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PAGE FOUR
EDITORIAL
People’s Park
Now that all of the political flack about it has
died down. Moon Lake Park can be revealed for
what it truly is—one of the most astonishingly
lovely parks anywhere in the Commonwealth.
The fact that it is a county rather than state
park makes its existence all the more remarkable.
There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania, and Luzerne
is but the 15th to establish and maintain its own
park—this despite the well-publicized need to
preserve as much of our natural heritage as is
possible.
Moon Lake Park with its rolling fields, dense
forests, natural fishing pond, bird conservatory,
and magnificent swimming pool is truly, to quote
park director Robert Neff, a Peoples’ Park. Pic-
nickers, campers, swimmers, boaters, fishers and
naturalists are all welcome, and the fees charged
for use of the park’s facilities are nominal.
There's still work to be done before the park is
finished, most notably a second phase which will
develop the park’s resources more completely. We
hope the County Commissioners will see their way
clear to budgeting funds for this additional work as
soon as possible—we can think of few county
projects of more ultimate value than a well-
developed and adequate park system.
Power Act
The Pennsylvania General Assembly has
responded to our country’s current energy crisis
with what it calls the “Power Facilities Planning
and Site Approval Act of 1971.” Introduced by a
long list of legislators, the bill, if passed would
establish procedures for the development of a
comprehensive long-range plan to meet the present
. and future power needs of the Commonwealth in
an economical manner consonant with
protection of the environment . . . ”’
the
The bill, generally, is a good one in that it
requires the siting and construction of power
facilities to conform to a comprehensive long-range
plan drawn up by the Department of Environmen-
tal Resources. Furthermore, it requires that public
hearings be held before permission is granted to
begin construction on power facilities.
Behind this bill is a recognition that the use of
natural resources must be carefully controlled and
planned to avoid waste and pollution. There is also
the recognition that public power is just that—
public power, and that the public has a right to
become involved in decisions affecting this basic
need.
The acid test of the Power Facilities Planning bill
will ultimately be in the manner in which the bill if
passed is administered. The Department of En-
vironmental Resources must take a position in-
dependent of the power industry and remain
staunchly dedicated to the simultaneous
management of both the environment and public
power. It cannot permit itself, like the Atomic
Energy Commission, the luxury of promoting what
it regulates or, like the Public Utilities Com-
mission, allow itself to become responsible to in-
- dustry instead of to the public.
The energy situation in this country will never
be corrected until we come to understand the
dangeous implications of the private control of
public resources and other complicated issues. The
Pennsylvania Power Facilities Planning Act is a
good bill insofar as it recognizes some of the priori-
ties involved in the power issue, but it is indefinite
enough to require strong and independent adminis-
tration for it will be in administration that the bill is
finally defined.
Tie SDALLASC0ST
Co. from 41 Lehman Ave., Dallas, Pa. 18612.
Entered as second class matter at the post office at Dallas, Pa., under the Act of March 3,
1869. Subscription within county, $5 a year. Out-of county subscriptions, $5.50 a year. Call
675-5211 for subscriptions.
The officers of the Greenstreet News Co. are William Scranton 3rd, president and
managing editor; J.R. Freeman, vice president, news; William W. Davis, vice |
president and general manager; Doris Mallin, secretary-freasurer.
Editor emeritus: Mrs. T. M. B. Hicks
Editor: Doris R. Mallin
News editor: Shawn Murphy
© Advertising: Carolyn Gass
. An independent newspaper published every Thursday morning by the Greenstreet News
Changes
by Eric Mayer
It’s too hot to write today. The air is an
"invisible fog that sticks in my throat when I
breath. Up the river the sky has turned yellow
and purple like a vast deep bruise—promising
a thunderstorm.
December sounds like a good idea right
now ; snow scudding in white wavelets across
frozen macadam. If December came after
June, January after July and February after
August, winter and summer would both be
more bearable.
Anyway I now have an excuse to rewrite
some notes I found in‘ my desk drawer-vintage
late 1970—about a brief trip Kathy and I and a
couple of friends made to New York. Pardon
me if I'm irrelevant.
At 7 a.m. Public Square is dead, a con-
crete corpse powdered with snow, ghastly
pale under ineffectual street lights. Except
. for a magazine stand and a few deserted
restaurants, the bus terminal is the only
living thing.
There, incongruous crowds scurry off
incoming buses, milling about us momen-
tarily, before scattering out into the cold calm
of the city. This is Wilkes-Barre, where “Irate
Taxpayers’ and “Fed Up to Here's’ pen
Pavlovian reflexes of indignation to the
"Sunday Independent about the “hippies’’ and
rowdy dance halls that paper is so fond of
inventing. Little wonder we clutch our tickets
so tightly.
Every so often I shiver. The cold that
huddles outside against the littered sidewalks
and dark buildings makes chill invasions at
every opening of the terminal doors.
The bus trip itself seems more of a
transformation than a journey. It consists of
flickering shadows, magazines that lurch
unreadably through a green tinted gloom.
Outside our metal chrysalis we glimpse white
highways, Howard Johnsons, endless in-
distinguishable hamburg factories. Only road
signs indicate movement. Turnpike they
inform us, Hackettstown, road ends—we are
sucked into a tight, winding tube, neon lit roar
and clatter, racing against claustrophobia
before breaking the surface of reality again.
Numbed by the slow miracle of the journey
we disembark, blink, breath in the stale,
cloying odor of New York. Luckily the air is
thinned somewhat with the cold.
Extremes tug at each other here, finding
atense, brittle balance. In a plush hotel lobby
a little tuxedo man chaperones his elevators
[TRB
A test of the moral stature of the United
Sates will come in the next few months when
we cannot coneaal from ourselves any longer
the stark reality that we have lost a war. All
our airpower and puissance have not been
able to enforce our will on a small backward
jungle nation in Southeast Asia. Will this
gathering realization finally produce a primi-
tive knee-jerk demand for a scapegoat to bear
the blame? Or will the ugly episode help the
world’s most powerful nation and, at heart,
one of the most splendidly idealistic, to
wisdom and maturity? Who can say.
Not later than 5 p.m. this Wednesday the
Senate is scheduled to vote on the McGovern-
Hatfield amendment to the draft extension
bill to force a withdrawal of all U.S. forces in
Vietnam by the end of this year. A year ago
the amendment got 39 votes. Almost certainly
it will fail this year and the vote will be called
a ‘“‘defeat.” Nonsense! It is a victory just to
have the measure voted on. What has hap-
pened, very siriply, is that all the street
protests, the campus turbulence, the sneered-
at hippies and long-haired objectors of the .
past five years have finally had their effect on
Congress and that, mostly without admitting
it, the legislators are carrying on from there.
This war has got to end. Even those who vote
against McGovern-Hatfield know it.
World War I was one of the most popular
in American history while it lasted and one of
the most unpopular when it was over. There
was the bad taste in the mouth after Ver-
- THE DALLAS POST, JUNE 17, 1971
Leftovers from New York
while out on the street a couple of tired kids
from Boston look for a place to crash.
Telephones and buses and toilets turn
millions of gluttonous mouths toward
exhausted wallets. Uncounted coins disap-
pear into some insatiable subterranean
stomach. A small victory; we blunder into a
subway exit and save four tokens.
The subways are fascinating, great in-
senate worms racing madly through un-
charted mazes. We descend into their lair, are
engulfed by the roaring, jolting, hiss and
screech, emerging into a world transformed
and far removed from the one we left minutes
ago. The city is nothing more than a series of
disjointed destinations; islands of unfamiliar
reality linked by a blindly passed unknown.
Bus doors snap at our heels. So many
people. The city ignores them. This is fine for
a day.
As night comes to leech what drab
warmth the daytime air contained, we go
OTUELOS ANGELES TIRES SYMAATE
197 THECEVER ROXT —
Zl
down to the Fillmore, the now defunct rock
music, heart of the city. (Wouldn't you know
it. The lowest common denominator of
American culture, the great leveller, Howard
Johnson’s has bought the site.)
Under the unimpressive marquee, in the
crowd of blue jeans by the entrance, stands a
fellow with a cup. ‘‘Spare change for a
ticket?” he asks then as'we brush past he
whispers confidentially back over an Army
fatigued shoulder, ‘Meth! Mesc? Hash:” A
few other entreprenaurs suggest acid, very
politely. In New York as in Wilkes-Barre,
there is no need to give drugs the hard sell.
We go into the theater where green-
jerseyed ushers try, vainly, to enforce the no
smoking rule. When the overhead lights go
out the screen behind the stage blazes into
phantasmagoric life. The Fillmore light show
is a work of art in itself, not a headache in-
ducing garble of strobes.
We’ve come to see the Kinks, an English
group that has advanced too far to get much
radio airplay. They do a lot of satire, tend to
depend on melody rather than loudness. Their
last two albums, one criticising the music
industry, the other wryly chronicling the rise
and fall of the British empire were song
cycles. They lack the BOOM BOOM BOOM
and insipid lyrics that make for hit records.
The girls buy flowers to strew on the
stage before the second show. (Beating a
rather hasty retreat back up the aisle while
singer Ray Davies grins around the gap in his
teeth). After the show we wander around the
village trying to find a bus, which we finally
do. No one kills us. As a matter of fact most of
the “freaks”, “trash” and so forth that give
so many of the tourists the creeps look pretty
much like us.
So much for the trip. Since than nothing
much has happened, and then again a lot has
happened. I think that’December has never
been so far removed from June.
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The Hard and Gritty Facts
sailles, and so ‘Merchants of Death” was
invented and a generation grew up thinking
the war was all a plot by arms manuf-
caturers.
After World War II there was the loss of
China and another scapegoat was needed and
provided by Joe McCarthy, those Commies in
the State Department. Always after war
there is reaction in America and a move
toward isolationism, and the charge, ‘“We
were betrayed” Since the United States is
obviously omnipotent (look at all our motor
cars!) anyone can see that nothing can go
against us in the world unless it is caused by a
conspiracy. President Kennedy was no traitor
no Johnson, nor Nixon. If we are to have one
somebody else will be needed and
we can forsee a political drive to blame our
failure in Asia on Pacifist intellectuals, on
subversives, on softies who got a ‘‘Ph.D. from
the Acheson college of Cowardly Communist
Containment.” (No, that has been used
already; we must invent something new).
It will be a sad business if this happens
again. There is something important for
America to learn from Vietnam if we are
mature enough to face reality and it is not too
early to think about it even while the troops
are coming home.
Vietnam was not a betrayal, it was a
mistake. We did not go into it for selfish gain
but from bad judgment. When we saw our
mistake we tried to pull it out by going in
deeper. War was a momentum of its own. We
The Empty Pew
by W. Jene Miller
It was when a business man thanked me for
my witness in behalf of bringing our boys
home alive rather than dead that I first heard
the terrible word.
That word is: The most powerful force in
American life today is not even elected, nor
does it answer to any elected authority. The
most powerful force in American life today is
the power to take a man’s son away from him
through the draft board!
The business man told me he was afraid to
age and his competition was represented on
the draft board.
And before you sit down and write that
vitriolic letter about patriotism, etc., let’s get
a couple of things straight: 1) I volunteered
for service during the Second World
Massacre, so I got no kick about the draft
from that angle. 2) Any nation which could
whitewash the cold blooded massacre of
mothers and babies in literally thousands of
cases, is perfectly capable of producing the
kind of citizens who gladly use their power on
a draft board to exploit, just like they use
power on the real estate boards, zoning
boards, church boards and tax boards.
So, if you want to bring peace to this tired
old world, one more thing you can do is elect
draft boards.
I suggest you hurry. ;
Did you catch Mr. Nixon’s appeal to hurry
lost prisoners so we had to fight to extricate
them. The consequences of earlier military
action became the causes of later military
action.
‘What will we remember about Vietnam?
Well; there is Mylai. And the tiger cages. And
the phrase, ‘We had to destroy the fillage in
order to saveit.” There was the make-believe
about the Tonkin Gulf ‘attack’ and two
brave senators, both defeated, Morse and
Gruening, who alone in Congress voted
against the war resolution based on it. There
were those military phrases like ‘‘protective
reaction,” and the two that bracketed the
Cambodia ‘‘incursion,”’ first that the United
States couldn’t act “like a pitiless, helpless
giant,”’ and after it was over that it was ‘the
* most successful operation of this long and
very difficult war.” Well, well; after that the
Gallup poll reported in February that 7 of 10
quieried thought the government wasn’t
telling them all the facts.
John Graham of the London Financial
Times wrote that the United States ‘‘has
bombed four countries and invaded two to
withdraw from one.”
The United States has done its duty by
Vietnam. It has set up an army of a million
men, well-armed, well-trained, fighting an
army perhaps a quarter that size. In our
generosity we have laid waste a nation, and
contributed more than $100 billion and 50,000
American lives. We have made subtler but no
less real sacrifices. This combined recession-
inflation at home comes from the refusal of
Lyndon Johnson to apply the taxes needed to
pay for the war; erosion of Congressional
power in the face of the presidency is due to
mistaken delicacy about supporting the
troops in wartime; these 309® Wfpriore GI
dope addicts returning to plague the nation
are a sacrifice too, with a terrible cost to us,
to their mothers, and, of course to them.
In four months, on Oct 3, comeiihe South
Vietnamese election. It could be the last
graceful way out of the quagmire. Recently
before the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, elder statesmen Averell Harriman
recalled that President Thieu tried to wreck
the Paris peace conference and will do so
again if re-elected. He got only 34 percent of
the vote in the 1967 election, with strong U.S.
support. Harriman thinks the Vietnamese
people want a coalition government and
would throw Thieu out if given the change.
They aren’t likely to get it. Thieu has one
political adversary in jail. Deputy Tran Ngoc
Chau, contrary to two Supreme Court rulings.
His rival for the presidency in 1967, ; Truong
Dinh Dzu, is in jail. And now a nevi®iece of
slick legislation may have eliminated Vice
President Ky from the race. It is still possible
that General Duong Van (“‘Big’’) Minh may
run. 4
Any reasonable appraisal show¥ihat we
have met our obligations in Vietnam. We
overestimated our capacity. We made a
mistake. If we can squarely face that hard
and gritty fact we shall be an even greater
nation that we are now.
A Political Promise
up and bring about the day when prisoners of
war could be free to go to the land of their
choice?
That was the gimmick which kept the
Korean war piling up blood-profits and dead
bodies for so long. We wanted to refuse to
sign until the communists could agree that if
we had their boys brain-washed enough to
To the Post:
Perhaps I am wrong in assuming that Mr.
W.A. Shilling has never had Bruce Hopkins as;
a teacher. But if not, I would like to express
the opinion that Mr. Shilling should not pre-
judge Mr. Hopkins in the area of teaching
solely on his editorial views.
As a former student of Mr. Hopkins; I have
experienced the real meaning of teaching, his
teaching. He is an intelligent, sensitive, and
very fine teacher.
You are wrong, Mr. Shilling. Itis very sad
that Mr. Hopkins is not presently teaching. He
has left a gap hard to fill.
TERESA STEINBURG
247 Hampshire Dr.
Chalfont, Pa.
To THE POST:
Re: “Grade School Conservative,” Dallas
Post, June 3, 1971
I'm afraid Mr. Eric Mayer should have
want to stay on our side, like they had the
chance to brain-wash our boys enough to want
to stay on their side, then the boys could
choose which country they would live in after
the armistice was signed.
Ihave no sons in this war, bit I do know that
peace will be dallied about until 1972 unless
direct and relentless pressure is put on
Letters to the Editor
defined “Conservative” before he used the
term wrongly as the subject of an article
which was essentially a combination of
psychoanalysis of himself as a child and an
echo of statements made before and which
are no longer effective.
Since there will probably be no rebuttal to
Mr. Mayer's article, the readers of The Post
will have to take everything at face value
without recognizing or analyzing the rhetoric.
Mr. Mayer asked a lot of questions in his
article without so much as a hint of for-
mulating an opinion that would justify the
overall article. Point one.
Point two: The sentimentalizing in the
last few paragraphs of the article sounded
like the never-ending and predictable, may I
say, antics used by people who are, at least,
left of center politically.
Come on, Mr. Mayer, a young fellow like
yourself should be able to innovate when
writing rather than using examples that have
been driven so deep into the ground that it
congress and senate powers. Mr. Johnson
had been president more than a year when he
promised to get us out, and he knew h#jw, but
lied about doing it. Mr. Nixon won mily vote
saying he had been vice-president, so he knew
how to get us out quickly, but a political
promise is a political promise is a bunch of
baloney.
would take one of the sewer authority steam
shovels to dig them up.
Just a few observations; Centerville and
Dick and Jane have nothing to do with Con-
servatism. And as for American justice I
believe Mr. Mayer would agree that ours is
best form anyone, world-wide, has come up
with so far.
I am not going to persue the subject any
further, i.e., addressing myself to each of Mr.
Mayer’s statements. I don’t want to burden
the individual who will initially read this
letter.
All I ask, as do many conservative-
thinking people, is that any type of media, no
matter what the size, give an honest and
factual view of each side and let the people
judge for themselves.
Sincerely,
JIM BALAVAGE
Shavertown
—