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Show SuccedSui f-arentliood ifl MR$ CATHERINE CONRAD EDWARDS 'l Associate Editor, Parents' Magazine Superstition Can Be Deadly; Be Sure to Keep it Harmless A UGUST is the month when Fri-day Fri-day the thirteenth comes up again a reminder that superstition . Is still around. It's all nonsense, says Science; but It's a safe bet that you're just a bit more careful about black cats crossing your path, or taking three lights on a match, or walking under ladders on this day. So we can't blame the children if they, too, find fun in such doings. using superstitious phobias to buUd up their "master race." As a result, eight million innocent people died in Hitler's concentration concen-tration camps, not to mention the ten million more who per-ished per-ished on the battlefields ol World War II. Our children, If they're old enough to study history, will find out for themselves that superstition can be deadlier than TNT. It has burst into flame more often and killed more anyway, tnrowmg salt over your left shoulder or knocking on wood are innocent pastimes and may even add to the spice of life. -But there are certain other superstitions not so easily laughed off, and there's no better time to tell our boys and girls What harm some notions can do. Take witches, for example. Outside Out-side of fairy books or Walt Disney movies, our wide-awake boys and girls know that witches don't exist. Even in our own country, superstition su-perstition has gotten out of hand. It flared into the witchcraft witch-craft hysteria in 1692,' killing twenty, innocents in xSalem. It hanged Quakeress Mary Dyer on the Boston Common. It ral-s ral-s lied fanatics behind such movement move-ment as the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party in the 1850's, later the Ku Klux Klan. Of course it's easy to see why people peo-ple went off on witch hunts back. In the Dark Ages; There were almost al-most no schools in those days and few books to tell the truth. And, anyhow, most people couldn't read. But there's no excuse for ugly, Ignorant Ig-norant Ideas today. It's good for our boys and girls to appreciate how lucky they are, with books, newspapers, news-papers, movies, radio and all the tools of modern science to bring them true facts. That's the greatest protection we can have and it's probably the main reason why present-day Americans have kept superstition super-stition pretty well confined to harmless harm-less folderol lucky charms, rabbits feet, dream books and so on. When it comes to more serious matters, we try to use our common sense and not be carried away by racial myths and other hobgobblins of bigotry. mm But they should also know that hundreds ot years ago, most people ;i really believed in Witches. When the j! crops failed or the i milk turned sour, ; folks said It was ' witchcraft. Corrupt i rulers soon turned this kind of super- Btition to their own advantage. In the days of ancient Rome, the emperors em-perors simply blamed every calamity on the Christians. If the people complained of any grievance, the Christians were thrown to the lions. In this way, emperors escaped responsibility re-sponsibility for their own misdeeds. In modern times, the Nazis practiced the same black art, |