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THE TRffiUNAL AID
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10,1975
EDITORIALS
^You^re A Part Of The Solution^ Or You^re A Part Of The Problem
THE VIEWS 0^ THE WIITEI’S AIE WT HIWIYS THOSE OF THE PUPEH'S
Point
by Albert A. Campbell
THE TRIBUNAL AID
1228 Montlieu Avenue
Post Office Box 921 Phone [919] 885-6519
High Point. N. C. 2 7261
Published Every Wednesday
by Triad Publications, Inc.
Mailed Subscription Rate ,$5.00 Per Year
ALBERTA. CAMPBELL. EDITOR
DON L. BAILEY, GENERAL MANAGER
JEANM. WHITE, SECRETARY
ASHEBORO VaJnesla Cross 625-4950
BURLINGTON. . . . Hurley Patterson . . . 227-5359
FAYETTEVILLE . . John B. Henderson . . 488-1241
GASTONIA .... Rev. T. M. Walker .... 867-5690
GREENSBORO Lulla Jessup 2994402
t HIGH POINT ... .A. Alphonso Smith . . . 882-2601
KERNERSVILLE . . . Mozelle Warren . . . 992-4657
REIDSVILLE Sandra HUl 399-5229
SALISBURY .... Rev. J.C. Gaston .... 636-1186
LEXINGTON Jessie Wood 246-6421
STOKESDALE Shelia King 683-3237
THOMASVILLE Kelly Hoover .... 476-7472
THOMASVILLE.... Ruth Farabee .... 476-4730
Second Class Postage Paid at High Point, N.C.
Ocsoopooooooooooooooooooooe
THEY ARE NOW SHOUTING 'NIGGER' AND 'ANIMALS'
rOHATBIS, /
0E0RAt>fNO:
EX-PRESIDENT JOHNSON
by Vernon E. Jordon, Jr.
Without a doubt, young persons graduating from the
schools today are the most unprepared generation that I
can remember. When I say unprepared, I mean
unprepared for, or to cope with, or to successfully live
in this time or society. Unquestionably, our educational
system must be failing to properly prepare our young
people for what is to come as they reach adulthood.
Certainly, the art of reading and writing is not only a
necessity, today, but is one of the tools for survival.
Yet, the need for more than reading and writing is
becoming so prevalent. Just reading and writing,
alone, still leaves us in a position of cultural illiteracy
when one thinks of the necessity for being purdent and
thrifty when simply shopping for groceries. It’s easy to
understand that ignorance brings about waste. Simply
making the correct purchase of similar items can
become the difference between a savings or a debt.
One can even look further at the young people of
today and ask them to perform the simple procedure of
writing a check. They have not been taught that! They
have not been taught many, many of the necessitities
which require simply getting along in today’s life.
The Driver Education Program is a commendable
one. The records show it and speak for themselves; and -
the driving performance of young people can also speak
for itself. But, then, we ask why aren’t there other
programs being administered in the schools today with
equally as much efficiency and proficiency.
Is our school system failing to meet the needs of our
people; or is the school system manufacturing robots
who know how to read, write and count only.
From No To No!
Do you recall that from the day that
President Nixon chose him to replace Spiro
Agnew, Ford had spent a Congressional lifetime
voting against progressive legislation - against
the jobs bills, health bills, and education bills
under three prior presidents?
Further, there appears not a piece of
legislation bearing his name during his thirty
three (33) years in the Congress.
So his continuing veto is just another
instance of Ford saying NO to the American
people and to our country.
ALTHOUGH THE EDITORIALS WRITTEN IN
THIS NEWSPAPER ARE NOT INTENDED TO BE’
THE ONLY ANSWERS TO THE PROBLEMS
AND CONDITIONS EXPRESSED, SOME PER
SONS MAY STILL DISAGREE WITH THESE
THOUGHTS, BECAUSE OF THIS, THE NEWS
PAPER EXTENDS AN INVITATION TO ANY
RESPONSIBLE PERSON WHO WISHES TO
REFUTE THESE EXPRESSIONS TO DO SO,
AND FREE AND EQUAL SPACE WILL BE PRO
VIDED.
'M
BOSTON
CARNASIB
nypocR\sy
By Alfred L. Hinson
Decentralization of services is usually
good and effective, especially when
services are decentralized for the
convenience of its receipients. Unfortun
ately, the staff of many agencies seem to
feel that outreach offices are established
for their personal convenience. This
seems to be particularly true with the
outreach staff of Guilford County
Department of Social Services.
Basically, the only service that
outreach offices can not provide
recipients is counseling. The curtailment
of other services now causes one to
question the feasibility of continuing to
maintain these offices. Furthermore, the
general community is far less responsive
to these offices as compared to the past.
For example, if a given outreach office
has more than 20 visitors per week
seeking services, personnel from that
office feel that they are setting the world
on fire. Today, however, this seldom, if
ever, happens.
Guilford County Social Services
Director Wayne Metz and the Guilford
County Commissioners should take a
close look at the effectiveness of these
outreach offices. Presently, these offices
serve as a convenience for insensitive,
newspaper reading, incompetent staff,
who seemingly have no concern for the
general public. An investigation of these
offices will also reveal that they are
over-staffed with one and/or no more
than two persons doing the work. The
remaining two staff persons are often
found reading the newspaper and
supervising the work of the other two.
This is a definite waste of the taxpayers
money--even though the office is a
convenience for staff.
Last week an employee of the State
Department of Vocational Rehabilitation
sought services from one of the outreach
offices for a social services client. The
client was an amputee who lived in public
housing with an upstairs. The amputee
was home along during the daytime and
had to crawl upstairs to use the rest room.
When the supervisor was asked to assist
the amputee in relocating to a unit
designed for the handicapped with no
upstairs, the supervisor allegedly stated,
“Well, you’ve got to crawl before you
walk.” This incompetent, newspaper-
reading supervisor should be committed
to an institution for the insane. Yet, a
“box” of this mentality is charged with
the responsibility of supervising others.
If the County Commissioners have
money that they want to waste, they
should hire an independent firm to study
the whole social services program,
especially the top-heavy outreach staffs.
llimgs Tott Should Know
S'
PERRY,
^ORN IN HOUSTON^TEXAS/
1873/HE HAD TO QUIT SCHOOL BY THE
EIGHTH GRADE TO WORK! TWE LVE YEARS
LATER,HIS FIRST ATTEMPT TO START AN
INSURANCE CO. WAS A FAILURE — BUT HIS
SECOND TRY SET UP THE STANDARD LIFE INSURANCE CO,ATLA^!TA.GA.
-ANE6R0 FIRST! BY 1918 THE PREMIUM INCOME WAS 1339.327.77)
HE SOON ORGANIZED THE SERVICE C0.(CAPITAL STOCK:$ IQQ^OO!)
AND CITIZEN TRUST CO.. CAPTTAL STOCK. $ 250,000, SURPLUS-
$ 25Q.000!
TO BE EQUAL
New Housing Program
Disappo inting
The long governmental silence on
housing policy has finally been broken,
but the program recently announced to
enable moderate income families to buy
homes is a disappointing adaptation of an
earlier program, and it contains the seeds
of the same kinds of problems that proved
disastrous.
The program is a ressurection of the
old Section 235 housing subsidy program
that subsidizes mortgages for moderate
income families. That program became a
haven for every vulture out to rip off poor
families and the government.
Speculators bought up rotting old
houses, threw a new coat of paint over
them and sold them to unsuspecting
families who thought they were fulfilling
their life’s dream-a house of their own.
After a little while the old houses just
gave out, boilers blew, leaks developed,
walls sagged. The new owners had to
make repairs they couldn’t afford, fell
behind on their payments, and then the
government had to come in and take back
the now worthless house.
' The result: many poor families lost the
little they had and the government got
stuck with an enormous financial loss.
The Section 235 program and some other
federal housing programs were suspend
ed in January, 1973 pending development
of a new approach.
Now we have that old program back,
with the same central flaw that doomed
the earlier program.
Then, people were on their own in the
housing market. They had to qualify for
the subsidy and get homes certified as
being in good condition by Federal
Housing Administration inspectors.
What they needed, and did not get, was
some form of community-based counsel-,
ing service.
Without counseling, the program
became the most corrupt playing ground
for chiselers in the country. And by
chiselers I mean the speculators who sold
rotten houses and those FHA inspectors
who took kickbacks and bribes to approve
them. Some of those people have been
punished by the courts but that doesn’t
help the poor people whom they
victimized or the taxpayers whose dollars
should have been buying good housing
for those who couldn’t afford it.
The revived program errs in several
ways. The glaring flaw is that it too does
not provide for community-based
counseling services, virtually assuring
that similar problems will develop.
A second flaw is that it requires a large
down payment. It will still be serving
people with temporarily low incomes but
the poorest families, whom the original
235 program was aimed at, can’t
participate.
Because the poorest families are
eliminated from home-buying subsidies,
the Department of Housing and Urban
Development assumes intensive counsel
ing won’t be needed. That’s a false
assumption for several reasons.
Even many middle class families need
help in learning how to choose, buy, and
maintain a house and there’s nothing to
make us think that the moderate-income
families in the new program are less in
need of such help than the lower-income
families were.
In the absence of counseling one would
think that the FHA staff would be beefed
up to provide such assistance, with more
stringent controls against corruption. But
no new staff has been added to FHA
offices so the field is again wide open for
speculators to feed at the federal trough.
All of this is made more serious
because the higher down payments by
participating families will mean their life
savings are at stake. If the house is really
not worth the mortgage amount and if
this program goes under the way the
previous one did, those families will be
left penniless.
It doesn’t make sense for the
government to sink vast amounts into a
program and then refuse to protect that
investment by not providing ^ for
counseling services. It is all the more
inexcusable when the life savings of
moderate-income families may be
sacrificed too.
The old 235 program functioned to
dump houses that couldn’t be sold any
other way onto the market while jacking
up their prices. It was a subsidy program
for the housing industry, not for the poor.
Will this new program be any better?
INSIGHT:
For Teens Only
by
Miller Carter, Jr.
Mistakes-we have all made a few.
Some mistakes are big ones and others
are not so big. All mistakes have an
outcome that affect someone or
something. Sometimes the outcome can
be extremely fatal; and then again, a
mistake may prove to be very rewarding.
The fatal mistakes can range anywhere
from bad to worst to disasterous. Most of
us have made a few bad mistakes and
some worst mistakes; fortunately,
disasterous mistakes don’t happen to
oft%n. A bad mistake may be one where
too much of something is added to a
recipe and makes it taste bad. A worst
mistake would be where too many spices
were added to a recipe and gave someone
heartburn. A disasterous mistake would
be where poison was added to the same
recipe and killed someone. Of course
these are only examples but they prove in
how many degrees a mistake can be
measured.
Surely, we know that the term
“mistake” has a bad connotation; but
mistakes can often bring about rewarding
outcomes. Using the same examples I
used previously regarding a recipe, let’s
say an ingredient was added “by
mistake” and it made the recipe better.
This is a mistake that came out to the
good. Now let’s use an example that most
teens are more familiar with. A boy may
speak to a girl that he thought he knew
but it turned out to be someone he didn’t
know. Then after talking with his
newly-made friend for a while, he may
find that he likes his new friend more
than the girl he thought she was. These
and numerous other examples are a few
,that illustrate that mistakes don’t have to
be all bad.
Whether bad or good, what causes
mistakes? There are a number of reasons
that cause us to make mistakes. One
cause to which we attribute many of our
mistakes is haste. Hurrying about, trying
to get things done is a sure way to make a
mistake. Also trying to do more than one
thing at a time will cause errors in
whatever the task(s). Haste may also lead
to confusion-which in turn causes
careless mistakes. It is possible to do
more than one thing at a time but there is
a greater risk of careless error. The
reason for this is that our minds can’t
function accurately while we try to do
more than we are capable of.
Try the simple test of “patting your
head and rubbing your stomach at the
same time”. If that is not mind-boggling
enough, then try “turning one hand
forward and one hand backwards at the
same time”. Often you find yourself
patting your stomach and rubbing your
head or turning both hands in the same
direction.
Now let’s put these examples into more
practical proportions for we teens. Try
watching your favorite television program
and doing your math homework at the
same time. You may think that you got
both done, but wait till the next morning
in class and see how many math problems
you missed. ‘
The world would not be “the world” if
no one made mistakes. If there were no
mistakes, how would we leam some of
our most valuable lessons. We must all
live and learn by our mistakes and
remember-mistakes are not all bad.
THOUGHT FOR THIS WEEK; If we do
not learn by our mistakes, then some of
us may not live and if we don’t live by
them, we will never learn.