Page 4 : Weatherwise, winter brings more than its share of problems to nearly everyone, and at the wake of Although the last snowfall fell short of the Thanksgiving storm a year ago, the problems it perpetrated along the roads were comparable. tion for its tardiness in responding to the hazardous driving conditions reported along sections of the Dallas-Luzerne Highway. The grievances of local officials and residents began, the state highway was allegedly ignored to request their assistance. Cindering and ashing and as a result, slippery and icy conditions caused traffic snarls which interfered with the normal flow of transportation throughout borough and township roads. ~ On the other hand, PennDOT officials maintain that their highway crews were dispatched by mid- day, but in some cases operations were late be- cause their trucks and spreaders became en- tangled in the afternoon rush of motorists, many of whom were released early by their employers. PennDOT also claims that a shortage of equipment time lag in re-locating this equipment subsequently ‘Haggling between state and local government is nothing new in the political scene and obviously, the winter season has begun on this note. We are hoping that it will be resolved by the next snow- The Light A few months ago we published a one-line, tongue-in-cheek editorial that read: ‘Will the last soldier out of Vietnam please turn out the light at the end of the tunnel?” Today as presidential negotiator Henry conduct their top secret tete-a-tete over the fate of Indochina in a posh French villa, sensitive Americans at home are wondering whether Lyndon Johnson’s proverbial tunnel might extend as far into infinity as the space-warp tunnel in ‘2001: Space Odyssey’’, when one considers the post-war ramifications of previous peace settlements. It is not necessary here to belabor the obvious have destroyed in wars we have ‘“won,’’ a tribute to our willingness to forgive our enemies, but a glaring testimony to our inability to extricate ourselves from the neurotic cycle of devastation and restoration with its dangerous complement: destructive national guilt. We are not suggesting that America immediately abnegate its self-imposed duty to rebuild the shattered cities and restore the napalm-scarred face of the Indochinese countryside. Neither do we advocate witch hunts to affix blame for this most disgraceful blunder in the history of our diplomacy. Rather, we propose that our nation take courageous steps to convert the mighty force of our industry to the task of domestic facelifting, and once and for all dispel the notion that America exists by virtue of its conquests. Only then shall we have seen the light. Thissa n Thatta During the presidential campaign, I soft- pedalled any criticism of Richard Nixon that might have come into my insidious little ‘mind, for the reason that I didn’t want to do anything to further the chances of George McGovern, who I regarded as utterly incom- petent to head the United States government. I might add that I feel, after watching his campaign with fair assiduity, that he is in- competent to head anything else, except possibly a medicine show or camp meeting. Now that is settled, I feel that it is time to admonish Richard about a few important matters, past and present. Firstly, about the ITT mischief; secondly, about the Watergate Caper and thirdly, about his permissiveness toward the American Indian war party, which damaged the property of us taxpayers to a degree of six figures. I can forgive him for going a little easy until after the election on some of these noisome eruptions, but the matter of the Indian occupation of govern- ment buildings and destruction of property is a little hard to condone; particularly after some of Nixon’s strictures against permis- siveness in his 1968 campaign. It seems likely that the president didn’t have any knowledge of the ITT deal, but it was kind of smelly and it seems to me that he is in a position to ferret out just who in his ad- ministration and party was responsible for it and to punish them. As to the Watergate Caper, if Mr. Nixon doesn’t know who was responsible at the top, find out and take some action. The only compensation I can find for him in the matter of the Indian raid is the probab- ility that the Democrats stirred up the whole thing in an effort to put Nixon on the spot a little before election with the hope that he would crack down on them and as martyrs, the noble red men would have attracted some votes to McGovern. Politically, the permis- siveness may have been a wise move, but the President of the United States isn’t supposed to act politically when the property of the tax- payers is being destroyed. It is ancient his- tory now, but I would think a little more of Richard if he had put these criminals behind the bars the minute he heard their war cries. Be that as it may, Vietnam is not ancient history and however the rest of the country may feel about it, I am pretty apprehensive about this peace treaty that is being negotia- | TRB from Washington = Sort: As you read this, God willing, three astronauts will be approaching--or on --the Moon. As they look back through the cloudless lunar sky they see another spaceship behind, the Earth. We who follow them are passengers on this second spaceship. Like it or not, the most lasting effect of these flights is, probably, to lift our horizon, to make us think globally. How are things on Spaceship Earth? With its torrid zones and polar caps, it is a peculiar place. It is inhabited by an, odd, aggressive, oxygen-breathing, warm-blooded species called Man. Man is a pygmy, with a trace of Divinity. Often he is selfish; generally he is short-sighted and sometimes he is noble. His will-to-survive is breath-taking. He is over- populating his little spinning planet at a great rate and very soon he must do something about it. Will he do it before disaster? Every 24 hours that Cernan, Schmitt and Evans are away from Earth, 200,000 more humans are added. The population is already 3.7 billion. At the end of their 13-day cruise Cernan, Schmitt and Evans will return to a planet with 2,600,000 more people on it (deaths subtracted from births) than when they left. In 35 years, population will double. Where will they all live? Some, in AD 2007, may be jammed in as tight as on Apollo 17 itself. If the fish tank gets too crowded, of course, many will die. Of the passengers on Earth about two- | Footnotes by J. R. Freeman The demise of mighty Life Magazine brings who once was not so small-town at all. The year was 1967. I was contracted by Life to assist its then business editor, Chris Welles, to develop and write a story about what Sen. Paul Douglas had said was the “most sub- merged issue in American domestic politics involving the largest scandal in the history of our republic.” The subject was oil shale -- $6 trillion worth of the stuff -- and involved a national scandal so large as to make the famous Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s pale away as nothing more than a western-type tea party. But Life Magazine didn’t have the journalistic in- tegrity to challenge the oil slick policies of a branch of the federal government, no more than it had the guts to challenge then President Lyndon Johnson and his oil lacky Interior Secretary Stewart Udall for at- tempting to give away to the international oil cartel a rich chunk of land belonging to all Americans. The contract with Life said simply that I was to furnish consultation, information and research to Mr. Welles for the sum of $400 a week and expenses. At the time Mr. Welles said that I was needed 24 hours a day, seven days a week for as long as necessary. To develop and write the story to the business editor’s satisfaction took he and I together almost a year. ted with North Vietnam, a treaty that seems to me to threaten the existence of South Viet- nam, the independence of which was guar- anteed by the U.S.A.; ergo, that all of our expenditure of men and money was wasted. It is too early to be sure of this, but as outlined by Kissinger, North Vietnam has by far the best of the deal as a little analysis reveals. What I fear is that Richard will mix a bit of American politics into the negotiations and come up with a treaty, which in the long run will give North Vietnam just what it wanted and was unable to get by armed warfare. I judge that so many Americans are tired of the Vietnam War they would consider Richard a Nobel Prize candidate if he brought peace—even if, in a few years, everything we fought for is lost to the Communists. It must always be remembered that Hanoi maintains and has right along, that North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambod- ia, are a unit, one nation and indivisible, so that when they claim that they have no troops in South Vietnam what they mean is that South Vietnam does not exist in their eyes, therefore the troops which have been fighting there are not in a place that does not exist, but are still within their own country. The whole of Southeast Asia belongs to and is part of North Vietnam, according to their interpreta- tion. As the projected treaty now reads, it mitting the legal position of the Viet Cong, but consenting to a place in the government for its representatives, which would place the South Vietnamese who do not want to be placed under a Communist yoke in a pretty bad pos- ition. Put yourself in their place and it may be seen that President Thieu is right. According to. the draft of the cease fire agreement, it is to take place without any supervision of supposedly neutral nations and only the United States has to withdraw its troops, the North Vietnam legions can stay where they are—and make trouble. Also, there is no provision for a cease fire in Laos and Cambodia. There are other dangers and President Nixon is to be commended for not signing this document even although it would have assur- ed his election. At that time nobody was posi- tive that it was in the bag even though every- body thought it was. Signing would have pla- cated the ‘Peace at any price” grofff of American citizens, who through naivete would just as soon have seen a sweeping vic- tory by our Communist enemies. They have constantly denigrated Pre- sident Thieu, who, whatever his defects, has stayed on as a popular leader of his country and has led the South Vietnamese military forces to bring the North Vietnamese invasion to a halt. Thieu would certainly not shape up well as a candidate for President of the U.S., but he does all right on his home playing field. I just hope Richard listens to me and doesn’t sell us down the river after all of our sacrifice of men and money. 2 a Pe THE DENVER RosT - © 1972 HE LOS ANGELLS SN thirds go to bed hungry at night. To put it more scientifically, as Lester R. Brown does in his rousing new book, World Without Borders ($8.95, Random House), they are = below the nutritional minimum required for who has been to Saigon knows what that means. You tower a foot taller than the Vietnamese. When you squeeze his fingers he winces. No wonder he dislikes us. Messrs. Cernan, Schmitt and Evans will be looking for geological demarkations along the Sea of Serenity. As they look back at Spaceship Earth they can almost make out another kind of demarkation at home. It is an imaginary line that separates: North America, Europe, Russia and Japan from Latin America, Africa and Asia: the North- South line of the economic gap, the division between the two worlds. It is taller than any Taurus mountains, and deeper than any Littrow crater the astronauts will encounter; life expectancy in the North may be 70 years, while in much of the South perhaps 30, which is not very long to live, but too long to be hungry. Our astronauts come from a nation with six percent of the earth’s population that com- placently consumes 34 percent of its energy; the individual income of the American is over $4,100, of India $90, and during the sixties the gap between the two, says Brown, widened: “both absolutely and relatively.” The bir- thrate in the poor countries is about twice that of the rich. Back in the sixties, we remember, everybody thought there was going to be a famine. William and Paul Paddock published placent, highly bourgeois, very wealthy, very small North Atlantic elite and everybody else.” The head of the international Food and Agriculture Organization said ‘‘the outbreak of famines within the next five to 10 years cannot be excluded.” Gunnar Myrdal, the great Swedish economist, was more explicit; he was an impressive figure with massive head and china-blue eyes, and his vast ex- perience and his difficulty with the English letter “J” made his testimony to Congress unforgettable. In 10 years, he predicted (that was in 1965), there would be world famine: “What the world needs,” he observed memorably, “is not yet planes, but yobs!” Famine didn’t appear. Why?—because of the Green Revolution—the production of new, miracle strains of grain and rice, a discovery that has affected more people, in less time, than any previous technological advance in history. It got Norman Borlaug the Nobel running out. It has given us time but not very much. Last month from Rome FAO director Addeke Boerma in a grim annual report said that the developing nations are falling behind again in food supplies as population catches up; it is “extremely serious,” he said. Earlier in Washington, Boerma observed that ‘‘history teaches us that situatidB of this kind lead sooner or later to violence and poli- ‘tical upheaval.” Well, 18®s come back to Lester Brown again, and his book, and the planet Earth. The point he makes is that we have come, gather suddenly, to a global society ‘‘withouf®bor- ders,” and that our resources are not endless but finite. We think we can stretch things with and, for a while, we can till population cat- ches up. But we have reached the point where the relationship between man and his natural environment is deteriorating. The mantle of life-sustaining topsoil which is only inches deep over most of the world’s surface (though it sinks 10 or 20 feet in the humus mines of Iowa and Minnesota) is being used up. The word is ‘‘eutrophy.’”’ The water run-off from farm lands, with chemical fertilizer, pollutes the streams: Lake Erie is the best example of eutrophication. The moon has no moisture at all but on our Earth we are poisoning our water; it is becoming even more precious than land. We can, of course, restore life to Lake Erie, explains Brown, but it will cost $40 billion. : : It is Lester Brown’s message that we are in a period like that when the scientists gathered evidence that the globe was round, a nany refused to accept the notion. Now theYastro- nauts drive it home. Like it or not, we must think globally. We are all on the same Space- ship, and it is the only one we have. During that year, between the two of us, a rather sizeable research expense was paid for by the mighty Life, published by Time, Inc. We made numerous air trips across the country, with several shorter excursions from Colorado to Washington and New York all on Time, Inc. credit cards. Finally, by opening my already sizeable files to Mr. Welles, a story was written and handed in to the magazine's hiearchy of editors. And that’s where the trouble started. After wading through a half-dozen pedestal- type bureaucratic editors and rewriting the article perhaps ten times, each time cutting out more of the meat, we descended on the office of George Hunt, Life’s then managing editor, the last man in the long line of editors, who must give final approval to the editorial contents of each issue. After another re-write job, the article was complete, scheduled for publication to cover 14 pages of the magazine. We sat back with a sigh of relief, and prepared to settle in for the flak we expected the moment the issue hit the street. After waiting a few weeks and watching the columns of Life eagerly, I received a note from Mr. Welles: ‘“We unfortunately missed out on the December issue I was pushing for because the managing editor said he didn’t want such a scandalous type story in a Christmas issue. So since we have a special issue on the 22nd and no issue on the 29th, he promises he’ll run it the first or second week Sem magazine business, so don’t worry.” I waited, and I worried. The second week of February, with still no oil shale story on the street, I received another note from Mr. Welles: “I’m sorry to tell you that our advertising department staged a counter-attack on the shale story. I managed to beat them back on about 95 percent of their demands, but the net effect has been to delay the story three weeks to the week of March 18th. Believe me, this thing has become the cause celebre around here. But keep the faith, baby. It’s going to run.” I’m still waiting. A few months later, Mr. Welles proved his integrity, and sold a condensed version of our story for a few hundred dollars to Harper’s, which rushed it into print in August, 1968. At which point he was fired by Life, with George Hunt’s blessings, while the integrity of Life went down the drain. Mr. Welles found himself another job, and went on to write a book on our subject, (The Elusive Bonanza,” E.P. Dutton, New York, $7.95). I found another job, and went on to new and better things. But Life hung in the balance. : The reason the magazine killed the oil shale story was never proved. But it became ob- vious advertising pressure from the giagt oil companies played a big role in the deci®n to scrap the story. The magazine should have died that day. per year. Call 675-5211 for subscriptions. Editor Emeritus: Mrs. T. M. B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin Advertising Manager: Dan Koze
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers