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Show Kathleen Norris Says: We Need Courage, Laughter and Faith (Bell Syndicate WNU Service.) America needs battalions of women ready to fly to their posts. If it is only washing dishes in a service club, or taking charge of the babies of young mothers moth-ers to free them for defense work, there is something you can do. By KATHLEEN NORRIS IF YOU are one of the many women who have been acting badly since America went to war, now is the time for you to make a fresh start. Any woman who indulges in vague, groundless fears, communicates them to her neighbors or allows the children chil-dren of the household to be frightened is a bad American. Any woman who complains constantly of change, of the rising cost of food, of the things she once could afford and can't now is a bad American. Amer-ican. Such women are not worthy of the protection and liberty their flag has given them; they are essentially essential-ly stupid, a drag upon the supreme effort to which all America is now committed. Nobody wants to hear their troubles; trou-bles; there is not one of us women in our broad land today who has not plenty of her own. what we need from each other is courage and laughter, ingenuity in solving the new problems and filling the new blank spaces, and faith that looks, as the song says, "beyond the years." If your boy is in the service he may not come home. Granted. Or he may come home blind or crippled. crip-pled. Granted. But the CHANCES are that he will return to you whole and unhurt, and when he does you must be ready to help him live in the new world. A poorer world, a world burdened with tremendous problems, but, I believe, a happier one. A world with its eyes wide open to the fact that peace as well as war has its battles to win, and while there is a slum or a hungry baby or a work-hungry man unemployed un-employed in that world, it can hold no prospect of a secure and honest future. Do you realize that in England, another year to finish the job. But time is on our side. Our resources are limitless; to compare the manpower of all the other nations of the earth to that of a united America, England, Russia, China, Holland and all the smaller nations overwhelmed now, but not always to be powerless is to show a comfortable four-fifths of the world's fighting energy on our side. It is tragic, and we women feel it bitterly, that it must come to this; that evil must be invoked to overcome over-come evil, and peace-loving peoples be forced into the slugging tactics of the gutter. Can Signify Strife. But we can elevate, we can dignify dig-nify and justify it if we keep in mind the great objectives; that little nations na-tions may live under just treaties in no fear of encroachment or molestation, moles-tation, and that great nations shall constitute themselves the watchdogs over God's peace in the world. Your . job and mine is to make perfect our lives, outside and in. To go after health first of all, the all-over all-over health that simple diet and plenty of walking and good sound nights of rest insure. To keep the spirit within us serene, realizing that after all the bombings of the past year, the death rate was slightly BELOW what it had been in normal years? What's the answer? The answer is that the starving poor had been brought out of the fearful city slums, the men set to work, the women given jobs, and all of them fed. And also because the children had been shipped to country places, where, despite extraordinary ex-traordinary difficulties, they had been slowly brought up to the levels of luckier children, decently fed and housed and trained. And because there was so much less motor traffic. It would be a very terrible battle that cost us 30,-000 30,-000 lives, and maimed and wounded 100.000 more of our boys. But that's what careless driving cost us last year and will cost us this. Autos More Dangerous. You don't tremble and shiver and shut doors and cower under beds because motor cars are racing over the highways, yet there is a greater danger in a steering wheel trusted to incompetent or intoxicated hands than in enemy bombs. Especially as bombs, which have not conquered -gallant' England, must come thousands thou-sands of miles to reach us. Make no mistake. America and her Allies will win this war, as America has won every war. little or big. upon which she has entered, en-tered, even though the odds were heavily agninst her. It may take her a year to get her full forces into action; and as she pushes the invaders steadily out of one stronghold strong-hold after another, it max take her this is poor, faulty old Terra Firma upon which we live not Olympus or Eden or Valhalla, but a place of mistakes and blindness, wherein every ev-ery little while we have to pay in blood and sweat and tears for the intervals in-tervals of peace and harmony we win. To make home a place where fears and complaints don't enter. Where Mother finds ways of making meatless meals delicious, of turning the blackout room into the cosiest place in the house, of holding tight to the thought that when Tom comes home, and his uniform is laid away, he must find a courageous, solvent, busy family, a family more than equal to the tremendous demands of war-time, and ready to help him in peace to find his place in the world. Wars used to be entirely a man's business. He went away to remote parts, news of him trickled back only at long intervals, and the women wom-en could only worry, starve, roll lint and wonder what on earth all the shooting was about It's different now. We all belong in this war. America needs battalions battal-ions of women ready to By to their posts; scores of San Francisco girls have called off the cotillions and shelved the bridge parties for the jobs of sentinel, intelligence officers, secretaries, nurses for Defense. Ii it is only washing dishes in a service club, or taking charge of the babies of half-a-cozen young mothers, to free them for defense work, there is SOMETHING you can do. And the sooner you get to it, the less you are going to worry and be afraid. |