OUR SITUATION TODAY

by Manuel Boyfrank

Prosperous as the country may seem, I tell you that our situation is precarious. Truly good jobs are hard to get. The man without a college education is handicapped and from now on we shall see more and more applicants for employment displaying two diplomas apiece where one was once enough. The man who hasn't $5,000 today is in bad shape.

We had best study how to discharge the citizen's responsibility by exercising industry, prudence, thrift, forehandedness, tact and goodwill toward our fellow citizens. Fortitude is called for.

You can't be sure where you can best put in your oar, but if you are forever on the lookout and energetic to do the right thing when you canwhat more can we ask of you?

THERE IS HOPE

Bad as the situation is, there is hope. You have many friends. Don't be too ready to assume that you are in a minority. Do you think you have any monopoly on intelligence? Whatever you have learned that is true, other people may have learned the same lesson; and those who don't know the truth are usually eager to have it told them. Don't you believe for a minute that other people haven't had occasion to give demological questions long and intensive study. Don't be astonished if you find out that other people have totted up the same column of figures that has engaged your interest and have come up with the same total that you got.

16

We in America need a deuteronomy, a return to the law. All our troubles can be traced to our violations of the constitution; and if only we will regard the constitution, pay our elected officials better wages and exert ourselves as the citizens the constitution contemplates our being, we shall thrive and live in peace as never before.

ONE and its friends have a special interest in the constitution's faithful observance. Article VI, paragraph 3, provides that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust and Article I of the amendments prohibits an establishment of religion. You and your friends, whenever you are persecuted by officials under legal pretext, are afflicted by reason of somebody's determination to write religion into the law. There is not one law which you find obnoxious that was not put in the statute books from a religious motive-and in violation of the constitution.

Much of our trouble comes of our paying Congressmen and other elected officials such low wages that it is not worth while for an honest man of ability to run for Congress. Unless he be backed by free-spending interests-interests with axes to grind, he will find a campaign's cost so high that it will outweigh his lawful salary. As long as we pay coolie wages we shall get the coolie Congressmen who are the source of trouble-and, at that, our Congressmen, as are all our elected officials, are, on an average, better than we deserve. We