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PAGE 4—The Southern Cross, June 6, 1968
Most Rev. Gerard L. Frey, D.D. President
Rev. Francis J. Donohue, Editor John E. Markwalter, Managing Editor
Phone 234-4574
Second Class Postage Paid at Waynesboro. Ga
Send Change of Address to P. G. Box 180. Savannah. Ga.
Published weekly except the second and last weeks
in June, July and August and the last week in December.
Subscription price $5.00 per year.
Hatred Can Kill
As this is being written, Senator Robert F.
Kennedy is listed in critical condition less than
four hours after surgeons removed most of the
bullet fired into his brain by a
would-be-assassin.
A man is in custody, charged on six counts
with assault with intent to murder. No one
knows who he is. He will not divulge his
identity, will not discuss his own guilt or
innocence and even refuses to say anything at
all about the attempted killing.
All kinds of possible motives come to mind,
of course. And there is the temptation to
explore at least some of them. The police, it
is true, must assume certain motives establish
possible theories. But for the rest of us to do it
is just a waste of time.
What we ought to do is to pray for his .
recovery, for his family, for the others who
were injured during the incident, and for the
assailant.
And we ought to reflection the one thing
certain about the attempted assassination: For
a reason or reasons as yet unknown, someone
hated Robert F. Kennedy enough to try to take
his life.
Hatred can do that — move a man to murder
— and there is too much hatred in society
today. It is literally tearing this nation apart.
But society is the people, you and I. So, if
hatred is part of our lives, we ought to be
deeply concerned about the attempt on Senator
Kennedy’s life, because if hatred moved
another man to try to kill him, it could move
you or me to inflict injury, even death, on
someone else.
But hatred has no existence of its own, any
more than death has an existence of its own.
Death is nothing more than the absence of life.
And hatred is nothing more than the absence of
love or, if you will, compassion, concern.
So, if there is any hatred in us for anyone,
the only way to remove it is by replacing it
with love, compassion, concern. That takes
determination and prayer. But if it isn’t done
then we are no better than the men who killed
John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King
and the man who tried to kill Senator Kennedy.
Our hatred just isn’t deep enough yet. But who
is to say it never will be?
Sacred Heart Month
GUEST EDITORIAL
Your $400
A Year
Nearly everybody believes in law, order and
justice. Nearly everybody wants to solve the
problem of criminality. But not everybody
agrees on how to overcome the muggings,
burglaries, assaults, embezzlements, overcharges
and other violations of the law.
Anybody who drives to work knows that the
speed laws are violated by hundreds of citizens
each day. Anybody who works in a store knows
about shoplifting and a good many teachers are
aware of cheating in the classroom. Cheating at
school seldom breaks a law, but it represents a
frame of mind that rejects social norms. It is
this same rejection of social responsibility that
causes the accumulation of parking tickets —
hardly a capital offense, but an indication that
“law and order” are only for the other fellow.
Americans generally are split into two
groups in their view of law enforcement. One
group believes that society should “get tough”
with all who break the law. The other group
believes that crime is an enormously complex
problem that can be solved only if broad social
problems also are solved.
The first group, representing the “get tough”
school, seems to see crime as something to be
stamped out by the application of
overwhelming police power. It should be
observed that nations whose governments
embrace absolute police power, such as the
Soviet Union, have succeeded in erasing crime.
Commission Needed
The Chatham County Human Relations
Council has asked the City Council of Savannah
to enact legislation, and has submitted a
proposed ordinance, creating a Human
Relations Commission with enough legally
supplied teeth to come to grips with the very
real and pressing problems of a large section of
the population.
The Commission would be composed of
eleven appointees from the city’s two State
Colleges, local labor organizations, the Chamber
of Commerce, the Economic Opportunity
Authority, local Clergy and Civil Rights
organizations.
;
The proposed ordinance was drawn up by
Professor Robert Patterson of Armstrong State
College and chairman of the committee on
human needs and resources of the privately
sponsored Human Relations Council. He gave
the following reasons for establishing an official
Human Relations Commission:
-Valid grievances in Savannah.
-A sizable portion of the city’s population
have no voice in the governing of their lives and
often are deprived of their rights as citizens.
-None of the existing grievance mechanisms
in the city are considered satisfactory.
-Satisfactory channels of communication
between the city government and its citizens do
not exist.
Do people in a modern city who still must
go to a communal pump for water for drinking,
cooking and bathing have a valid grievance? We
think they do. And there are some such people
in Savannah.
WherTsuch a situation has existed for years
and the people must petition the government to
remedy it and then wait, week after week,
while city and county argue about who should
do the job, can it be said that there are
satisfactory channels of communication
between the city government and its citizens or
that the existing grievance mechanisms of the
city are satisfactory? We don’t think so.
When the city’s large Negro population has
no representation on City Council, can it be
maintained that they do have an effective or
meaningful voice in city government? We don’t
think so.
When the city is asked to set up more
effective machinery to deal with these
problems, and when detailed and concrete plans
for such machinery are submitted for official
consideration - and when the city’s only
response is that “perhaps” we’ll talk about this
with you some other time, is there a need for a
strong, governmentally established Human
Relations Commission. There certainly is.
DANGER OF THE COMPUTER
The Backdrop...
By John J. Daly, Jr.
Someone showed me the other day a
cartoon which pictured a priest before a giant
computer, his head bent as if listening to the
machine, his face grave and sympathetic.
In the background stand two men. One is
saying to the other: “I knew it made mistakes,
but I never thought it felt guilty about it.”
I hope that is the computer of a national
credit card business
with which I have
just lost a battle-at
least I think I lost.
There’s no way of
knowing.
I tried several
times to communi
cate with the thing,
to complain that it was making what I judged
to be a mistake. I made telephone calls to its
tenders and sent it several notes, including one
registered letter, but to no avail. None of my
efforts was reflected in what the computer
continued to send me, so I met its demands and
withdrew.
One gathers that such exercises in
frustration, and some infinitely worse, are
increasing in some sort of proportion to the
takeover of the impersonal machine in the
credit field. There have been enough complaints
in recent months to inspire preliminary probes
by committees in both Senate and House in
Washington.
On the Senate side, investigators of a
subcommittee on antitrust and monopoly
legislation are said to be examining credit
reporting agencies to find out if Federal laws
are necessary at this point to protect people
from having mistakes become a permanent part
of their records. Catching up with an error in a
computer, particularly if the mistake is
damaging, is becoming an important part of
modern life-and a very difficult task.
The Senate subcommittee, headed by Sen.
Philip A. Hart of Michigan, is expected to hold
hearings this summer on what its investigators
have turned up. Already, one fact not generally
understood has been unearthed, namely that
the records of credit agencies are being used
with growing frequency to screen men for jobs.
In the House, another subcommittee has
taken a different tack. It is slowly gathering
testimony on the broad question of whether
massive computerized record-keeping poses a
constitutional problem over invasion of privacy.
The House committee’s concern is not
far-fetched. The president of just one firm, a
San Francisco operation, told the committee
that he could have every American in his
computers within five years. His company’s
specialty is telling inquiring businessmen how-
fast or how slowly an individual pays his debts.
There can be no stopping of the computer’s
conquests. It would be like fighting the
telephone. It is becoming an essential tool in
the economy and to the nationwide businesses
which use it, the computer obviously offers
benefits which far outstrip any concern over
the present level of complaints.
Nevertheless, despite the machine’s
importance, Congressional frowns are being
turned upon it. Coupled with he sudden
emergence in Congress of remarkably strong
support for consumer protection legislation, it
seems inevitable that an extremely close look at
the computer’s influence in decisions affecting
a man’s credit standing-or job opportunities-is
on tap.
“People are frightened,” one Senate
investigator told newsmen after weeks of
gathering information from consumers.
ROAD TO SCIENTIFIC BARBARISM
It Seems To Me
Joseph Breig
The hard-won progress of
medical science and of the
legal profession in protecting
and improving human life is
gravely endangered when laws
against abortion are repealed
or weakened.
Such was the warning laid
before the New Jersey
legislature by
§ the state’s
bishops after
the legislators
voted for a
study of
proposals for
loosening
anti-abortion
laws.
Had the bishops not
wanted to concentrate upon
the issue immediately at
hand, they could have gone
much farther. The fact is that
the whole anti-life movement
is all of a piece.
I do not mean that those
involved realize this. But
abortion, euthanasia,
contraception—all that sort of
thing—are alike enemies of
human life, and of God’s
creative love without which
there would be no life.
The barbarian eliminates
life which he considers a
nuisance. He kills the
handicapped infant, rather
than trying to correct the
handicap or to find means of
enabling the little one to be
happy, creative and
productive within his
limitations. >
Similarly, the barbarian
leaves elders and the sick or
injured to die or puts them
to death when they no
longer can care for
themselves.
The barbarian does these
things because he does not
know how to love God or his
fellowmen. He has no values
outside his own selfishness;
and even his self-love turns to
self-hatred because he is a
moral monster.
Hitler was the No. 1
barbarian of our time; and he
is a standing warning to us
about how swiftly civilization
can be transformed into
savagery, once contempt for
human life runs lawlessly
wild. He exterminated six
millions Jews and hundreds
of thousands of Christians;
and with another monster,
Stalin, he plunged mankind
into World War II.
Against man’s constant
temptation to barbarism
there have stood, for many
centuries, two chief
guardians: Judaism and
Christianity, with their
teaching (when the teaching
is not perverted) about the
sacredness of human life
because man is the image and
the child of God. And under
that inspiration, medicine and
law have labored tirelessly in
the service of life, not of
death.
But now there is a
worldwide anti-life movement
which deceives even some
Christians and Jews, not to
mention the millions of
persons whose values are
merely secular and
materialistic.
Where are the abortionists
really going?
The answer was seen the
other day in a new policy
statement issued by the
American College of
Obstetricians and
Gynecologists.
A physician should
perform an abortion—kill the
life in the mother’s womb—at
any time when the “total
environment” of the patient
demands it, said the
statement.
This is to say, openly at
last, what the abortionists
really believe under all their
sloppy sentimentalism about
rape and incest and
“endangering the life of the
mother” —that the unborn
infant has no rights whatever,
can be put to death whenever
the patient and the physician
wish.
This is scientific
barbarism. It is lovelessness
and godlessness. And it is the
direction in which these
morally blind people would
lead us to abortion on
request, to euthanasia when
anybody is a nuisance to us,
to eugenic monkeying with
the sources of life, to
animalistic contraceptive
sexual irresponsibility.
Down that road, if we
travel it far enough, lies a
godless society with almost
god-like scientific knowledge
and technology, in which
freedom will be not even a
faint memory, and human
beings will be mere
laboratory guinea pigs.
“He’s a pastor in the underground church.”
The second group, which seems to see crime
as a sort of social disease, apparently feels that
the individual citizen must be taught that
obeying the law is a personal responsibility.
This theory depends on making certain that the
needs of individual citizens are met in such
areas as employment, health and education. It
depends further on efforts to rehabilitate all*
lawbreakers who can be reached by professional
workers, and isolating the rest from society.
It may be that both groups are partially
right, partially wrong. But the two differing
views are widely held.
The United States Senate has embraced the
“get tough” view and has gone beyond a simple
insistence that justice be equally applied.
The Senate voted by a substantial margin to
reverse Supreme Court rulings on the speed
with which arrested citizens must be arraigned,
on the admissibility of confessions obtained by
police and on the right to counsel during police
lineups.
If the House goes along with these
provisions, which is not assured, it is possible
that President Johnson will veto the bill. If the
President signs such a bill, the Supreme Court
may eventually rule that the sections relating to
confessions and lineups are unconstitutional.
The Senate has acted further in the area of
wiretapping, voting, in effect, to abolish privacy
on your telephone. This is a dangerous,
probably unconstitutional move that makes it
an easy matter for government to invade a
man’s privacy at home or at work.
The Senate also has rejected a series of
amendments to a gun-control bill that would
regulate the sale of rifles and shotguns. Said
Senator Dodd: “We cannot ignore the the fact
that one-third of all murders and more than
one-third of all gun crimes involve the use of
rifles and shotguns . . . We cannot ignore the
fact that the high-power rifle is the favorite of
the assassin.”
Well, the Senate showed that it could ignore
such facts. Deadly weapons are still available on
the mail order market.
Americans continue to speed on the
highways, cheat in the classroom, short change
customers, rob banks, shoot bus drivers in the
course of robberies, snatch purses, slander their
enemies, chisel on their income tax and litter
public parks.
Tougher laws may be the answer, although
we doubt that there would be an end to hese
violations of the law if each one involved the
death penalty.
The war budget approaches $80 billion.
That’s $400 for you, $400 for your spouse,
$400 for each of your children—in fact, that’s
$400 a year for each man, woman and child in
the nation. Such a sum might be enough to
stamp out crime without the loss of the civil
liberties guaranteed to every citizen by the
constitution. It might be more effective tham
wiretapping, or grilling suspects without benefit
of counsel.
It might have some effect on peace in the
streets, peace in the nation and peace in the
world. It might lead to the defeat of crime,
poverty and disease.
(BALTIMORE CATHOLIC REVIEW)