The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 11, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Britain Reports" sets forth the stark statistical facts abstracted from a report recently released displaying England's tenacious war-footing after two years since the retreat from Dunkerque and the fall of France: one of every five homes damaged or destroyed; two out of every three persons between the ages of 14 and 65 employed in war industries or in the armed forces; no strikes allowed, production consequently at record levels. During the Battle of Britain, September 1940 through May 1941, the British reported 3,692 Axis planes were downed against about 900 from the RAF. Twenty thousand tons of bombs were dropped on the Continent during the first six months of 1942. Three hundred thousand tons of Axis shipping had been thus far sunk in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean. Three hundred U-boats had been attacked. The Royal Navy had lost during convoys but one in 200 ships. The editorial suggests that these facts tell the story of a determined people, standing strong against the Nazi-Fascist Wave, betraying in the process the lie of those who contended Britain had done little or nothing for itself during the war, that it depended on American aid for sustenance. It wasn't so.

"Hold, Enough" argues against a rise in Social Security taxes from 1% to 2%, a scheduled increase set to go into effect in 1943, with other scheduled increases in 1946 and 1949, that the extraordinary surplus in the Social Security old-age benefits fund demonstrated the stability of Social Security and lack of need for the increase.

But that was before the baby-boom years after the war. Today, even with Social Security taxes at an aggregate of about 13%, 6.2% of employee wages, the fund is in trouble, dire predictions being that in a few years when the full complement of the baby-boom generation, those born between 1946 and 1955, reach retirement age--already the first entries of which being just a couple of years away from age 65--the fund will be bone dry.

Even with record debt, for both New Deal programs and the war, with forecasts that the war cost would run to an unprecedented 300 billion dollars, ten times the cost of all previous wars combined, still the new Social Security fund was stable at only a 1% rate of taxation. The country, at about 135 million in 1942, was less than half its present size. People generally lived shorter lives, with less medical care in the bargain, and consequently were dependent on the fund for a shorter time. Benefits were obviously much smaller as the cost of living was much lower. A large, comfortable house in a nice neighborhood ran about $10,000 in 1942. But wages, from which the fund achieves its basis, were also much lower.

Where did a good idea find so much trouble? Can it be remedied? Should it be based henceforth only on demonstrated need? Should those who have corporate pensions, accounting for a far greater percentage of the population today than in the 1930's at the advent of Social Security, defer to those who face a future with little or nothing in their old age except Social Security benefits?

The answer to the first question is probably unfathomable and is beside the point to a large degree, as supplying that answer will not likely supply a remedy. The answers to the latter two questions appear obvious, unless the country would like to endure the consequences to its health care facilities and society generally of allowing degraded life conditions to senior citizens to come in the next 15 to 25 years, or unless employers are willing to extend retirement ages to accommodate the better health care realities of our time, enabling continued mental acuity into older age than was the case when retirement age was somewhat arbitrarily fixed at 65 or 70. Now, it is conceivable that a large segment of the workforce can remain productive to 75 or 80, and as time passes into the future, even to 85 or 90, 95. There is no rational basis for a perfectly healthy, mentally alert adult being forced to retire at age 65 or 70, relegated to odd jobs thereafter should they desire to work at all or should they need to do so to supplement insufficient Social Security and other retirement benefits. Re-thinking, creatively and conceptually, the entire retirement system must be undertaken in light of modern circumstances and realities.

Obviously, occupations entailing strenuous physical labor pose a different problem from traditional white-collar jobs; but in a computer age, people retiring at age 55 or 60 from jobs which require more physical strength than they can any longer provide, can, in most instances, be re-trained to do other types of work. There only need be some creativity brought to the table, rather than thinking so strictly within the box, confined by traditional thinking on retirement from the 1930's and earlier. We are neither our parents nor grandparents when it comes to the aging process. It is one of the benefits of being born into the latter half of the twentieth century.

Of course, we could instead just continue as we are going and adopt a Social Darwinian plan, that is eliminate by competition from the workforce everyone deemed by some slug unacceptable socially, based in fact on superior job performance and superior sociability of which someone else is merely jealous, "eliminating the competition" as it were, "get ahead"--and then sit back and watch what that form of idiocy bred from watching too much tv melodrama on the part of fools too lazy to read will suffer society to endure ultimately, indeed, that which is happening to our society--not dissimilar to that which took place in Germany, eventuating in its adopting the ways of Nazism as a solution to its 50% unemployment, its turn to full militarization, warring on the world to acquire wealth, dignity, and a sense of requited retribution, encouraging through harassment and denial of civil rights emigration of those deemed unacceptable, limiting immigration to a trickle.

But anyone but a dolt might see that such a system leads nowhere but inexorably to collective suicide.

The Bible quote this date from Romans suggests a thorny issue with which we have at times wrestled, the principle, essentially, of yin and yang: Can one learn a positive lesson from others who have done a bad thing and thus benefit from their bad example, thereby, as the Bible passage states, becoming their "debtor"? It is one way to look at it. But does it not serve then to stimulate others to bad acts, that is actions contrary to individual rights or society's rights as a whole, to serve as perverse examples of what not to do? If so, could the murderer not then say with sapience: Yes, my son, commit not murder and follow not my example; and so I murdered to save you from the same fate I have endured, and so benefit by my example and therefore be in my debt?

Do Hitler and the Nazis, taking the extreme example, not then become a people to whom all are indebted for providing the prime examplar of recent history of how not to behave as a society?

Well, we have a problem accepting this concept suggested by Romans. We are not indebted to those who have acted badly, at least those who did so malevolently and deliberately. We recognize no yin and yang, except as that recurring naturally in nature itself, or that occurring in man strictly from accidental confluence of negative conditions: the forest fire thins out the forest so that new vegetation might appear; the violent storm irrigates the land for a better crop the next season; the shipwreck in an unforeseen and unforeseeable storm might serve, upon study, to afford greater foresight in the future to mariners and prevent similar accidents; the Titanic demonstrated that no ship is unsinkable, that the unthinkable will always occur, that adequate lifeboats must be afforded all passengers.

Accidents, natural occurrences, for all man's preparation, study, and precautions, will always inevitably happen, will always take man to his death, if for no other reason than to frustrate man's belief in his invulnerability, especially as he takes the chance of stepping from his threshold into the world each day, or merely risks the hazards of the bathtub for a shower, defying death the while.

The gods are a jealous lot, jealously protective of their power over the universe and over skimpy, frail man always existing precariously within it, ever striving to stay put past his appointed hour, beyond his welcome mat on the portal of existence, fit only for survival not by his slight skeleton and tender flesh and feet but by his wits and ability to think before the superior physical might of the beast, the storm, the avalanche, the iceberg.

But when applied to man's conscious behavior, there is no such thing, we posit, as yin and yang. For the yang, by definition, is the negative polar force in nature, in the universe, the thing, for want of a better name, usually dubbed "evil" or, when personified, "the Devil", not a deliberative course in man. For when man plays the Devil, he is precisely doing that, playing a role, one he casts for himself, one from which there is escape, choice to run another course by equal strokes of conscious determination to do the right thing.

We are not indebted to Hitler or the Nazis or to any other murderer, rapist, thief, cheat, liar or other marauder of the night, the poetic rendering of the matter by Romans notwithstanding.

Hitler killed himself and was responsible for the deaths of the bulk of the members of the Nazi Party and the Fascist Party in Italy, the feudal militarists of Japan. For that and only that, we stand indebted to him. For the rest, for the killing of brave men and women, both soldiers and civilians, who fought to stop him or resisted in their own lands against his incursion of their borders and usurpation of their sovereign government and control of their society, or who were thrown into concentration camps and exterminated for merely existing within the immutable characteristics of their genetic passage, for all of that we have no indebtedness. For that was a lesson most people did not need to learn, having seen the lesson repeated down through the ages.

Oh, one can make the poetic argument: Hitler's war was the last world war and Hitler's stimulus to invention led to the rocket, the jet aircraft, the competition which bred the atomic bomb, the space race to get to the moon to teach peaceful uses of the new technology otherwise threatening Armageddon; and that in this modern age, during the Cold War, man therefore learned from the imminent threat of cold steel incessantly held fast against his Adam's Apple, the threat of nuclear annihilation in the night, not to commit to war, that the concept was learned this time more pervasively, extending even to the most aggressive of men by their nature. For it is ultimately inherent in man to want to survive, not to desire death. One can make such an argument.

Yet, no one starts a war who desires to live, and so it is no positive answer to say any purpose was served by such a world war. Attempting to make such an explanation of it only invites more war by the next brute who would start one on the rationalized self-fulfilling prophecy of teaching another a positive lesson from negative forces, the deliberately concocted yin and yang, the positing of themselves, in other words, as with Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo, the Emperor and Empress, as gods with superior sapience, even omniscience, over that of mere mortal men and women, the peons, the slaves, confined in their pecking order within mankind by royal fiat, one deduced by the superior wisdom of His Highness, handed down by divination from the gods themselves.

The war produced nothing but hardship globally, hardship, the remnants of which still reside with us, which might arguably continue to reside with us for another century, should, that is, global warming not in the meantime drown us and change irrevocably and disastrously our weather patterns and consequent capability of harvest to the point of massive starvation within the industrialized world some time before we have a chance to be rid of those residual effects.

Thus, be it resolved that the poetry of Romans in this regard is disproved by history itself, that we owe no debt to those who consciously and deliberately do a wrong thing to another. We respectfully disagree with that text in its most literal interpretation. Should you think otherwise, then argue the point. But don't seek to prove it by proving yourself a creditor to another from the virtue you believe thus attends the doing of an evil act.

And, "Visitin' Around" brings forth another piece from Big Branch on the Baird brothers, Tom and Harry. They must've been popular preachers over that way. They seem to have been the subject of a lot of scrutiny, anyway.

Whether Big Branch, incidentally, is any kin to the Long Branch, we don't know. We've been to Dodge City, but never had occasion to pass through Big Branch, at least not to know it.

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