Page Four
EDITORIAL
Manicure
Brett Slocum, a member of Boy Scout Troop
281, spent nearly 36 hours recently planting and
manicuring a ragged triangle of land at the inter-
section of Routes 415 and 309—a project he devised
and executed himself. This remarkable project,
which was undertaken by Brett to fulfill
requirements for an Eagle Scout award, prompted
us to look around our community for other signs of
similar handiwork.
There is abundant evidence that the Back
Mountain is a brighter, cleaner, more pleasant
place to live, thanks to the efforts of these scouts.
Several youngsters have initiated painting
projects—at neighborhood churches, at the Back
Mountain Memorial Library, at the homes of
elderly citizens. Others, like Brett, have weeded
and planted and trimmed and clipped—around
churches, in neglected cemeteries, near littered
roadways. The projects are as varied as the boys
themselves, with but one common denominator:
each is a man’s job.
~ We owe gratitude not only to the scouts who
undertake such projects, but to the scoutmasters
who guide and help them in their endeavors. These
leaders include John Juris and Bruce Davies of
~ Troop 281; John Stubeda of Troop 225; Lee Baker
and Skyles Neyhard of Troop 155, and David
Kopetchny of Troop 132. To each of you, and to the
scouts you have trained for responsible citizenship,
we say thank you.
Power Policy
President Nixon has again called for the
development and application of fast breeder
nuclear reactors in the United States to solve the
power crisis of the future. And he has again failed
to set up the necessary government machinery to
protect the public from the tragedy of accident or
sabotage such facilities carry with them.
Speaking to a group of nuclear power pro-
ponents at the Atomic Energy Commission’s
Hanford works in Washington State last week, Mr.
Nixon said he was pledging to ‘““move this nation
into an era of plentiful, clean and safe atomic
power’’ by asking Congress for the appropriations
for a second fast breeder nuclear reactor project.
Mr. Nixon has yet to place any importance on the
latter two, taking no action except to put wheels in
motion to see that we have plentiful atomic power.
The AEC, meanwhile, is taking mostly a hands off
attitude when it comes to both clean and safe con-
siderations.
While the President was calling for prolifi-
ration of nuclear power in the Northwest, in
Colorado the AEC was ignoring its responsibilities
concerning vast uranium tailings which have
recently been considered a source of lung cancer.
Thousands of Coloradans have found themselves
living in houses and working in buildings which
were constructed from materials from these
tailings that still contain 85 percent of their original
radioactive contents. The AEC maintains that such
safety implications are not under its jurisdiction.
The first such fast breeder for the nation may
be located on a site on the Susquehanna River near
Meshoppen in Wyoming County. Though only ex-
perimental in nature, that facility will cost more
than $450 million, to be shared by government and
industry. Billions of dollars have already been
spent on the development of the use of nuclear
power for generating electricity by the AEC, thus
placing taxpayers into a position of subsidizing the
power industry generally, with little or no satis-
faction regarding safeguards.
Until the President can satisfy the environ-
mental protection aspects. of nuclear power,
Congress should keep a tight hold on the nation’s
purse strings.
Tie DALLASCPDoST
An independent newspaper published every Thursday morning by the Greenstreet News
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, $5a year. Out-of county subscriptions, $5.50 a year. Call
. 675-5211 for subscriptions.
The officers of the Greensireet 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-treasurer.
- Editor emeritus: Mrs. T. M. B. Hicks
Editor: Doris R. Mallin
News editor: Shawn Murphy
Advertising: Carolyn Gass
-\
THE DALLAS POST, SEPT. 30, 1971
a
{Insights
by Bruce Hopkins
Dear Mr. Agnew,
Your article, ‘The Root Cause of Attica,”
in the Sept. 17 New York Times was very
distressing. I am a 23-year-old man (although
you might have other names for me) who
frequently loses his faith in humanity. Un-
fortunately you are a man who tends to
enhance this feeling within me.
You have no conception of what
humaness, or humaneness, is, my dear sir. I
suppose it is politics that has done that to you,
I don’t know. You spoke of humaneness in
your editorial, purporting that “the theory of
American criminelogy and our penal system
remain among the most humane and ad-
vanced in the world.” The theory, perhaps. If
there is one. The penal system as it stands—
_ hardly humane. Of course I say this having
never been subjected to life in a prison. I
assume you speak on the same basis. Neither
of us knows for sure just what we're talking
about. However, if one-third of what I hear in
the evil news media (I try not to believe any of
it, but once in a while something strikes me as
so far-fetched it couldn’t possibly be fiction)
and what I have learned and felt in talking to
people at the Fortune Shop is true, then our
system as it stands rates very low on the bell
curve for humanity. Even average humanity
is above us.
Tell me, Mr. Agnew, what is the purpose
of a prison in America? Is it to punish? You
know that is what I was always taught to
believe. Prisons were for punishment. No one
ever suggested to me that they were supposed
to be used to rehabilitate. No, prisons were for
suffering; paying for your sins against your
fellow man. Have you noticed, sir, how
selective we are when we send people to
prison. We have established a Selective
Service for jail. If you are wealthy enough you
can usually buy your way out of a sentence.
The poor have little chance. Our system is
such that it can, if it so desires, send a man to
prison for a good many years for the
outlandish offense of possessing marijuana.
An offense that is primarily quite personal.
It’s rather like arresting someone for
masturbation. We can send a man to jail for
the crime of physically loving another man,
thus solving his problem by placing him in an
entirely male population where his crime will
be distorted and perverted until it is as devoid
+ of love as possible. These are just a few of the
more obvious elements of humanity within
our system. Sometimes, Mr. Agnew, I wonder
if there really is a theory behind American
criminology. Is there a theory behind -a
| TRB
a,
We can imagine an uptight President in
Alaska, putting his hand out with a forced
grin and saying, “Well, well, Wally. Long
time no see!” And Wally Hickel, the man he
fired from Interior along with six top aides,
responding cheerfully, “Welcome to An-
chorage! Have you had a chance to read my
book, WHO OWNS AMERICA?”
“No, I haven’t, Wally,” (the script goes
on) “I've been terribly busy on that wage-
price thing. and brushing up on my Chinese.”
“Keeps you busy, don’t it? But I do hope
you'll dip into the book sometime. By the way,
I mention you in a couple of places. I just gave
a copy to Emperor Hirohito.”
“No hard feelings, I hope, Wally?”
“Oh, dear, no! Not after that Cabinet
introduction you gave me on TV to the nation
in December ’68: ‘He is going to bring a new
sense of excitement, a_ new sense of
creativity, to that Department.’ Ermalee
loved it.”
“You sure brought excitement, Wally
“That was when you said you didn’t want
a Cabinet of ‘yes-men’. Remember? You have
to go now? Well, it’s certainly easier to see
you up here in Alaska, Mr. President, than
across the block back in Washington.”
Yes, that’s the scene we conjure up as we
read the Hickel book ($6.95; Prentice-Hall).
Oddly enough it makes us recall another
Cabinet member, Elliot Richardson of HEW,
the handsome Boston blue-blood. Richardson,
you remember, made the mistake of thinking
the president would buy that unanimous
decision of the Supreme Court on school
busing. What a goof that was! But Richardson
is a shrewder man than Hickel; he didn’t let a
122
rt.
Changes
By Eric Mayer :
The man was standing aimlessly, like
half a road crew, on the outskirts of the
construction site at Wilkes College. Clouds of
dust raised by the bulldozers that toiled
nearby swirled out toward him and some of
the dust must have stuck to his T-shirt
because it was dirty though his hands were
clean. His eyes, narrowed down into the
perpetual squint of those who can’t quite
understand any of what they see, passed
vacantly over the excavations that are
destined to be a multi-million dollar educa-.
tional complex. When the man spoke, it was to
the crowds of students who had filled the side-
walk between classes.
“Wouldn't give a damn dime to these
colleges,” he growled, to no one in particular.
“Not a damn dime.” :
The Susquehanna flows through the
Wyoming Valley like a rusty trickle through a
gutter. Small, grimy towns—Plymouth, -
(
5
i
! Illusions
system that will condemn a 19-year-old boy to
an indeterminate sentence of from 1 year to
life for a $70 robbery? A system that forces
him to spend 11 years in prison, making in the
‘meantime a bestselling book out of his
correspondence, and then permits him to
die—fact it, to kill him within the justice of the
system? All for a $70 robbery. This is
Shumanity.
The most distressing aspect of your
words, Sir, is that they imply that the George
Jacksons and Attica inmates of the world
don’t deserve to live—Or at least not as much
as the rest of us. It is as if you have made up a
scale of values for human life:
‘“—to compare the loss of life by those who
violate society’s laws with a loss of life
of those whose job it is to uphold it—
represents not only an assault on human
sensibility, but an insult to reason.”
That statement, Mr. Agnew, is as com-
pletely devoid of a sense of human worth,
moral responsibility and basic compassion
for one’s fellowman as any I have ever heard.
And it comes from the mind of a leader of
men. You must not judge lives as you would
judge livestock sir. If you raise cattle on the
streets and rooftops of Harlem, it will
probably not fare as well when you take it to
the county fair. You can’t bring a cow up in
the ghetto and expect it to give good milk. All
that takes time. First of all you must teach it
to relax. A society that creates a ghetto and
then punishes individuals for being unable to
cope with it dare not boast about the
humanity of its penal system. A society that
will advocate the shooting of unarmed men,
and make heros of the murderers because the
thing they killed was a “criminal” does not
represent the pinnacle of humanity.
History, from which no one has ever
learned anything, has taught us that politics
*and humanity do not get along well together.
The Greek tragedies showed us that. And
Anouilh’s Antigone, written in the 1940s
centers upon a man who allows himself to
destroy all of his loved ones for the sake of a
political philosophy. I am currently per-
forming in that play, and it could have been
written last week about Gov. Rockefeller and
the sister of one of the dead inmates.
‘FOR THE SUPREME COURT WE'LL NEED A LIBERALLY CONSERVATIVE WHITE, PRO-INTEGRATIO}
ANTI-BUSING, SOUTHERN WOMAN WHO LOOKS GOOD TO MINORITY GROUPS!”
Js
' Kind Regards; No
thing like that get him fired. He just ate a
little crow, accepted a ritual abasement from
young Ron Ziegler, the White House press '
secretary, and submitted to a press con-
ference.
We went to that conference. You have to
see one of those things to understand the
degree of cynicism and ridicule that the
working press sometimes put into their
questions. “Sir,” one of them wound up,
“‘weren’t you at least a little bit dismayed and
a little bit taken aback—just slightly—by the
President’s August 3 statement (repudiating
the Richardson busing order)?”
Richardson, the scion of Yankee
abolitionists, didn’t make a direct answer.
Now Hickel is a different type! No sub-
tlety. He’s just a self-made businessman, a
Babbitt. Believes in “positive thinking”. Big,
brash, bumptious, bouncy; as a boy on a
tenant farm in Kansas he watched farms blow
away, never thought of going to college, set
out to see the world, wept when he saw the
Rockies, picked up an occasional twenty
bucks in welter-weight fights, made his way
up to Alaska (too expensive to go to
Australia), went back later to the States with
$1000 borrowed from Ermalee to buy a sur-
plus Army plane and then, with a pal, flew
north, to the awe and admiration of every
Army post he careened over. “Son! Let me
see that plane!” said one incredulous three-
star general. He wound up in Alaska finally,
five times a millionaire, building houses and
motels. So then he helped make it a state, got
to be governor, and, at 49, was tapped for the
Nixon cabinet as a hard-nosed businessman,
loathed by liberal reporters, a man who would
get along fine, it was thought, with the oil
The
Plains, Pittston—lay up against their culmn
banks, clogging the gutter like the debris left
behind by a hard rain.
Abandoned coal breakers stare blindly
through hundreds of dusty windows. The huge
machines, the sifters, sorters, and chutes; the
elevators; engines, and catwalks that served
both as skeletons and vital organs have
corroded or been dismantled. Bereft of
purpose the breakers wait patiently for the
past to return and, perhaps pray that the
wrecking crews will soon spare them their
slow death by decay.
These are the surroundings in which
many of us attend school, or work or shop; the
surroundings which breed, and are bred by,
people who wouldn't give a dime for educa-
tion; people whose spirits are as exhausted as
the coal mines that should have provided
their livliihood—who tend patiently to their
bitterness, aging it; a rare wine to soothe
contributors. He kept the Nixon Inaugural in
his desk drawer—the one about lowering our
voices and bringing us all together.
He interpreted his job as cracking down
on oil polluters and protecting the en-
vironment. Odd things began to happen. The
White House told him to fire the hardworking,
hold-over director, of the Bureau of Mines (it
would mean ‘‘two more votes’ for the Ad-
ministration’s ABM). He did it but it bothered
him. “How in hell does this help the miners?”’
he asked himself.
He thought Vietnam was phasing out.
Then one night the President called in the
Cabinet and just before his TV speech to the
nation, told them he was going into Cam-
bodia. ‘I listened with horror. . . When I
walked out of the room I was screaming in-
side.”
The poor guy, you see, had a conscience.
Fancy. Also he thought it was poor politics.
He couldn’t get to see the President in this,
the most isolated of all Administrations. Half
a million war protestors gathered in
Washington and the President watched a TV
football game, for the next one the President
left town. “It was unbelievable to me,” said
this simple soul.
Then there was Spiro, always Spiro,
always making speeches. For Spiro the defeat
of New York’s liberal Republican senator
Goodell made the evening in spite of other
GOP defeats; the VP strode over to the TV
and said, “We got that son of a bitch!”
The Secretary finally talked it over with
Ermalee. “Wally,” she said, ‘you didn’t
come to Washington to play it safe.” (That’s
the kind of wife who gets a man into trouble!)
Ugly Valley
their rotting lives.
High school football thrives in the area.
Middle-aged failures fill stadiums to cheer
their more hopeful pasts. The editorial policy
of one leading newspaper begins, quite
literally, where its high school sports pages
end.
Essentially it is an ugly area. The streets
of Wilkes-Barre teem with ugliness; with
people who are, as John Lennon put it,
crippled inside. The agony of their disease, an
all consuming hatred, a cancer of the soul,
snarls out from distorted masks that once
were faces. Were it possible, these people
would hate themselves but since human
nature works in devious ways they project
their hatred outward—especially toward
those they envy.
It isn’t surprising then that colleges, with
their much publicized promises of degrees
and the good jobs that go with them, have
Regrets
A Greenstreet News Co. Publication
Open Letter to Spiro Agnew
Mr. Agnew, these were your words on the
governer’s role:
je . .Governor Rockefeller acted
courageously. Those who would have had him
act otherwise have yet to learn the paramount
lesson of our country; that acquiescence to
the demands of the criminal element of any
society only begets greater violence.”
In a political sense, one might consider
those words quite true. However, if we are to
consider them on the basis of one man doing
* whatever he possibly can to help his fellow-
man along the way, then Mr. Rockefeller has
betrayed us all. Looking at it as a human
being, and not as a politician, I find the
governor’s action despicable. I find it as
cowardly as an action could possibly be.
There are some things, we must believe, that
cannot be judged on the basis of society’s laws
or political laws; things that come under the
category of human compassion; of human
understanding; of—pardon the expression,
love. My idealistic mind wants to believe that
love for one’s fellow man does not end when
he is put behind bars. In fact, that might be
where it could begin. For indeed, th who
have been unable to cope with societyffire the
ones-who need most of the understanding and
love of their fellow men. We could do so much
more if we offered that instead of bullets;
instead of punishment; instead of retaliation.
You tell us that the lesson of the century is
not to acquiesce to the demands of our
criminal element. An, but what exactly 1s a
criminal act? For a long time, Mr. Agnew,
my friends and I have acquiesced to the
criminal acts of your administration in
Vietnam, and indeed at Kent State, at
Jackson State, and now at Attica. We have
acquiesced although we did not want to. But
despite the crimes you have committed
against humanity, Mr. Agnew, and as th-
less as I personally may think you are'to us,
still I believe in your right to exist on the same
level as decent people. If only because you are
a human being. Before you are anythi Ise,
and you are a number of unfortunate things,
you are a human being. It is you who has yet
to learn the paramount lesson of the century
although it has been shouted out to you a
number of times. The paramount lesson of all
centuries has been the same: to love one
another. How many times will we fail the
course?
Love always (or until
the end of the century,
whichever comes first),
BRUCE HOPKINS
.
4
He passed a sleepless night or two, re-read
the Inaugural in his desk. Then he wrote one
of the most famous political letters in history,
a private letter, he insists, directed to his
boss, trying to explain about youth. At the end
“he added that it would be a nice thing, if Mr.
Nixon saw cabinét members occasionally,
‘on an individual and conversational basis.”
Photostats were given to his staff for their
comments. The letter got into print before it
got to the White House. When he got home he
said, ‘Ermalee, I have a feeling of relief.”
Wally Hickel never ate crow—that’s for
sophisticated Boston Brahmins like Se ry
Richardson. He writes in a cheery, low-keyed
tone about it all, preaching ‘‘positive
thinking’. It is fun to read how the White
House gets rid of a cabinet member who son’t
quit. He found out about the spiteé$fand
paltriness of this Administration, one of the
pettiest in this century. When the time came
for the White House briefing on the can-
cellation of the oil and gas leases in the Santa
Barbara channel which he considered one of
his crowning achievements, he was told not to
come. He was cordially disinvited toa White
House prayer breakfast to which he had
hoped to take his son, who had flown back
- from college for Mothers Day. He stayed for
the 1970 election (by then he had a following
with young people, conservationists, liberals,
blacks, and types of that sort). Then the
President let him go. That evening, with the
news on radio, neighbors gathered at the:zloor
and sang, “For he’s a jolly, good fellow’ In
+ the flyleaf of the book he gave to Mr. Nixon he
wrote “Kind regards; no regrets.”
There’s a man who doesn’t whine, doesn’t
repine, doesn’t grovel. Ermalee, too.
come under so much fire lately. Ignorance
always despises widom, while envying it
secretly.
It is a sad commentary on the state of this
nation that the Nixon administration should
see fit to turn for support to this particular
minority of our population. The president
slogged willingly through the stinking mire of
the 1970 ‘law and order’ campaign and has
been tracking mud across the face of reason
ever sincé. We: all know about his silent
majorities and his southern strategies. We've
all been regaled by Spiro Agnew’s attacks on
various forms of intellectualism. (Attacks on
intelligence actually)
The president and the country might well
ask themselves if hatred and ig: anc are
really the solutions to the problems that bese:
the United States. Having been exposed tc
these commodities, Wyoming Valley style, 1.
would say no.’
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