Newspapers / Jones County Journal (Trenton, … / Feb. 3, 1966, edition 1 / Page 2
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Til help you carry it—and your paycheck, EDITORIALS Never Forget That These Editorials Are The Opinion Of One Man — And He May Be Wrong Mistakes Compounded We still subscribe completely to Stephen Decatur’s toast: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” But this surely is not blind submis siveness to whatever direction; right or wrong, that our country may take, at home or abroad. Such a willingness to fight to preserve our republic imposes the most constant effort on each of us to do all in our power to insure that our country will be right. This leaves plenty of room for wide differences of opinion at home on the specific issue of what is right or wrong. The consensus minded rule we are held under today is the easy assumption that a huge majority at the polls amounts to a blank check for every action in every direction. Surely in times of greatest world peril something is expected of all of us that is a bit more than blind negativism, or a simple reflection of our personal. re spect or disrespect for that transient mortal who occupies the presidency. From the earliest arrival of “advisors” in Viet Nam until this day there has been neither a moral nor a legal basis for their presence. Perhaps a sense of guilt for the abuse we helped heap upon the French during their long and fruit less labor there, or a sense of fear for our own loss of dominance in The Phil lipines, Japan and lesser areas could be offered as a reason, but neither of these has sufficient moral or legal basis to support the sacrifice of a single frightened boy in this strange and be labored little land. The presence of any thing more than diplomatic or foreign aid agents in Viet Nam is a direct contradiction of our responsibility to the United Nations, to NATO and SEATO treaties, to the Unit ed States Constitution and to the prin ciples of .the Monroe Doctrine, which stated our hemispherical attitudes at home, while we violate them abroad. The public has been given crumbs from the executive table during the ten ures of Eisenhower, Kennedy and John son. We have been told by expert guess ers that American lives were being sac rificed; 1. to protect a Catholic hege mony, 2. to protect tin and tungsten re serves in the Malayan Peninsula, 3. to contain Chinese communism, 4. to save American “face”, 5. to seek a “balance of power.” But neither or all of these excuses for war has been dignified with the legality our constitution prescribes for military involvement. Certainly the Viet Cong has not at tacked us, and a look at the Viet Namese map tends to question just who is at tacking whom in this illegal war, whose purposes are so dimly stated. There is a dangerous jingoism afoot in the land which labels any who protest our foreign policy as traitors or commu nists, but it is time now that this isroe be debated and decided at the very highest levels and congress is the place where both the forum and the responsi bility rests. Presidents can go no further than congress will permit them, and it is our view that Johnson has gone too far already down the path previously trod by Eisenhower and Kennedy. And when the debate has decided the legal direction our best interest is in we can all sincerely join in repeating Deca tur’s toast of long ago. A Matter of Faith Religion is sorely not the only area in which one must go on faith. One has got to accept the fact that he cannot understand everything, and let it go at that. Turning on a radio or TV set, or even flipping an electric switch is an act of faith for most of us. Consider the staggering amount of faith one has'to sum up to accept a new'Super-computer being built by IBM. Its makers say the gadget will make eight million additions and five mil lion subtractions in Who knows f Says, No ‘ Governor Dan Moore now ««,■>, “No” to a big shot communist speaker on the campus at Chapel HilL Pity is that he didn’t face up to the exact issue when he chickened out under the pressures of accreditation and acad emies last December. • Then was the time to enscribe clear ly on those hallowed ivy-covered walls that the -people who foot the bill are the proper people to call the tune. But the issue was lost in a cloud of scholarly smoke and a meek general as sembly joined the governor in Abdicat ing their responsibility to the people of our state. Today the issue is between the board Of trustees and a student group. The governor" infers that he thinks this is merely a harassing effort of the stu dents. But most basically it is an issue between the people of the state and the general assembly. Those 170 men and women are trust ed with carrying out the mandate of the people, and not the precious whim of even the most precocious schoolage brat. And when the governor convened the executive committee of the trustees to act on the current tempest he left town clothed in the hope that tire committee would act, rather than abdicate. But the people of the state do not elect university trustees, and they are two reaches beyond the grasp of the voters. This is a situation in which the in cumbent general assembly members will not enjoy this spring. A lot of us in every corner of the state have the list and we are keeping it fresh in our mind so that we can do all in our pow er to help out those who violated their trust in last year’s special session. Help them clean OUT, is what we really in tend to do. . ___ Picking on Bobby It must be obvious to anyone who keeps even a casual eye on Washington that Bobby Baker is being made the goat for a lot of his friends, who are now silent in seven different languages. The record is clear and frequently repeated that Baker .was the closest kind of crony to Lyndon Johnson, Luther Hodges, Everett Jordan, the late Robert Kerr and everyother wheeler-dealer in the United States Senate. It is too much to assume that Baker it the only person involved in number ous “deals” who acted'wrongly. There further is the undeniable fact that bri bery is rather like prostitution in that it takes two to tango. So if the govern ment has sufficient evidence to indict Baker for taking bribes it must have similar evidence against someone who was giving bribes. i Up until now it looks as if Baker is being picked bn and on the basis of all that has been publicly revealed about him we’d have to vote “Not Guilty,” and especially unless some of his part ners in crime are indicted. Strangely enough our highways are safest when they are mos,t dangerous. Maybe our engineers are designing in the wrong direction. There are some naive souls who ac cept the premise that federal govern ment can cut taxes while raising expen ditures. Recent; changes have been sim ply to transfer taxation from the small er base of excise taxes to the universal Enough Mas been s^id about the wea ther, but failure to take note of it edi torially would be a sin of omission that this sentence prevents. Baseball fans concerned about where e Braves will play in 1966 can find an isy answer in the fact that over t. PARAGRAPHS BY JACK rider Marty times before I have mentioned the unalterable truism that: ‘Teople, not buildings make slums.” Any of us with half an eye to see knows that pover ty is no synonym for filth and we know equally well that wealth is just as sure ly no synonym for cleanliness oi either mind or body. But pressiilg hard upon every concen tration of people from “the small town of Kinston-size on Up is this problem of human blight, which eats up a vast pro portion of the tax dollar and consumes an even higher percent of the manpow er devoted to making the nation a bet ter place for all of us to live and pliy. At the federal level we now have . a new cabinet member whose job is the pestilential urban sickness that is epidemic from Los Angeles’ Watts to Lenoir County’s Happfersville. The dis ease, crime, illegitimacy and human mis ery-spawned in such areas cannot be fenced in, or forgotten. It hangs like an evil fog always there; both a threat and a sorrow. Robert Weaver is the first negro to ' be a member of the presidential cabinet. He is a brilliant man with a long record of accomplishment in this difficult field, but the labors of Hercules are tiny com pared with those spread before Weaver. His job is so nearly impossible that none but the most optimistic could pre sume his full success. But somewhere, sometime a start had to be made. It would have been far better if each community of every size could have taken its own dilemma by the horns and wrestled it into submis sion. But sitting in the court house in Kinston or in the city hall,in Kinston and looking across the river into the pits of filth and degradation so close at hand understandably cause strong men to shake and weak men to flee. And so, the national approach; from the distant ivory tower where the thunder of fed eral power will be cast about to heal or cover over pockets of blight and mis sery. But where does man or government begin or end this business of being his brother’s keeper? Is it with housing, education, free medical care? Or does it include washing their bodies, their tattered rags and cleaning their pollut ed minds? If the gates of the Taj Mahal were left opened this shrine would become just as filthy as the rest of India. It takes very little chicken manure to spoil the biggest bowl of chicken salad. And that very .bluntly but truthfully is the fact of life we must accept. Vrest Orton of Weston, Vermont in his “Voice of the Mountains” recently put it concisely: "The do-gooders and bleeding hearts suffer far more anguish for the state of the underdog than the underdog ever suffers for his own con dition because, when the truth is rec ognized, if the underdog were not hap py in this state, he would do something to get out of it." . Our system would be unsupportably cruel if it bound the slave to the plow, the mechanic to the forge, but after the path is opened I do not think it is society’s responsibilty to carry the hu man blight on its back out to higher ground, where it will sink instantly to the same circumstance from which it has been dragged. '
Jones County Journal (Trenton, N.C.)
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Feb. 3, 1966, edition 1
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