Page 4
EDITORIAL
School Financing
- The Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision handed
down by the Republican majority upholding the
constitutionality of Texas laws governing property
taxes as a means of financing public education may
be indicative of the Burger Court’s insensitivity to
the plight of our nation’s underprivileged, but in no
way does it signal the death of much-needed,
widely sought school tax reform measures.
In its decision in favor of the defendants in the
case of Rodriguez v. the San Antonio Independent
School District the majority termed “a system of
public education that can fairly be described as
chaotic and unjust’”’ the means of school finance
challenged by 15 Mexican-American families
residing in the Edgewood District where the 1967-68
expenditure from all sources per pupil was $356.
That same year in the nearby Alamo Heights
District, $594 was spent to educate each student.
Numerous comparable examples of the depri-
vation of equality in educational opportunity can be
cited in Pennsylvania, as well as in almost every
other state, in which acting president of the
National Education Association Allan M. West
fears: ‘“The yield of crops and the concentration of
wealth in individual communities will continue to
determine the kind of education each child
receives.”’
Mr. West's fears that such factors as crop yields,
concentration of wealth, and, to extrapolate,
abundance of industry, geographic conditions, and
ethnic concentrations will continue to determine
the quality of education in school districts, may be
dispelled by hopeful signs of reform. Already a
citizen’s committee to study school financing has
been working on a report to be submitted to
Governor Shapp in June which will most likely call
for a more equitable distribution of state funds to
local districts through revisions of aid-ratios.
The administration, itself, is sponsoring legi-
slation to professionalize tax assessment proced-
ures and revise local property tax laws.
The burden of school financing pressing heavily
on the shoulders of municipal officials must be
eased, but never at the expense of quality edu-
cation. Measures must be taken to prevent
niggardly-legislators from reducing the quality of
education statewide to the lowest common denomi-
nator.
Benevolent Despot
Benevolent despot is the name historians have
come up with for a man who had power and in-
fluence over a large group of people and, amazing-
ly enough, used that power and influence to their
advantage. (Or, at least, to what they thought was
“their advantage’’.)
What happy men they must have been. Satisfied
and gratified to be doing something for others; con-
tent that their lives were being spent doing what,
they thought, was right; and, through the luck of
birth, influential enough to be able to carry their
noble ideas to thousands of others.
How lucky David Brinkley must, or should, feel,
some luck, much hard work, and years of service,
he now has the opportunity of reaching millions
with ideas he believes in.
The intermittant chapters of ‘David Brinkley’s
Journal’”’ as they appear on “NBC Nightly News’
do, indeed, have power behind them. They have the
power and influence that is so frightening in the
hands of some advertisers. The Power of Televi-
sion. (Something that is increasing steadily, as pre-
school children are ‘‘baby-sat’’ by television, and,
reaching school age, are taught by it.)
It’s hard to tell whether David Brinkley’s predic-
tions of the present fight between the President and
the Senate anticipated this important, and abrupt,
turn of events or caused it. It seemed, watching his
“Journals” of a few months ago, that he saw, what
he felt was, a president becoming too powerful, and
set about to “right” things.
. His predictions (that even, what he inferred was,
this weak and apathetic Senate would soon wake up
to the rape of their powers and fight back) were a
catalyst that almost had to cause Senators who
heard them, or of them, to react strongly against
the next attempt to lessen their powers. It was a
challenge with a purpose (David Brinkley’s); the
Senators knew it, but if they had any pride they al-
most had to accept it. It seems that they have.
If Dave Brinkley truly is a benevolent despot
(whether or not I agree with where he’s trying to
take us), long may he reign!
eam od
Thissa 'n Thatta
by H. H. Null, III
(Editor’s Note: Henry Null III, former
editor and publisher of the Abington J ournal,
and the author of this column for many years,
died last Wednesday. This is one of three
columns he wrote before his death.)
About 30 years ago, I was a patient in a
hospital for the first time. The late Dr.
Russell Wall had diagnosed my trouble as
appendicitis and in a matter of hours had
skilfully extracted it. The events which T still
remember vividly, were the anesthesia - I
thought myself in an open Greek-type cir-
cular temple, where I could see wide stret-
ches of country between the pillars, and my
home, which was one in a long row of similar
beds, with a like row facing it across an aisle.
down this aisle from time to time and
provided interest and assistance.
'I'ne lovely landscape soon disappeared and
Iregained my thinking processes to learn that
my appendix was gone and the nurses had
been treated to a rare bit of conversation - the
kind one addresses to a mine mule. It was
embarrassing, but it had gone the one-way
track of all spoken words, so nothing could be
done about it. The bed, which did well enough,
was one in a ward, something I am informed
has been done away with.
If so, I am sorry to hear it. I was in that
ward and in others after that, largely because
it was the cheapest and in those days, when
my two boys were growing up, cheapness was
an absolute must. But there were other good
and sufficient reasons for electing to be
bedded in a ward.
They were more fun than a private room;
which I later learned to be the same thing ag
solitary confinement and, unless one was able
to hire a private nurse, one wasted one’s time
by ringing for help. A ‘‘semi-private’ or two
in a room, was simply a ward in miniature,
with no chance whatsoever of choosing an
interesting conversationalist as a roommate.
After a few trips to a hospital with the semi-
private habitat, I opted for a ward and was
ancient history at that refuge for the afflicted.
These wards invariably had as an inmate, a
recuperating clown, who kept those who were
able to enjoy the banter in time-devouring
laughter and who was always willing to turn
you over, or get you a bedpan when the paid
nurses were at parts unknown.
There was also a system, whereby one kept
moving to a better bed as the others either got
well and left or died and left, so that it was
TRB
from Washington
Let’s turn the impoundment issue over to
the Court, says Mr. Nixon. Why, yes, the
Court. We had almost forgotten it.
Mr. Nixon has brought the Supreme Court
into politics more than any other President in
modern times. He attacked the Warren Court
before he got elected. He made law and order
the issue in 1968 and 1970. He bought prime
time on election eve, 1970, to promise to “give
the peace forces new muscle to deal with the
criminal forces.” He carried his desire for a
conservative Southern appointee to such
lengths that Dean Pollack of Yale declared
Judge Carswell ‘presents more slender
credentials than any nominee for the
Supreme Court put forth in this century.”
Mr. Nixon told the nation that he was
nominating men who ‘‘share my conservative
philosophy.” He has kept up a running
commentary on the court that irks the
Journal of the American Bar Association.
And he has all but done what he set out to do,
won the historic battle to gain control of the
court after Earl Warren retired.
Mr. Nixon has named four members and
stands within one beat of a mechanical heart-
timer implanted in Justice William O.
Douglas (74), to name a full majority.
“President Nixon’s place in history is
secure,” says Pulitzer prize winner Louis M.
Kohlmeier Jr., of the Wall Street Journal in a
superb new book, God Save This Honorable
Court (Scribners). ‘Nixon politicized the
Supreme Court more dramatically than any
President in history.” -
Guest Editorial
Do you like your job? Do you really
(honest-to-goodness) enjoy your work?
If your answer is ‘“‘Yes’’, great! keep it.
If your answer is ‘No’, quit.
If your answer is, “What a dumb
question; they wouldn’t call it ‘work’ if you
were supposed to like it.”’, you show what a
sad situation this work thing can get in.
You're probably like most people; your
job takes up way more time (way more of
your life) than does any other thing you do,
with the possible exception (big deal) of
sleeping. So if you don’t like it, you’re missing
out big. And don’t let anybody (including
yourself) tell you that you shouldn’t or can’t
like your work. You can. You should!
Don’t tell me (or yourself) that you can’t
quit your rotten job because ‘I'd probably
have to take half the pay for the job I'd really
like’. Take a third and be happy.
Being happy is what it’s all about. As long
as you have enough to eat, a place to sleep,
and you're happy (or at least satisfied)
you've got it made. ;
But don’t feel too bad or too responsible
for the mess you're in, Mr. (Mrs. or Miss)
Dissatisfied. Things started getting goofed up
a long time ago. There didn’t used to be any-
thing called work (primitive peoples of today
don’t even have a word for it!); people just
lived. They killed and gathered food, they
slept in caves, and they just lived.
They may not have been very happy,
(they may have), but they definitely were
/
/
possible to end up with your bed beside a
window, if you hadn’t antagonized any of the
Florence Nightengale sorority. Thirty years
mercy. I was much better looking then. Now I
couldn’t kindle a spark of tender, loving,
desire from Bella Abzug. Somewhere along
the line, I learned that the young beautiful
nurses regarded their male patients, all-
which helped out the service.
The other day, my jaundiced eye fell on a
newspaper article which stated that a floor or
two of the Scranton-State Hospital was
unusable because it didn’t meet bureaucratic
approvai - it had 30 beds in one room and only
two bathrooms - in short, it was a ward so for
that reason, had to lie idle, even when the
beds were needed for incoming sufferers. I
remember that ward or one like it, very well.
Not long after the appendicitis bout, I sud-
denly developed a nose bleed, which nothing
would stop until my nasal passages were
stuffed with yards of gauze and I was put in
one of the 30 beds at complete rest. In a few
days I got well, the gauze was removed and
tests showed 1 had anemia, indicating other
trouble, but that is another story. I spent the
time much more enjoyably than would have
been the case had I been marooned in a
private room or sentenced to a semi-private
buddy who died in the middle of the night-it
happened twice in my hospital experience.
So it was suddenly revealed to me just what
had caused the hospitals to raise their prices
to the stars - state standards. Back in the 40’s,
there were, no doubt standards of cleanliness
and care and all that, but they were practiced
where footsteps were saved and a single
nurse could look after a large number of
patients, all of them practically in'front of her
eyes. It was all plain - the bureaucrats had
homed 4n.
Just as they have homed in on our schools,
our sewers, our automobiles, our back yards
and anything else they could find to interfere
with and change and make more expensive.
With the added expense of themselves - a
class of people, who in the 40’s were content to
A Greenstreet News Co. Publication
serve government at reasonable wages, mind
their own business and retire on pensions as
soon as possible.
They have succeeded in minimizing ef-
ficiency and maximizing cost, just as they
have done with hospital wards. They are no
longer public servants, but have become
public masters, harrassing us frgm day to
day and demanding an annual inc pe from
our meagre pockets. 2
It may be seen on every. side - acres of
recreation areas with nobody using them, but
more on the planning boards; “scientific”
treatment of criminals at a huge increase in
cost (you can’t beat capital punishment
costwise or effiencywise) and now, I call to
your attention a quotation from a recent
bureaucratic report “The center is staffed
with individuals who have each attained
academic achievement at the master’s
degree level and have experience in the
various social science fields’.
Aw, nuts! Now they have set up a nobility
and can keep the lofty positions and salaries
among the elite. ;
%
We 2
4
The public wants a Supreme Court of
which it can be proud. Including Justice
Rehnquist, the latest ‘appointment, exactly
100 men have sat on the great tribunal. Some
have been great, others less so. Two years
ago a group of scholars and historians ap-
praised the justices up to Mr. Nixon’s appoin-
tees. It found 12 ‘‘great”, 15 ‘“‘near-great’’, 55
“average” and eight “failures.” The great
were Marshall, Story, Taney,
Harlan, Holmes, Brandeis, Stone, Cardozo,
Hugo Black, Frankfurter and Earl Warren.
The near-great included two sitting judges,
Douglas and William J. Brennan. The failures
included three of the ‘Nine Old Men” con-
fronting FDR when he took office - Van-
Devanter, McReynolds and Butler.
What makes success on the Court? The
overwhelming answer is that what is not
wanted is narrowness of vision. Previous
judicial experience means little; itis a ‘‘zero’’
factor, Frankfurter once said. The court is not
just a court. It is the instrument that recon-
ciles the constitutional verities to the times
we live in. It links past experience with future
hopes. It demands men steeped in diverse
fields; philiosophers with vision.
How do the Nixon appointees, and near-
appointees, stack up? The Senate rejected
Haynsworth and Carswell. The President
Black vacancy and he hit on Rep. Poff (R) of
Va., signer of the Southern Manifesto of 1956
(a pledge to reverse the school desegregation
decision) and against every major civil rights
Love It
often satisfied. Everytime they filled their
stomachs, they were satisfied. Everytime
they got a good night’s sleep, they were
satisfied.
Catching animals and gathering fruit and
nuts was not ‘‘work’’ back then, it was “life.”
They were hungry, so they ate. They were
tired, so they slept. That was life.
That still is life, but it’s become much
more complex. Agriculture probably started
it all. It was great at first, man didn’t have to
‘keep moving each time he used up what grew
naturally in a spot. He could stay in one place.
Fix up a nicer cave. Even build a “log cave”
or a “mud cave’. But some clown started
specializing. He’d just grow corn, maybe. '
Tons of it, and trade it for the other things he
needed with neighbors, who soon stopped
growing any corn.
Before you knew it, after a few tens-of-
thousands-of-years, almost everybody was
specializing. One guy just made and fixed
ploughs; one lady just delivered and helped
care for babies, and so on. But he couldn’t eat
ploughs and she didn’t care to eat babies, so
they had to trade (their product or skill) for
food.
Money then came about when some
genius discovered that it was easier to trade
his big, clumsy ploughs for a little gold. Then
he didn’t have to carry a plough out to a farm
that grew his favorite strawberries. He'd just
carry a little piece of gold with him, to swap.
He could then ‘‘buy” from someone who
bill since. While a dubious ABA committee
examined Poff’s qualifications the latter
fight. as i
Then the President considered Demo-
cratic Sen. Byrd of West Virginia. Sen. Byrd
had voted against confirmation of Thurgood
Marshall, and for Haynsworth and Carswell,
and he once suggested that Douglas be im-
peached. How=ver, the ABA committee
implied that Byrd would not get its highest
rating. By now there were two vacancies as
Harlan died. There followed a ludicrous
episode: Mr. Nixon submitted six names
-confidentially to the ABA committee, in-
cluding a woman, Judge Mildred Lillie of the
Los Angeles District Court of Appeals. In no
time at all the names were all in print across
the nation, and the embarrassed ABA com-
mittee found little in their favor. Judge
Lillie’s decisions, it appeared, had not done
too well in the state Supreme Court.
Messrs.. Nixon and Mitchell hastily sub-
stituted two other appointees - conservative
Lewis Powell, of Virginia, former past presi-
dent of the ABA, and William Rehnquist, top
assistant to Attorney General Mitchell and a
resisted- local and state desegregation
measures. Mr. Nixon proudly introduced
them to a TV audience as ‘‘judicial conser-
vatives,” who shared his desire to defend
“the peace forces’.
The Nixon Four tend to vote alike. Last
June all of them dissented when the majority,
ot Leave It
didn’t need a new plough, or his old plough
fixed, too.
Well, you know how it kept getting more
and more specialized, until it got to how it is
today. Now there are guys whose total job is
just to put a couple of screws in a few
thousand ploughs a day. (He should quit!)
Somewhere along the way, in that
process, ‘living’ got transferred to ‘“‘work’’
for a lot of people. The idea was the same.
You worked for silver or gold (or these days
for that worthless, bastardized metal we
presently refer to as money), so that you
could buy the same things your ancestors
made or grew themselves. But now so many
jobs are so far from essential, that there is
little or no satisfaction to be found in them.
(it’s difficult, for instance, to feel happy with
yourself if your job is selling shoddy mer-
chandise at the highest possible price, or
5-to-4, ruled out capital punishment and
spared the lives of 600 persons on death row in
the country’s prisons, Now Mr. Nixon wants
Congress to reimpose the death @nalty.
Mr. Nixon publicly suggested that it
would be constitutionally improger for the
Senate to refuse to confirm Cars ll. After it
refused, he angrily declared tw&t as then
composed it would not confirm any strict
constructionist from the South. He declared
at one point, “I am persuaded that Congress
has the constitutional power’ to amend the
Constitution by legislation. :
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, all gave
creative enforcement to the Warren court’s
four big unanimous desegregation decisions,
but Mr. Nixon publicly repudiated his own
civil rights staff at HEW when it proposed a
mild busing plan for Austin, Texas.
*‘Skillfully,. purposefully, and politically,”
Kohlmeier writes, ‘Nixon converted the
school bus from symbol of equality into a
symbol of racism.” The ABA in its official
Journal criticized the Presidesl’s narrow
approach to court nomination®@W¥is talk of
“peace forces” and the like. It said his run-
ning commentary on the Court “places an
unfair burden on the President’s nominees.”
Always in modern days the Supreme
Court has been the moral symbol of hope for
the poor, the oppressed, and the undefended.
There can be no turning back; not without
some fear of violence, that is.
trying to make somebody buy your com-
pany’s deodorant, which is no better than
lower priced brands, etc.) Also many people’s
specialized jobs are so small a part of the
whole process (they might not even un-
derstand what part their job plays in that
“whole’’) that they can’t even think of what
they do as any part of the overall service
being done. (They may feel that all they are
doing is “putting in screws’’, rather than that
they -are “helping to secure ploughs so that
farmers can grow the nation’s feod crop”.)
First try thinking about a jo you don’t
like. Think of it as an essential part of a larger
service. If that doesn’t help, quit. It’s not your
fault that many jobs have become “work”.
But it is your fault if you're staying in one that
is “work” to you. The job is a huge part of
your life. You shouldn’t hate it. You might
find yourself next hating life.
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