The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-09-24

opposed tO have dropped bombs In abaft coming tower, one housing , dem0untabIe cargo boom lower him an hour after sub surfaced.
 
 are most certainly damned, but our product can save you.
 EgOtism StiIl With Us
 "It seems to me that our pre- Pearl Harbor egotism had such mo- mentum that 1t is with us today in distorted and dangerous form. We go around saying We can lose the war, but - we may as well admit 1t = eyerytime one of us say we can lose the war, we think of this as pure rhetoric, part of the old pep talk. The assumption is, oi course we can't lose the war, but scare 'em & little and then in the windup of the talk give 'em the build up about our great American heritage of freedom and whatnot and how our courage and our self sacrifice will bring us to victory ovel the forces of evil .. .. and then there will be peoples peace, and amity and justice will pervade the earth forever after.
 How about, for 8 change, just saying that we are losing the war period. And realizing that we damr well mean 1t. period.
 "Such realism, no doubt, woulc be 8 heart-racking plunge into cole water, but it would probably give us an idea of what we are ur against.
 "It would remind us that not since :, the Civil War has this nation beer called upon to suffer greatly.
 "It might drive ust the realiza. tion that morale is the Spiritua capacity of a people to endure pair and suffering, and not a campaign of bill posters, pep talks, and bare concerts.
 Kid Us of CalmnesS
 "It. might free us of the calmness with which we read of the ordeal; of the Russian Army.
 Tt might, in our shaken frame of mind. drive US to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, where or the north wall we could read the second inaugural, in which Presi- dent Lincoln posed the disquietine proposition that perhaps the nation was being punished in those days for having enslaved a race.
 Mess of Slogans "Thus conditioned to the unpleas- ant task of self-examination, wG might ponder whether or not w have tempted diversity and slavery by trading our fine sounding con cepts of the freedom and dignity oi the individual for mess of adver- tising slogans and political clches
 This painful technique of real istic self-analysis might even remind us that freedom, like any other vir- tue, does not exist in vacuum It must be worked and practicec to exist at all. And like any other virtue, 1t imposes upon those whe would have it the unpleasant task; of discipline and sacrifice. A ma terialistic people do not learn these tasks by reading posters or listen. ing to pep talks. any more thar you can learn to play the violir by the same methods.
 "We have a course, under the stress of the war, had a spiritual re- juvenation of kind.
 'But I rather feel that our spirit ual revival Is a little bit like that of the boy who said his prayers only when he had to sleep in a folding bed.
 We have been wrangling for months over a tax bill for 1922, which in plain language means that we have been fighting over who is going to pay how much for this ca tastrophe which has engulfed us, The pressure of rival economic groups, each armed with unassail- able statistics to show how that group will suffer injustice if thus and so happens, has ebbed and flowed like the tides for 10 months. No Sacrifice Spirit
 T fail to detect spirit of sac rifice in these group gyrations be- fore congress. Neither does 1t indi- cate that we have a spiritual grasp of our threatening fate when we sell bonds to help finance war of survival or extermination on the promise of profitable monetary re- turns on the investment. I see no fundamental grasp of our predica- ment in anti-union employees who sabotage production committees for fear that industry will be Sovietized, nor in labor union leaders who are aA n1ANfak kHaA aVNnff fftVTa position of their own little groups as to examine the war within regard to how their own puny fortunes will be affected If labor unity is achieved or jurisdictional lines are eradicated.
 "I think our insufferable and materialistic pride has rendered us incapable of realizing fully that in German NaziiSm we are fighting a monstrous thing that started out as a God d-man complex, and now is fighting to the death, whether that Goldman complex still exists or not. in the desperate realization that Naziism and the deluded fools who are backing Naziissn cannot survive if they do not win and exterminate their victims.
 we would find 1t hard to follow through the thought that the little Japs. for whom we have always en- tertained Q rather fond contempt, consider us foppish because we equip our avlatoTs with parachutes. It sis a degrading thought to these our enemies that there should be any alternative to defeat save vio. lavsk Anakfa