————u Page 4 EDITORIAL Northern Lights It was cold for early August and remarkably clear. Straight up, you could see the Milky Way, and even the untrained star-gazer had no trouble locating the Big Dipper or spotting a shooting star. Many of us had heard about the aurora borealis but had never before been fortunate enough to see it. It’s a case of being in the right place at the right time under the right weather conditions, really. Friday night, as the clock ticked toward 1 a.m., the sky was streaked with vertical bands of white light. Saturday night, curiously and fortunately enough, we happened to be in the company of an astrophysi- cist. Together we watched patiently, and at the wee hour of 2:30 Sunday morning, horizontal and verti- cal streaks of light, faintly tinted with pink, began to pulsate in the sky. It was eerie indeed, but none- theless beautiful and, as our astrophysicist friend pointed out, unexplainable. “Tremendous energy,’ was all that he could say, and he too was over- whelmed by what he called the ‘classic aurora.’ In an age when science is bent on explaining everything, it seems to us a good thing that the Northern Lights remain a mystery and their visibi- lity a rare and fleeting occurrence. We are rather glad, we must admit, that to date no one has dis- covered how to harness that ‘tremendous energy’’ or offered a point-by-point explanation of what makes the aurora as breathtakingly beautiful and awesome as it is. Mother Nature has indeed done her work well, if mysteriously. Cheap Criticism Criticism, like advice, comes very cheap. It springs to the lips of snarlers with marvelous alacrity and usually accomplishes precious little. Lately, HUD has been coming in for some very harsh criticism from just about everyone. It has become the ‘in’ thing for community officials to lambast the efforts of the federal flood relief agency at public meetings, and private citizens who have been frustrated in their attempts to get much needed housing threaten to sue the govern- ment. To hear the critics tell it, nothing but nothing is being done right down at the Mackin Street School. > Still, HUD is here. In our haste to condemn the agency for its ineptness and red tape tangles, we might forget that floods have happened—are happening—in other parts of the world where there is NO hope for immediate assistance. On the Philippine island of Luzon, for example, nearly 400 persons haved died as a result of flooding there, and typhoid and cholera are stalking the survivors. Fuel supplies have been depleted and food shor- tages are severe. Housing for thousands of flood evacuees—whether it be evacuation shelters or camper trailers—is simply nonexistent. We are not implying that HUD is without fault—far from it. It is obvious to everyone, in- cluding the HUD administrator’s themselves, that there have been operational snafus of gigantic proportions. Yet this has been a flood of gigantic proportions, too, and HUD may well have been as unprepared for the disaster as we were. We suspect that the Washington bosses will be taking a close look at the department’s lacklustre performance While we do not advocate a HUD whitewash, we do question the wisdom of public officials’ carping without cease about HUD’s shortcomings. Might it not be more beneficial to all concerned if these officials lent their time, energy and influence to helping HUD administrators help us? The ad- ministrators are, afterall, strangers in our com- munity who are trying to do a job which would be diffcult even for persons knowing the ins and outs of our Valley. Unlike criticism, tolerance and patience do not come cheap. By Eric Mayer The bedrock of canned goods supported boxes of instant rice, cake and pancake mixes, which in turn supported an egg carton plateau. Loves of bread, a frozen chicken, a bag of sugar lay scattered like foothills around the mountain of groceries that rose from the small kitchen table. Flossie folded her empty grocery bags. When she put the eggs and chicken in the refrigerator, cool air brushed away a trace of red left in her face by the long, grocery laden walk home. Flossie realized then how tired she was. She noticed that her black cat, Bernard, was sitting attentively beside the table, staring up at the mound of boxes and cans as if one of the tuna fish he seemed to smell might suddenly come leaping out. “I guess I'm just not as young as I used to be, “Flossie told Bernard. ‘There was a time when I could walk down to the store and back like it was nothing.” Bernard glanced at his mistress with an- noyance. He wasn’t a very sympathetic listener, but then he wasn’t a stickler for originality either. He greeted all of Flossie’s remarks with the same indifference. “And do you know, I didn’t run into a soul today. Not a single person I recognized...” Bernard gave Flossie a look that said, “Well, now you’ve done it, with all your talking. Those tuna fish will never come out.” Then he showed her his magnificent tail. Left alone, Flossie gave way to the depression that had been growing in her, like a stormecloud, all this hot afternoon. Once, long ago, the weekly visit to the grocery had been an outing rather than a chore. The store was,, in retrospect, rather small, rather badly lit and too warm in the summer. A bell on the door announced your arrival. The proprieter knew all his customers and the customers knew each other. Flossie would take her time, meeting friends and exchanging gossip. | TRB, Washington. One year ago this month President Nixon made one of the most astonishing about-faces in the history of the presidency. For two-and- a-half years he had anxiously waited for his delibertly induced recession to halt inflation but things steadily got worse. New Deal economists implored him to adopt an activist policy. Instead, the White House issued a stream of optomistie predictions while all the time unemployment and inflation rose and simultaneously a desperate balance of trade deficit developed. The latter finally triggered the Nixon switch. - In a televised address to the nation Aug. 15 , 1971, Mr. Nixon knocked the dollar off gold, froze wages and prices for 90 days, and pro- posed a series of sweeping tax benefits for cooperations and individuals. It was a turn- around from a miserable record that need not have occured. The next day stocks jumped 33 points, on the industrial average in Wall Street, the biggest rally in history. Here we are now in a presidential election in which the real issue is the “Nixon issue.” How has Mr. Nixon done? The economy is only part of it. Mr. Nixon is not very well liked as a person and he has a reputation for par- tisanship, aloofness and deviousness. He is challenged by Senator McGovern who almost frank, open and direct. The Senator has immense stores of argument available to him and the nation deserves a discussion of the issues. For an underdog like the Senator there is the only one path to the White House: at- tack, attack, attack. But is Mr. McGovern the man to do it? That we don’t know. At Miami Beach he seemed to Thissa 'n Thatta by H. H:Null III - A week ago, without any planning, I found myself in a bed at Robert Packer Hospital. I had decided that I had about two weeks left of my life and that I had better give some thought to how they would be spent. It dawned on me that I would not be able to secure a typewriter around the hospital, nor use one if securable, the upshot being that there would be no Thissa and Thatta for the first time since the column’s appearance about 10 years ago. Unimportant as that might seem to my readers (if any), it bothered me on my bed of pain until I remembered that the world had to get along without Shakespeare after he reached a certain stage of debilitude. If so, they could certainly get along without me; whereupon I relaxed and began thinking about other consequences after I left the earthly scene. The one that bothered me the most was the fact that if I quit living as soon as I expected to Nixon would lose a vote in November. I wondered if I couldn’t put in an absentee vote right away and have it counted on Election Day. Would it be considered different from the vote of someone who planned an excursion to Atlantic City or to a golf tournament? Or would absence by death be considered a little different? Then I began to worry about the Newspaper Guild president endorsing McGovern, won- dering whether I would be a little less in- dignant if he had endorsed Nixon. I decided that I would have been just as annoyed since I have always opposed bloc voting of any sort - ethnic, religious, fraternal, union, even family. I have not always agreed with my own family and that is the way I think it should be. a The new supermarket was huge. Endless varieties of food lined long gleaming corridors of shelves. The tile walls reminded Flossie of a hospital, as did the white uniforms the store personnel wore. Air conditioners kept the place cold even on the hottest of days and the doors swung open with a hiss when you stepped in front of them. The supermarket was invariably crowded with strangers. Flossie seldom met anyone she knew and her shopping took half as long and left her twice as tired. Flossie decided to rest in the shade of the porch for awhile. At the front door something black streaked past her ankles, hurtled down the steps and into the bushes. She hardly noticed. She was wondering at what point had she stopped changing and fallen out of step with the world. : Doubtless, she was still growing older; her eyes were weaker, her hair grayer, her walk IS JEWISH 9 CATHOLIC OR gio slower. But these were only surface changes. Inside she remained the same and had to watch the outside world, which included her body, change around her, leaving her out of place. Sitting on the porch she could almost believe that nothing had really changed. The shadows falling across the lawn, cast by the oaks beside the house, were the same and geraniums and pansies bloomed in the flower beds just where they had always been. Her own tiny bit of the world had been protected. Time had flowed around it and left it untouched. But she had only to look up or down the street to see the change that elsewhere had taken place. The Pleasance lot, next door, was characteristic. Thirty years before, hollyhocks and lilacs had grown near the street. There had been a miniature orchard behind the house and further back narrow paths had wandered vacillate over the appointment of Larry O’Brien as national chairman. Up to the middle of last week he seemed at times to be running against Senator Eagleton rather then Mr. Nixon. The Eagleton incident was finally written off, in a dramatic scene with every- body keeping his cool and a mutual exchange of courtesies. Ad columnist Mary McGory said in a memorable phrase, ‘For an execution it went off remarkably well.” Nobody has mourned the demise of Eagleton more noisily, incidently, than the Republicans. So now’ we come back to the economy again, prompted by the anniversary of Mr. Nixon’s great turn-around, and wondering if Senator McGovern can make something of it. A big new decision faces us, a historic de- cision, in which the differences between Messrs. McGovern and Nixon are almost as wide as over Vietnam. The fact is that economic law has been vindicated. Starting a year ago and using the tools recommended by New Deal economists like Walter Heller, Paul Samuelson, James Tobin and others, Mr. Nixon gave the country a lift. Fiscal stimulus, wage-price restraints and liberation of the dollar have worked. Testifying here the other day economist Walter Heller gratefully noted that ‘the US economy is at long last on the move and in- flation is at long last on the wane.” Paul Samuelson and Ken Galbraith agreed. The most boastful notice of the economic im- provement, naturally enough, comes from Mr. Nixon. But qualifications must be noted. First of all, the recovery is still tentative. The infant is still in its crib. Furthermore, it is an un- balanced recovery because Mr. Nixon threw one-sided tax cuts to corporations rather than to individuals. Corporations got recondite things like the “accelerated investment tax credit’ which the layman does not even want to understand. And rather pitifully, we think, Mr. Nixon made a great show of balancing his tax cuts by reducing social expenditures in which the very first casualty was Pat Moyniham’s famous welfare program with a floor under incomes and $2400-for-a-family of four. (Mr. Nixon never had his heart in, the +» The pointis that what Mr. Nixon has'done he has done reluctantly, and that now he has started pulling back. It reminds us of General Eisenhower. In eight years the General had three recessions which is no mean stunt in anybody’s record. Every time recovery appeared it would frighten him and he would slam on the breaks to prevent inflation with a new recession. ( Mr. Nixon last month sent one of the most patronizing messages to Congress that we have seen in a long while commanding it to set a ceiling of $250 million on expenditures and adding ‘let there be no misunder- standing,” if bills came to him over this ceiling, “I will veto them.” This sounds well enough until you look at the real situation. Mr. Nixon cut taxes about $12 billion, the chief benefit going to Corpor- uneven that corporate profits are now reaching records while werkers’ wages, par- ticularly non-union workers, are marking time. It is true that if Mr. Nixon’s New Deal deficit financing is bringing recovery, and Idon’t think that consanguinity, party loyalty or the bonds of lodge brotherhood should take the place of a free choice when picking a candidate. Then the Eagleton affair came along to take up my thinking moments - even when I had not even written my own obituary, something I had always planned to do. How the Democratic Party has changed since I first elected to identify myself with it when I cast my first vote in 1920! Without looking it up, I think it was for Woodrow Wilson’s second term, but I am not sure. I remember voting for Al Smith a few years later and then put- ting in a ballot for Herbert Hoover, my first defection to the Republicans. Then I voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt because he promised us economy in govern- ment. Everybody, including myself, can see how wrong I was about that. I’m afraid it has made me a little cynical. But with only two weeks to go, what does anything matter? Except that when you are sick, even trivial things matter a lot. For instance, I kept going over in my mind a news story that the Shapp Chap was tightening his hold on each in- dividual by assuming the right to appoint a commission, which would decide whether hospitals could or could not expand. He was afraid two hospitals serving the same area would both settle on some expensive equip- ment or building when in the commission’s view, one was unnecessary. Then the federal government was going to make it illegal to ride in an automobile without putting on seat belts - through a commission of some sort, of course. Even though one had opposed seat belts from the oo IE, come to compulsion, there would be nothing to do but bow to it. It isn’t just the seat belts that matter, it’s the constant invasion of private rights. Unless, of course, one is a great liberal, in which case,, judges « can extend rights that nobody had ever possessed before. These same liberals, who want the right to overheard by anybody, want the laws to compel power plants to leave us in darkness rather than to cause a little unavoidable pollution, want us to buy oil and gas abroad at exorbitant prices rather than build a pipeline across Alaska. : These and many other national and in- ternational problems kept beating at my brain until I fell asleep, half-drugged by a sleeping pill, mercifully given me to allow me to get some rest. When I awakened a few hours later, I noticed that a miracle had happened - I could breathe normally again. I tested it by getting out of bed and into slip- through clumps of phlox. Beds of radishes and onions were hidden away behind sweet peas, zinnias and poppies. A patch of herbs was guarded by snapdragons. Grape vines and roses hung along arbors planted amid the flowers. Pumpkins had grown fat&a the tall corn of a large garden. And now, in place of the countless flowers and growing things there was only grass; a great long stretch of grass. That was all. It was easier to take care of. Flossie guessed she could understand that. Anymore you couldn’t earn enough money to own land on Elm Street and still have time to take care of flower beds. (As Mrs. Pleasance had said when she’d had the last of the beds ripped up). It was still a shame. It seemed that the whole world was being levelled off, reduced to colorless practicality. The stores were as cold and efficient as the stark, im- maculate lawns. Even the homes were long and low and lacking in character. They no longer built big porches like Flossie’s. Perhaps it was supposed to be i#ybad taste these days. And even the people... Flossie stopped her thoughts there. “You're just getting old,”’ she. scolded herself. “Times do change. They always have and always will. Just because you can’t keep up anymore is no reason to blame everyone else.” Perched somewhere in the oak limbs above [the porch, a red squirrel chattered at the black shape that stalked silently through the shadows on the lawn. Sunlight lay heavy on the bushes in front of the porch and a breeze nudged the zinnias into motion. A hum- mingbird, flashing gold, darted 0 hover in front of the long orange flowers of Flossie’s as soon as the vine bloomed there was a humming bird waiting. Some things were always the same. that inflation under his controls has been cut to 3 percent. Splendid. But there is a long way yet to go. If you want statistics--un- employment is still 572-6 percent, factories are still operating at only 77 percent of capacity, and the gap between the nation’s actual and potential output is a staggering $60 billion. Mr. Nixon boasted to Congpes that he had cut taxes, and four times wed against expenditures that would bring “higher tax- es.” This is demagoguery. Surely the public cycle it is wise to cut taxes to stimulate the economy (as the president did ‘@ er ago) while sooner or later Federal rev#iues have to be restored to meet social requirements. A recent Brookings study showed taxes’ have been so reduced that by 1974-75 even with fuller prosperity, there is a built-in $17 billion annual deficit in the absence of tax increases: If we don’t restore taxes by then we shall have raging inflation. Federal expenditures could be cut, of course. It takes audacity for Mr. Nixon to talk * about high expenditures. The Nixon war in Vietnam adds $7 to $8 billion to the budget annually Secretary Laird wants 14 billion more for defense this year, which Senator McGovern tried to eliminate on the Senate floor. And conservative Mr. Nixon who was pushed into his activist economic role now make motions of pulling out prematurely. “We are in danger of repeating the Eisen- hower mistakes,” cried Paul Samuelson, winner of the Nobel prize in economics. McGovern has lots of material if he can use it. 9 wi pers, which carried me to tom without having to gasp for breath. So now I am going to be alive again for the foreseeable future. I am going to be able to keep on fighting for common sense in a half- cast my vote for Nixon in November. A little hard to explain, but it was like this: For no apparent reason, my breathing kept getting shorter and shorter, until I could not even complete the brushing of my teeth without a pause to gasp for breath. Black Lung, says I, and hurried off to Sayre, where than they were a year ago, but that for some reason, my weight had increased about 10 pounds in a few weeks. “Body fluid,” said a wise physician, who assigned pills which worked during my sleep on my firstza ght, to taking away the pressure on my bZZathing. So in a few hours, I found that I was going to live. ; A miracle. scripfion, $6. per year. Call 675-5211 for subscriptions. Editor emeritus: Mrs. T.M.B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin News editor: Shawn Murphy Advertising: Carolyn Brennan i a \ a pa» 4 4 gaa 4 Tr RL ic oe? a pd Bo ARE a A Sa
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers