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Show Kathleen Norris Says: Peace and Fourth of July Bell Syndicate. WNU Featurei. "Unfortunately it has become the fashion to belittle ourselves, just why it is hnrd tn tnv " By KATHLEEN NORRIS THE other day at a woman's wom-an's club I heard a famous fa-mous man talking about the war we have so gloriously glorious-ly won, and the world crisis that is following the war. Three hundred women looked at him respectfully while he told them how mistaken mis-taken America has been in her postwar policies, how pitifully she has failed in her ; postwar obligations, how deeply she is despised by the great countries overseas for whose liberty she has spent young blood, money and arms so prodigiously. He repeated every depressing rubber-stamp rubber-stamp generality that all his type of speakers use, and wound up with the disheartening disheart-ening statement that we had not seized the advantage that our victories gave us, and were hence the laughing stock of Europe and even the Orient. Ori-ent. When anyone talks this way and men are always coming back from China and Europe and everywhere else and telling us these things I Bee red, and I think the Fourth of July, in this first year of peace, is a good time to say so. This man, and all the others like him, who are flocking to platforms and the radio and into print, hasn't evidently done any thinking on his own, about America's share in the world-wide disaster of the second great war. He has taken the criticisms criti-cisms of other men as ignorant or biased as himself, and because life abroad is barely sufferable, and life at home not too comfortable, he blames it all on America, and grows eloquent in knocking his own country. coun-try. Foreigners Jealous of Us. It has unfortunately grown to be the fashion to belittle ourselves; just why it is hard to say, except that as each country of the whole globe awakens from the nightmare of six years of horror, it realizes jealously that there is a country in the Western hemisphere that was not invaded, that is rich, that is almost ludicrously generous, and that there are clothes and wheat and medicines and money still existent in large quantities in that country and so why not try for a share of them? ,- Countries that did nothing to prepare pre-pare for the war, that saw it coming com-ing and shut their eyes and went en prospering and growing fat, are now bitter in their criticism of the magnificent country that isn't belligerent, that doesn't want to extend ex-tend her borders or run over any little neighbor, that is wealthy because be-cause of her principles of applied democracy, that has proved her way to be the way to the greatest highest level of human living ever known in the world. They dare to criticise the country that has given given given of her stores of both wealth and possessions in a river of help that would deplete any other oth-er nation to bankruptcy point. They dictate how much she must give. They ask us to raise the price of our products for our own people, so that their Inferior factories and slower production may compete and we do it They forget the convoys, con-voys, the planes, the arms, the money that supported them in the fight for the democracy for which, now, they have no use. 'Pride In Ourselves.' I don't often write of ar.y but domestic matters, but this is the week of Fourth of July, and every drop of American blood in my veins is apt to get hot when I consider the magnificence of our war effort, our unparalleled generosity in both peace and war, and the calm assumption as-sumption by all the rest of the world that we are created and existent exist-ent to fight their wars, pay their debts, feed their hungry, bind up their wounds. These are beautiful things to do Christian-like things to do but we are human, too, and unless we feel in our own hearts a certain pride in ourselves, nobody else is going to feel it. So whatever the foreign press says of it, and however ridiculous their claims and their .reflections upon us are, don't you be one of the Americans who lament our stupidity, stu-pidity, our meanness, our international interna-tional ignorance. Think twice before you quote the glib speakers all about us, those men who re-iterate that "America must not be left behind be-hind in the rebuilding of the new world, America must do her share!" Her share! Ask them some time what the other nations propose to do, what their share is? No other nation has as yet told us anything of co-operative action in helping and rebuilding. They all want help, lots of it, but each one wants it exclusively ex-clusively for itself. If you have heard of any European nation or even any other nation in the western hemisphere whose people are planning to help any other people, peo-ple, I would be glad to be notified of it, for I have not. And meanwhile, on the Fourth of July and every day of the year, three cheers for the red, white and blue. j Our unparalleled generosity. . . |