Newspapers / Jones County Journal (Trenton, … / July 11, 1968, edition 1 / Page 2
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'By all means... do come in!' ,;23ta&3S33E®3& - EDITORIALS Never Forget That These Editorials Are The Opinion Of One Man -—-:-;-And FLe May Be. Wrong Gun Controls •ji- . •+*'■*/* There is something bitterly unamus ing about a man who has unleashed the most terrible firepower ever known on a tiny nation standing up in his most pursed-lipped fashion, with moist eyes and voice a quiver to talk about gun controls. This certaihly does not take one iota from the cruelty of one Vietnamese to another, for we of all people should understand that civil war is the worst of all possible wars. A lesson not lost on Spain in the thirties, nor more recently in a long list of emerging african na tions. But the world watched with little real concern when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin used the lovely hills of Spain as a proving ground for their growing arsenals. Perhaps that lack of concern was more due to less sophisticated sys tems of propaganda than to man’s in humanity to roan. Today, however, in techni-color horror the gore of war is brought daily into millions of homes and only the awful sweet-rot stench of death is lacking. Yet when all the horror and propa ganda are peeled' from this bitter asian fruit one hard core remains: that the world’s richest and mightiest nation is tearing a tiny people into very small pieces — and sacrificing thousands of its finest young men and its own finan cial security in the same senseless act. So we find ourselves as a nation de bating the issue of individual gun con trols while we stand guilty in the courts of common morality of not being able to control guns as an instrument of diplomacy. r We can no longer hide behind the claim that we are fighting communism — if we ever could. Because we are signing treaties with, expanding trade with and encouraging international communism on a dozen dif ferent fronts — Foreign and domestic. So to crusade against communism half way around the world in a tiny, desti tute tenth power nation while making common cause with the real powers of the communist world is neither the fact nor the fancy of this untenable proposi tion. Much- more likely than the Vietna mese single bility— it has calculal With our ] being the result of any decision i* the proba 1 on certainty — that a long series of mis zation and our Southeast Asia Treaty Organization we attempted an encircle ment — or containment of eurasian com munism. This policy of containment has cost our nation uncountable billions of dol lars, has added almost 100,000 dead or permanently disabled Americans to the Pyre of Sacrifice and has left us with out one sufre alHe in a world much more deeply rooted in nationalism than in world federation. The Berlin Air-lift, bribery to Tito, aid to a series of Grecian governments, re-building of West Germany, troops to Lebanon, aid to Israel and its hostile Arab neighbors, wheat to Egypt and India and Pakistan, armies still in Korea, war in Vietnam, war indemnities in reverse to the murderous, polite Jap anese, missile bases in Turkey, dams in Iran, finally ended patronage: to the hostile French — still sensitive because of their cowardice in 1940. And while making this cruel sacrifice of men and money we have permitted — .almost encouraged — the decay of our inner-cities, the frightening pollu tion of our water and air and the ex ternal excitement of our ethnic prob lems far beyond their ignition point. We have forgotten that charity should begin at home — that only a fool tells his neighbor how to far pi while his fields lie fallow. We have sent forth hordes of mis sionaries; all eager and' sincere in their effort to enforqp, American religion, American polities, American diet, Amer ican clothing, American music on cul tures far older, and far wiser than our own. _ But even this is nothing new under the political sun. The glories of Greece, the grhndeurs of Raphe, the Empire of Napoleon all foundered On just such errors of navigating.-* " v Fitting Exit The exit if it ;can be called that at this juncture —&S, Earl Warren from the supreme court Is ^entirely in keeping With Iris lack After serving of with to about the roar tiie thunder Southwest at Camp < With so mucn me, and a steady __ the July sun it was sad, Jn a way, to think of so many young men busy with their practice for destruction. How much happier the world might be if those expensive swords they wield ed could be beaten into plougi shares, and they could pursue constructive pur But really is that the natural state? Histoyy of man and the other animals and plants around us hardly supports the premise that peace is the natural state of any living thing — plant or ani mal. From the moment of germination of every seed that ever was or ever will be there is that endless struggle for survival. In that wide space of beautiful Bogue Sound there is no peace. Below the waves, on the surface and in the sky above that struggle goes on every sec ond of every day. There is no armistice in nature. So as we watch th$ ritual of great men gathered in splendid halls'around vast tables before solemn documents should our reaction be hopeful or scorn fully What is the history of such tort urously conceived pacts? Obviously they have not brought peace, because men in every age have smoked some pipe of peace, exchanged some sacred oaths — and still we have wars. In nature, before the wicked little mind of man armed him with instru ments of destruction which gave him dominion over the fields, forests and seas — and now even the skies the serenest of things alive were the huge things — dinosaurs, mammouths and even with us today such huge leftovers unprincipled Democratic president. — So be it. And now added to the uproar this crass political deal has provoked is the pious prejudice of Drew Pearson, who has thrown the blanket smear of “anti Semitism” at any and all who object to the elevation of Abe Fortas to sit, in the seat fouled for the past 15 years by turncoat Warren. This page didn’t know Fortas was a Jew until the papers pointed out that Johnson was looking for a Jew to re place Arthur Goldberg on the court. And this page doesn’t care in theJeast whether Fortas was circumcised' by a Rabbi or a pediatrician. Our opposition to Fortas is based on his long association with the shadiest, seamiest underside of official Washington: His. connections with Bobby Baker; his effort to Mock, publicity about presidential-confidante Walter Jenkins being caught in a homosexual act in a public toilet across the street from the White blouse. And more important than his choice of friends has been the Fortas work since he was approved for a seat am the na tion’s highest court. Without exception Fortas has voted against the constitu tion, against the protection of the public from criminal elements and against pro tection of the nation from the interna tional communist But the final m with nnH projectiles the fiercest creatures ever to live on earth perished- even as the placid grass What, then, is the key to survival? so hostile none’ can conceive it* who have not known it. And in the malarial rot equatorial jungles man survives, if brief ly, as modern life spans go. From sea level to Tibetan heights man has created instruments capable of end ing all life — certainly all but sub miscroscopic life. But here again isn’t it just possible that man’s ego has over estimated his bower and under-estimat ed the powers, of nature? V Whether man has over or under-esti mated the power of his manufactured fury there is terrible enough evidence of its deadliness at Nagasaki, and Hiro shima, on the Atolls, of the Pacific, in the deserts of Africa; and China, and Russia, and New . Mexico to encourage us all to find some system — at the very least to search for soriie system to keep this nuclear pandorean arsenal closed. ‘il Some will say, and perhaps they are right, that it is too late — that the United States opened it over Japan in 1945, and it can never be closed again And many will argue that no country is safe from nuclear black mail if it does not also have the ability to rattle its nuclear sabers. This was the state philosophy of many Soviet spies some caught but, many undetected who felt it would be dangerous for the rest of . the world if the United States alone possessed such teifrible power. And they too, may have been right, but now we’ll never know since we have at least five and possibly seven nations who have this monster in their stables. So men gather about great tables and sign long documents on such labored phrases as non-proliferation treaty, but without the offices, good or evil of that nation whose signature is most needed: China. In. fact, if not in press releases, what we have seen sighed last week is a treaty of containment aimed at China far more than at the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which have already proliferated to the extent that nearly every nation — certainly every major nation — either has such weapons, or the guarantee of the use of such weap ons in the defense of its ‘(national Sovereignty. There was a time — a generation ago — when men trembled with reasonable terror from the peril of'poisonous gas es, and before that gun powder was the ominous thunder of universal destruc tion, and before that the crossbow, and the long bow and the spear, and the tomahawk, and the stone held in clinch ed fist. But the waves still lap at #11 the shores around the world and the struggle for survival remains fab more, a monoto nous, daily" grind than a poealyptic in its scope. The fight against disease (in all its forms, the terror of unleashed elements, the spec tor of ignorance in its every form — these far more than bombs or planes are the real challenge to man kind’s suryival. ; 'And there is good reason to believe that on aH these basic fronts progress is being made, despite the unfortunate but perhaps eternal fact that modern man hardly more capable of living v than wS|
Jones County Journal (Trenton, N.C.)
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July 11, 1968, edition 1
2
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