is finally determined by the buyer. Artificial efforts to fix price — either by government order, by union labor extor tion or by business greed all fail when the buyer puts this theory into practice. The public is a huge, placid, long-suffer ing animal that knows $3,000 is too much to pay for a car that sold for $600 a few years ago. Bnt this placid buyer ultimately reaches the breaking point Then it becomes fashionable as well as intelligent to drive a car 10 years rather than trading them when the ash trays are filled. Apply this same logic to the entire spec trum of luxuries and necessities and the answer comes out with either a crashing hall sometimes called depression* or a grad ual leveling off which is the best solution we can hope for in this problem that has been growing since World War II. ^ Spliting The Atom ^ Since man began publicly toying with die breakdown of atoms some men of science have feared that great danger might result to the world from added exposure to radio active materials. i Frightening predictions, including weird mutations have been waved before the pub lic, but rather than the world’s population being destroyed or mutilated by radioactive caused mutations we have been treated to another side of the human problem which has come to be called "The Population Ex plosion." At the risk of losing our membership card in the National Academy of Science we ven ture the hypothesis that radioactive fallout has had no more to do with this population than welfare checks have. Biology and arithmetic satisfy our cur iosity on this subject completely. The re production of the species is the fundamen tal reason for all living things — plant or animal. And it is equally fundamental that populations grow by multiplication and not by addition. There are more chain reactions in this world than take' place ' in an atomic bomb. Obviously this problem win have to be controlled by one means or another. Either some form of voluntary or involuntary birth control will have to come about or the more terrible controls of starvation and epidemic will take their place. This is not a pleasant subject because since time begun on this earth there has been more room than people, and there still is, but obviously this space cannot be ex panded forever. - ■ ' ....... Published Every Thursday by The Lenoir County News Company, Inc, 408 West Vernon Ave, Kinston, N. C, Phone JA 3 2395. Entered as Second Class Matter May 5, 1SM9, at the Post Office at Trenton, North Carolina, tinder the Act of March 3, 1879. By Mail in First Zone — $3.00 Per Year. Subscription Rates Payable h Advance. Second Class Postage Paid at Trenton, N. C J V» cow»fa tnrew * ponw » Sunday School room. La* Sep tember a coward in the White House cent 20,000 troop * to install one negro in the University of Mississippi. Each of these acts of terroristic cowardice tore people, further and further apart who have lived and pro gressed together in The South despite pay ment of the greatest war indemnity extract ed from a defeated nation. v : . » ■ No where in recorded history has any segment of the negro race risen to such heights as in The South. He did this with the help and not the hindrance of the whites. Together they worked as economic slaves to the financial centers of the north,, and together, they rose from the ashes of our nation's greatest military struggle. Not help ed to their feet as the gentle Germans and loving Japs were after V/forld War II, but bled white by usurious interest rates, rigged freight rates and repressive legislation. Just this year Lenoir County’s oldest cit izen died and carried with her to the grave the horror of seeing her mother raped and murdered by a roving band of freed negroes, who were inflamed with carpet-hag liquor and promises. This young girl was saved by a negro servant, while other negroes were killing her parents. So, through all these times of terror not even the ultimate crimes have been able to completely sever the bonds that have united the two races of The South in war, in peace; in plenty and in poverty. Bnt selfish men whose concern for the negro ended at the ballot box have convinc ed a per cent of the negroes, and the rest of the World that The South is a vast area of barbarism, where hostility between the races is universal and where white domi nation impoverishes the negro and robs him of his rightful place itt the sun. Any rational consideration of this myth evaporates such liesj because for every minute since 1865 every negro in The South has been free to seek his salvation in any corner of this wide land. That many have pursued their fortune out of The South is no more an indictment of The South than the fact that a very large per cent of our white boys and girls have also left home to test their talents in the metropolitan north. That these young men and women have had to leave The South is just one more result of the economic as well as military pillage that The South suffered for so long under the tender mercies of our compassion ate brothers who control the wealth of our nation and the policies of our government. (It was not until the mid 40’s that govern ment action removed the 35 per cent pen alty Southerners had to pay on each pound of freight coming to or leaving The South.) But despite the peonage imposed upon both the white and black South a majority of us stayed, because our roots were deep and because we preferred the pace of life to that of great cities. Most of us shared the view that “New York was a nice place to visit but no place to raise a family.” The South did rise again; despite every kind of economic restriction that could be dreamed np by Wall Street and the counting houses of Boston. The raw materials, the in dustrial water, the climate, the productive labor and the “pace of life" began to draw a trickle and then an avalanche of industry into The -Sooth that has not even been stemmed by all the tenors that have been evoked in the name of “democracy” and '‘Christian Brotherhood* by those men whose first allegiance is to their own greed and lost for power.
Jones County Journal (Trenton, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Sept. 19, 1963, edition 1
2
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75