Newspapers / Jones County Journal (Trenton, … / April 2, 1970, 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
t..— N„er Fore* Th« Tk.>. EMcrM Art THe OpHon Or O..^. Poorly Paid? At issue now, and for the foreseeable future, is the issue of underpaid; federal government workers. Last week it was postal workers and this week it is air traffic controllers. In 1969 the per capita income in the United States was $3,412, ranking from the high of $4,231 in Connecticut; to the low of $2,057 in Mississippi. At present the starting pay of the lowest paid worker in the post office de partment is $4,522, which is for a clean er. The lowest starting pay for anyone involved in the direct handling of the mails is $5,715. The beginning pay of a postmaster in a small town such as Kinston is $11,233 and ranges up to $14,599. The per capita income in North Carolina for the last compiled year (1968) was $2,664. It is difficult, and to some extent, unfair for anyone to pass critical judg ment on the value of another man’s la bor, but when the payment of a work er’s salary comes from tax funds each taxpayer has license to do just a little second guessing on the subject:^ ~ One of the basic problems with a national pay scale is that the costs of living Vary greatly in one part of the country from another, yet a civil service employee is painted with the same pay scale no matter where he is living. It would seem that a true, frequently tak en cost-of-living index could be establish ed that would add points to the base pay of workers all over the country. Such items as food, electricity, trans portation, clothing, amusement, educa tion, housing and medical costs could be computerized two to three times a year for each cbnununity in which civile ser vice workers live and their j — be adjusted on the basis of 1 particular community rated in these basic indexes. This, however, is too easy and too fair and union leaders would lose their license to rant and; rave and promise the people who are putting fat fees in to their pockets. . .for contributing noth ing constructive to anybody. One More License? In scanning the local news in any town on nearly any day there is one huge, and getting huger problem that is costing the vast majority of us a great deal of money. We refer to the assorted bad check artists, whose number includ es everything from the everyday garden variety of slow check passer to the pro fessional forger. Which gives rise to a perfectly sensi ble question: Why not one more kind of license? A license to write checks. Why not? Writing checks is a privilege, and not a right and those who abuse this privilege cost society a very big penny in an assortment of ways. :' At a given age each of us would be issued one more card, but this would be the license-to-write-checks card. It would include one’s social security num ber and most importantly: a color photo graph of the card holder. Then if Ye Olde Card Holder got out and started spreading bad paper his card would be taken away just like a driving license, but there would be one further benefit of such a card: That any mer chant or private person who accepted a check from a person who did not have his cbeck-writing-card would have no legal right to collect a check accent ed from such a 1IK ___ some may have had from the headlines that herald ed the Nixon statement is a very bitter dreg in one’s mouth when the whole cup of tea has been swallowed. Nixon no more than Johnson, and no less, still embraces the philosophical sophistry first muttered on May 17,1954, which slanders the Negfo race by estab lishing as a matter of court written law that Negro schools are inherently in ferior. However this political mush is sliced it still comes out the same: the white man’s holy egotism which asserts as a matter of unquestionable dogma that Negro teachers, using the same text books and laving the same teacher train ing, cannot teach Negro students as well as white teachers. It is not strange that the snobbish segments of white society subscribe to this racist view, but it is extremely strange that so many Negroes have ac cepted this slanderous premise about their race. And Nixon moves lemming-like to the precipice over which so much of public school prestige has already crashed. He speaks in one sentence of helping to boost the educational quality of schools and in nearly the same breath agrees with the white supremacists on the su preme court who argue, that each and every Negro School in the South must be destroyed because it is inherently in ferior. This ugly ignorance overlooks many things, including the recent survey of Dr. Howard Clark, the noted Negro psy chologist, who found in a recent study of 1200 Negro college students that the 600 who graduated from all-Negro high schools did far better at the college level than those who had graduated from racially integrated schools. There is no hope for improving the public schools in the foreseeable future under this prevailing bigoted blindness. the forger and the other varieties of bad check passers, but it would reduce a major problem to a minor problem, and since each of us never has but one social security number it would be aw fully difficult ;to fool a computer when the computer banks all simultaneously started kicking out any pieces of paper that had one’s name on them if he had been a little loose with his penmanship insofar as checks are concerned. And one mipor spin off from this would be the instant end to the stolen credit card racket which has also breached the propbffiofls of major problem in our country today. The military long ago adopted the ID card with the owner’s picture and most states now include a picture on driving license, the credit or check writing card badly needs this same improvement. JONES COUNTY JOURNAL Jack Ridbb, Publisher .PablUhed GOBIWV Thursday by the Lbnou r, Inc., 605 North Her of the ity The magni drug trade It__ portions in, our country, we are doing is not sufficient to cope with a problem that is beginning to reach into practically every home. Any home with as many as three children can ex pect to suffer the terror of seeing one of those three children fall under the terrible spell of heavy narcotics unless this tide can be turned. And I confess quite candidly t)iat I suffer along with other concerned par ents .and citizens in that I have no easy answer, no instant remedy for this dis ease of the young that is now in epi demic form in our country. We have' enough laws, but perhaps not enough lawmen, and perhaps too, the courts have been too lenient in' their protec tion of both the high-level rulers of the dope world and in their paternalistic concern with the rights of the dope peddler. But when the entire scene is survey ed: Schools, police, churches, courts, and every other social agency, it is inescap able that the ultimate blame has to fall upon the parent. Children cannot cas ually become drug addicts; without too much money and too little parental supervision. All of, the dopes in the evil cornucopia have very pronounced ef fect on all who indulge, no matter what their age may be . . . cancer is said to have seven danger signals. . . Dope addiction has its set of danger signals too. And when parents fail to take the time to learn the danger signals of drug use, and when they fail to take ■the time to watch for those signals in their children, the unhappy sequence comes with the sudden knock on the front door of a policeman, or of an un dertaker with news that a child — a tender-aged child is either in jail or the mortuary. And then, of course, it is too> late for the parent to undo his parental sins Of commission and omis sion. Perhaps the absolute first sin of omis sion is that of assuming, that “It can’t happen to my child.” There are no ex ceptions. It can happen to anyone’s child as all ,too many recent headlines re mind. Rich and poor, black and white, north and south this evil spreads. Police cannot stop it . . . Courts can not stop it . . . The church cannot stop it . . . The schools cannot stop it . . . Only parents can stop it. Add in those -sad instances-where there is no parent,_ or less than iy> parent — a parent who refuses to be concerned, then someone will have to $tand in that parent’s place, or that child will be destroyed Fortu nately our society does not have such a terribly high percentage of children who have no parents or unwilling par ents, or just plain stupid parents, but even one, child without the protec tion of parents is too many . . . and it is perhaps in this direction that our society’s responsibility most surely lies; that is protecting that child who has no
Jones County Journal (Trenton, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
April 2, 1970, edition 1
2
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75