The midland journal., 1946-11-29
By KATHLEEN NORRIS
Bell syndIcate.-wNu Feature.

w THEN a serious crime is
\A/ committed, reparation
w has to be made. When a
person suffers from a devastat-
ing illness, convalescence is long
and slow.
War is both a crime and an
illness. We self-styled Christian
peoples plunged into it, and the
fever of it burned into our very
souls. Now, not for sentimental
reasons, but from simple COM
mon sense, we have to lend
money and send clothes and
food and build hospitals and re-
establish trade for friend and
foe alike, just to keep the world
going at all. Our late enemies
are just as airy about asking
help as are our allies.
1t is for every one of us to help
the world toward convalescence. If
you are merely a good, honest citi-
zen, with kindly impulses in your
heart, think it out. If you have been
fortunate enough to find God in your
earthly pilgrimage, then add
prayer to your thoughts. Think hard,
pray hard. not just for hungry babies
in Poland and Germany and Italy,
but for our own men.
Think-think for five minutes what
some of our boys paid for this war.
Take the boy you love best, the boy
for whom your hopes are highest,
whether he be seven months, seven
years or II years old. Picture that
boy suffering. Suffering hard steady
pain, from one of those thousand in
juries of which we say so lightly,
"well, the doctors don't know ex-
actly what it is" Some delicate
internal fibre incurably torn, some
essential inch of bone rotted away,
some ininitesimal splinter pressing
on eyes or brain, and your mag
nifcent six-footer is going to wear
all his life that chiselled, weary look
that means pain.
He Might Be Your Son.
Your own boy-that roughneck out
in the sandbox who already this
morning has been riding his bicycle
like Barney Oldfield, coasting down
his slide, splashing in the lawn sprin-
klers, climbing the apple tree, that
outlaw who presently will come in
for his chop and baked potato, his
exhausted nap-he might be one OF
them.
He might be one of the hundreds
who walk with crutch; he might be
wearing a patch over one Of his
beautiful eyes, or sitting signing,
with his forehead gripped by his
hand, when the dreadful inevitable
pain comes back. He won't marry |;
he won't burden his girl with this.
He won't complain much, or talk
much of the mud and the loneliness
and the dying in south Italy. He
won't tell you Of the morning he was
Just one of the other fellows, trying
to take an island beach despite drip
| ping sweat and stinting insects and
sharp rifle fire, and of the noon when
he was carried to the hospital ship,
never to be himself again.
Today put your boy in his place.
And then, if you will, 60 down on
your knees. And rise from them re-
solved that not one single war.
wounded boy in your town is going
to be left without the work that he
can do. Many Of them can take
regular jobs; jobs don't always need
two legs, or two arms, or two eyes.
Many of them can take part-time
Jobs. Not one in ten, they tell
me, need be idle.
If these boys were lying wounded
and screaming on some field near
your house, how fast good women
would organize to help them. How
fast they would be carried to the
cool bed and clean bandages, the
hot coffee and the opiates that mean
comfort and love and care again
4 Al