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Show ERMA BOMBECIC DESERET NEWS A Groovy Dialogue SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH We brand For The Constitution Of The United States a p Mi (j muviiiQ uccii Uivinc'y inspired i 14 A EDITORIAL PAGE TUESDAY, i JANUARY You know something? I'm so groovy anymore thac half the time I dont know what I'm talking about. i I 13, 1970 d my meaning it's good. Preserve The Merger When Salt Lake City and County merged their health departments last August, it was a major breakthrough not only in providing better health service throughout the county but also in improving governmental efficiency. These gains could go down the drain, however, if either the city or the county pulls out of the merger agreement in the next five years, as they have a legal right to do. And the county just might decide to pull out unless it gets help from the Legislature as the county grdually shoulders the financial responsibilities of the merged health operation. The Legislature needs to get into the act because the county seems to be prohibited by law from spending tax money raised from residents of unincorporated areas for services to residents of incorporated areas. To help remedy the situation, a joint resolution has been drafted by which the Legislature would direct the Legislative Council to study and formulate legislation on how best to fund the health merger. Whatever legislation is formulated would be introduced at the regular session of the 39th Legislature a year from now. Ordinarily such directions to the Legislative Council are routinely approved by the legislators toward the end of their session. But this particular session of the Utah Legislature is anything but routine, since it is a budget session, in which a vote is required for the introduction of matters, and since its the first such session. A study by the Legislative Council is the least the Legislature can do to preserve an important breakthrough in consolidation. The resolution to accomplish that shouldnt be allowed to get lost in the shuffle. ry U.S.. which alone among the Big Four powers has kept hands off the Nigerian civil war, should now be the chief hope for massive relief to the defeated and starv- ing millions in what was formerly Biafra. Yet that is the case. While Britain and Russia supplied arms to Nigeria, France was shipping weapons to the beleaguered Ibo tribesmen in secessionist Biafra. And the U.S., which refused to become committed politically in the struggle, nevertheless has contributed 60 percent of all global relief in foou and financial aid. But now that the conflict is at last over or nearing its end. even more relief will be needed if a catastrophe of even greater proportions is to be averted. How effective and how soon such efforts can get started depends upon victorious Nigeria. for it now controls all usable airfields and roads. Nor is the possibility of a massacre against the proud Ibo tribesmen at all remote. It was the massacre of 20,000 Christian Ibo tribal members by Moslem Hausa tribesmen that first precipitated the civil war. Now the problem is not only food and medical supplies, but to try to prevent vengeance - taking by the Nigerians. For this purpose a strong peace keeping force is needed, hopefully under United Nations auspices. The prospect of additional thousands of deaths by starvation must be averted if at all possible. Certainly the world must unite on this humantarian note, for as U.S Senator James Pearson has observed, the issue transcends party, geography. least I know what Im saying when I talk. "Maybe YOU know, but young people dont know what youre talking about. You're as out of it as Ted Mack at a sock hop." We drove along in silence. You he said hesitantly, Finally, know, theres an expression Ive always up-tig- girdle is killing you? It means Im keyed up. Then why didnt you say so? Lately which you you insist upon using words of dont know the meaning. You dont have to know . . . exactly. For goodness sakes, dont develop a hang-up- . Which means? Which means it wouldn't hurt you to Words bring your vocabulary up to date. like oaky doaky, spiffy, budro and toots just arent in anymore. riWell, T couldnt sound any more I the at party diculous than you. Tonight Violence: Nation's Greatest Peril THE DRUMMONDS By ROSCOE and GEOFFREY DRUMMOND (Editor's Note: Roscoe and Geoffrey Drummond, writing from dose contact with the White House, assess the achievements and shortcomings of the Nixon Administration In Its first year. In this Scond of five articles, the Drummonds examine frig nation's most urgent problem.) - What is the great-es- t WASHINGTON peril to the nation? Is it another Vietnam or the nuclear arms race or racial tension or the pollu- tion of our environment? These are harsh and pressing problems but hey are not the worst. The gravest and the greatest is the pervasive and mounting resort to violence as a means of social change. And this peril is not adequately perceived. The danger of escalating violence is to not its threat to the Establishment things as they are. Thats a miner and incidental danger. The Establishment needs to be changed at many points. The peril above all others is that the violence is aimed to destroy the democratic process by which change can be made by peaceful means. The most valuable gilt of our revolutionary forefathers was not the institutions of government which have proved their worth so well so long. Their most valuable contribution, without which the government they brought forth could never have endured, was the process they imbedded into the Constitution by which political, economic and social change could be accomplished by peaceful means. The obvious danger today is that violent militants want to destroy our political institutions without offering anything in their place. But the far greater peril is that the end result of pervasive and mounting violence is to shatter the democratic procif there ess by which something better can be put in its is something better place. Tne fight of the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is government by ballot. The consequence of the tactics of the militant left physically attacking public officials, bombing public buildings, exacting concessions from college administrators at harrassing and gun-poin- t, R. Drummond G. Drummond is intimidating whole communities government by violence. This is the kind of violence we are witnessing across the nation and there was more of it last year than the year before, and there is no sign that it is lessening. If government by violence succeeds, what do we have left? What do the government-by-violence have to people offer? They are not seeking to persuade; they are seeking to coerce. Therefore, all they can offer is government by force to replace government by the consent of the governed. This is the nations greatest peril and it is the greater because it is hardly being recognized at all. Once the process of peaceful change is destroyed, only repressive authoritarian government is left. Is this violence sufficient to justify raising the warning? The most careful, considered, factual answer to this question is in the exhaustive reports of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence headed by Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, retired president of Johns Hopkins University. These reports confirm what most readers know: Nearly every major city in the country has been the target of violence. New York City alone over a period of six months has been the scene of eight bombings of skyscraper buildings and acts heedless of government offices the lives of thousands of people. Purwanted to change pose: the violent-pron- e society by death and mass threats. Black and white militants on campus have seized buildings, destroyed property, kidnaped college administrators and teachers. This is increasing. They assert the right of unlimited free speech and free assembly, but use force to deny the right of free speech and free assembly to others. In downtown Chicago the violent-minde- d smashed windows and injured bystanders to show how opposed they were to war. Is this kind of violence a passing ordeal which will go away if we dont worry about it too much? The grim judgment of the Eisenhower Commission is no. The commissions staff report on Law and Order states that the current disobedience to law Is disastrous from the standpoint of the maintenance of a democratic society. It is getting worse. In a report on The Politics of Protest, a commission study finds tnat there has been a steady escalation of conflict, hostility and violence. And the commission itself says that political violence in the United States today is more intense than it has been since the turn of the century. This is not to say that social and political violence in the United States is a majority movement. But violence doesnt have to be a majority movement to evoke a violent response. There is no doubt in our minds that the silent majority of Americans will not indefinitely tolerate such violence and will be prepared to demand that the goverement do whatever is needed to restore stability and peace. The Eisenhower Commission staff report puts it this way: . . . disobedience to valid law as a tactic of protest by discontented groups is not contributing to the emergence of a more liberal and humane society, but is, on the contrary, producing an opposite tendency . . . Fanaticism, even for laudable goals, breeds fanaticism. This is another way of saying that pervasive and mounting violence, unless seen for what it is and checked soon, will turn the nation into a society in which everybody will lose important freedoms and liberties. NEXT: Solution for Violence. The Revolution At Home Margaret Mead, dowager queen of the turned up in Saturday anthropologists, Review the other day with an article from e x cerpted forthcoming Culture book, her It is ironic that the At course its 79 cents a pound and then its really tough.) One doesnt talk to the children; you have dialogue with them. Education is always quality"; involvement is alis ways total, and anyone in authority naturally gross. My husband has never adopted this new language; he speaks native Lawrence Velk. (He says his tongue is too old to change.) The other night coming home from a party. I kicked off my I don t shoes in the ear and sighed, know what's wrong with me. I guess I'm about something. Whats that mean? he asked. Your y Help For Biafra cool. tough, (Unless of dead-cente- r. ide-olog- example, is steak m city-count- Well, wouldnt you call three children a meaningful relationship? and legal. Id call it hog-tieThat's the kind of an answer you'd expect from a man who turns up the thermostat w.ien someone tells him hes since. For sense d ds Bear." haven't made Dues Salt Lake City really need more jiolice officers? We think so. So does the citizens advisory board which made a study of loeal police salaries and manpower nearly four years ago. So does the Salt Lake City Traffic Advisory Council. So do those involved in a study made in 1968 by the city personnel director. So do certain authorities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So do Police Chief Dewey Fillis and Public Safety Commissioner James L. Barker Jr., who note that Salt Lake Citys Police Department is answering nearly twice as many calls for help today as it did 10 years ago but with 25 fewer officers. But their arguments just havent carried the day, what with the community being as as it is for revenue, so where do we go from here? When Commissioner Barker first took office he suggested that the prestigious International Association of Police Chiefs be called in to make a study of Salt Lake Citys police operation, but a complete survey would have cost too much and the idea was dropped. But the IAPC is said to be willing to make a preliminary survey without charge, then make a more detailed study if the association and the city can agree on terms. With this in mind, Commissioner Barker got off a letter the other day asking the International Association of Police Chiefs to make just such a preliminary survey of Salt Lake Citys police manpower needs. The step makes sense. As long as community leaders here cant agree on how many more policemen Salt Lake City needs, if any, an independent, outside look at the problem seems essential if we are to get off In this field few voices are more respected than that of the International Association of Police Chiefs. While the organization has told some communities it has studied that they needed more police officers than they were seeking, it also has told others they could do a better job of law enforcement with fewer police by organizing them more efficiently. A study which concentrated only on ascertaining whether Salt Lake City has enough police and whether they are properly deployed might not cost as much as the one Commissioner Barker had in mind a few years ago. Moreover, if the City Commission wont pay for the follow-u- p to the free preliminary study though it certainly should foot the bill if its at all reasonable then maybe the in be can raised elsewhere the money community, possibly with the assistance available under the Omnibus Crime Control Act. Since crime exerts a serious economic drain on a community, Salt Lake City should look on better law enforcement not just as an expense hut as an investment that pays dividends. two-thir- talk- funny a few years ago when I picked up some of the hippie expressions my teenagers dropped and More Police? Let's Get An Expert Answer hard-presse- started ing overheard that drugstore cowboy ask If vou were married and you said. Oh yes, we have a meaningful relationship. What's wrong with that? "You made it sound as tf we were mairied in a forest by Smoky The and Commitment. cle is If the artia fair of the sample work as a whole, the book promises to rank among the most fatuous titles of the year. M r s. Mead's - general thesis, if I understand her correctly, is the brilliance of the young, and the ignorance of the old. She finds today's generation gap fundamentally diferent from all other generation gaps. Oldsters no iosiger have anything to teach their children that is really worth teaching. She says: Today nowhere in the world are there eiders who know what the children know, no matter how remote and simple the societies are, in which the children live. In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up within a cultural svtem. Today there are none. If is not only that parents are no longer guides, but that there are no guides . . In Mrs. Mead's view, a new age for all humanity began with the atom bomb. Hiroshima fused a world community, united by shared knowledge and danger. JAMES J. KILPATRICK guides remain is to suggest that all values went up in the mushroom cloud. Bosh! Satellites and jet planes have contributed to this single community, and television has created for young people a world in which events are presented to them in all their complex immediacy." Watching their clumsy parents grope with such complexities, young revolutionaries are impatient: These young dissidents realize the critical need for immediate world action on problems that affect the whole world. What they want is, in some way, to begin all over again. They are ready to make way for something new by a kind of social bulldozing like the bulldozing in which every tree and feature of the landscape is destroyed to make way for a new community. Well. th re is some meaty stuff here, but it is the kind of meat that gets ground up in intellect and comes out bologna. Granted, the post-wa- r generation comes to maturity in a world far different from the world we knew a world of TV, computers, and data retrieval systems; a world of organ transplants and genetic breagthroughs; a world of satellites, space ships, and supersonic planes. Granted, they inherit new evi's of pollution, the problems of population, the threat of nuclear war. But to propound the notion that these dramatic developments nullify the inherited wisdom of mankind is to propound no mwsense. And to suggest that Whatever has changed since 1945, the nature of man has not changed. He is as noble or as ignoble, as generous or as selfish, as broad or as narrow as he was before. True wisdom the wisdom that counts is not much concerned with transistors and laser rays. Wisdom compounds its interest upon observations of how men are, as individuals and as nations; wisdom concerns itself with love, hate, envy, pride, ambition, honor, patience, kindness, power; with the relation of man and the state, and, if you please, with the puniness of man in the immensity of God. These characteristics endure in any cultural system. Wonders are many, mused Creon long ago, and none more wonderful than man. Mrs. Mead attributes too much to todays knowing youths. Most of what the children know is baubles, trifles, laboratory tricks. The children know this much of the heart: They know how to transplant it. But the heart of man is no study for surgeons alone. The revolt that so appeals to Mrs. Mead contains an arrogance that repels. So these youngsters would bulldoze it all down, would they, every tree and feature of the landscape, and begin all over again? People will not look forward to posterity, said Burke, who never look backward to their ancestors. He was speaking of young revolutionaries at the tirq; and he spoke for the ages. been curious about. What does Let it all hang out mean? Im not too sure, I confessed. All I know is I said it to myself one day in the utility room and the dryer stopped." If it werent for our three meaningful relationships, Id have you committed, he snarled. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Engineer's Answer I wish to take strenuous exception to what the letter Bob Koenig wrote regarding engineers operating locomotives on the Union Pacific Railroad. For his information, I am an engineer employed by the Union Pacific Railroad, and have operated locomotives over that portion of track and railroad he is referring to, where he came so near getting killed. There is not a railroad crossing in that area that is not marked either by the standard railroad crossing post sign known as Cross Buck sign plainly spelling out Railroad Crossing. If not one of these, then a standard highway sign spelling Stop. These signs are placed there to warn the motorist to stop before crossing the railroad tracks. Also in many places they have flashing red signals. Regardless of what type signs there are at all railroad crossings, the cautious motorist will either stop or take a. good look before crossing. In the event cf a stop sign any motorist failing to stop for the stop sign is as guilty of a traffic violation as running a red stop signal. He accuses the engineer who drove his train through the crossing without regard to motorists. Every locomotive is equipped with an air horn or whistle to warn all motorists when the train is approaching the crossing, so if the motorist complies with the law he will have been stopped and is sure to hear the crossing whistle sounded by the engineer on the approaching train. Rest assured that the engineer is sounding the signal. This is required by law. As for the inconsiderate speed tills engineer was supposed to have been traveling. For Mr. Koenigs information we are regulated by speed restrictions on the railroad as well as any motorist on any highway. But the penalty Lr violating this speed is far more stringent than those imposed by the law enforcement agencies, and any engineer operating a locomotive over that portion of the railroad is living up to the speed restrictions 100 per cent. If anything, hes possibly a mile or two under the posted speed. As to his reference to incompetent engineers on the Union Pacific payroll, engineers operating locomotives are required to pass a far more rigid examination than he ever did or ever will to operate his automobile. -F- RANK H. COTTALL 30 G St. Shoddy Sidewalks I have lived in Kearns 12 years now. I have fixed my place up nice and I like it here. One day the county wanted to put sidewalks In and I protested, not because of the sidewalks but the way they were putting them in. I protested at two meetings at the Kearns Jr. High School and one meeting at the City and County Building, but I was just called an agitator. I even wanted to put my own in, but they wouldnt let me. Someone who didnt know anything about concrete could have done a better job than the confall In tractor who put ours in. There is a four-inc- h walk in the sidewalk in front of my home. a four-foo- t You cant walk on it because its dangerous. Not only that, but the county inspectors passed this walk. On one side of the street, they put the walk back 18 inches, and the other side is against the curb. There is nothing uniform about them at all I protested about this, but to no avail. They said they were saving us money. My taxes went up because I built a nice garage, but why should our taxes go up when they pushed these sidewalks down our throats and called it city improvements? Ask any property owner in Kearns about the way they put the sidewalks in. Ask Die little kids why they cant ride their bicycles on them. -B- URTON M. PROCTOR Kearns It's 'Good News' Thank you for carrying the wonderful column, Good News! For a long time weve felt the need for news such as this, to combat the violence, crime, war and perversion that usually crowd the front pages and the headlines. The world is filled with goodness and wonderful people, but they seldom make the papers They arent good copy. I, for one, love this idea in good news, by Frank Macomber. --MRS. PAUL CHEESMAN A Orem t |