ustxtxb_obs_1959_04_11_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

BOW WILLIAMS A utomoblie and General Insurance Budget Payment Plan Strong Stock Companies GReenwood Z-1545 624 LAMAR, AUSTIN Let’. Abolish the Poll Tax! Thoughts on Democracy WACO Enumerating the ramifications of illiteracy in Texas, State Senator Jerrard Secrest concluded that “every illiterate in Texas is a potential barrier to the easing of race tensions.” After listing the burdens illiteracy places on the economy \(“they furnish the unemployed in our state, receive various kinds of charitable aid, pay fewer taxes, are a threat to health and a danger to the safety of the lives and prop erty of the rest of the people, and … consider the production these people do not propoint: “Now, this one I have just thought of but I have the feeling that from among these 800,000 to one million illiter ates in Texas, we have a great group of people who might easily become led, who might form the nucleus for the mob the hot-head leaders. A person with a fourth grade education can be much more easily convinced that he should see to it that certain things do not happen in this country,” Secrest said. He added, “Also, many of the illiterates are among the minorities themselves and as long as they are illiterate, they cause their minorities to exist in such a manner as to cause the feeling of racial unrest to come into sharper focus. Some of the things people say they object about in minorities can be traced directly to the illiteracy of the minorities they’re talking about.” `WE CAN SAVE THE WORLD, IF WE TRY IT’ ti they make the laws to suit themselves. Underneath, the have nots they don’t have anything. These nine out of every ten are illiterates, these nine out of ten are desperately hungry. Another reason for the increasing hunger in the world is the success of preventive medicine, carried abroad by missionary doctors in the last 50 years. Few people realize that one of every five of our missionaries was a doctor or nurse. They have done a wonderful job, stopped one of the greatest scourges the world has ever known, cholera. Why was Africa sparsely settled? Because everybody, animals and men, died of sleeping sickness. But we did not keep the food supply up with the rising population. We didn’t teach people how to farm. In the days before we lost China, only one out of 1,000 in China was an agricultural missionary. But again before you can end hunger, before you can teach him how to farm, you first must make him literate. In Sun Life, also, there is strength. .4k When you become a policyholder of this great international company, you become one of a group of farsighted men and women the holders of two million policies and group certificates in 25 countries who protect their families and themselves against an uncertain future through the medium of life insurance. Those gospels that we take around the world are full of dynamite. Missionaries are conservative as a rule, but those gospels are not conservative. “I came that you might have a more abundant life.” Everything in the New Testament is hope … But the trouble with the world today is we’re getting richer while they’re getting hungrier. They’ve seen us, our cars, clothes, the way we live in the hotels in their country they’re just second rate hotels to us but they’re palaces to them and now they want to be more like us, to have the things we have. And they have a grim determination. This huge gap … broke out in Russia and in China and it turned out to be communism. It ‘broke out because people are hungry. In case nobody’s heard of it, I’ll tell you what communism is to these people, how it’s sold to them. “People who have are stealing from those who don’t … we liquidated them in Russia.” When you’re hungry, that is a powerful message. China went communist because she was hungry. These people know it better than you and I dothe reason they’re hungry is because they can’t read. They know that and they’re crazy to read. In many of these countries, our State Department must go through endless red tape just to get one emissary cleared for entry. But if we write `This Huge Gap’ MARTIN ELFANT 201 Century Building Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 SUN LIFE OF CANADA \(The Observer herewith excerpts the remarkable extemporaneous address delivered by Dr. Frank Laubach as a climax of the first annual Texas Conference on Illiteracy, held on the Baylor University campus in Waco April 3-4. Delivered with ringing passion by a man who, after 30 years as a Protestant missionary, author, and educator ranks as the world’s greatest authority on literacy, the speech evoked from Baylor President Dr. W. R. White the response, “I have not been stimulated so in 25 years … it has made me ashamed of my colleagues, my country and my life … we need to get this before all the students … they are the most idealistic … the possibilities WACO Those who have seen … illiterates change from defeat to a new attitude for themselves and a new vision for their children … know why we need a roundup of illit. erates in Texas. But it has a wider significance than Texas itself. Dedicating its vast wealth, courage, and vigor, Texas can become a springboard for a drive on illiteracy down through Latin America … for the fight against illiteracy, want and poverty which is the very core of the trouble we’re in in the world today. In the free world today, only the people who don’t know the facts are free from worry. Under communism is a deep underlying evil. Just as pneumonia is preceded by a common cold, the evil of communism is preceded by something and that something is hunger. There are millions of people in the world today who are obsessed with one question, where can I get something to eat today. There is frustration and hatred of those who are the haves … these cause communism. Wherever you find communism breeding today, study the situation and you’ll find the evil there, underlying it hunger, despair, desperation. And hunger is the result of illiteracy. Hunger befalls people who can’t cope with disease which ruins their crops and kills their animals. They don’t know scientific farming, they can’t plow, they use wretched seeds, they wreck the land and don’t know how to use fertilizer. In many of these countries, a small ten percent of the population mints the money and they keep it. ?hi Lion lad the Om In union, there is strength. The fable of the Lion and the Oxen illustrates this lesson very forcibly. As long as the three Oxen stayed together, the Lion dared not attack. But the king of beasts’ sowed dissension and jealousy amongst his adversaries, and they separated. It was then easy for the Lion to attack and destroy them one by one. … India or Castro or the others involved in illiteracy and ask if they want help in literacy, they always write back, “Yes, we really want your help.” The doors are wide open to us, the government is open to us, the masses are open to us. The President now has his Food for Peace program. It is all right, it is a stopgap, it gets rid of our surpluses, it will help them, yet I can see the danger of it. It might make paupers out of these people. They don’t want to be paupers. They have. pride. It might make me feel good to patronize you, but it’d make you feel awful to be humiliated. So are they. The one thing these people, these little people, have is their pride and Dr. Frank Laubach when they have to accept charity, they just plain don’t like it. They have to do it, or starve, but they don’t like it. What They Want What they want is to know how. What they want is to be able to do it for themselves. What they want is not charity but a chance. What they want is not a coin in the hand but a tool in the hand. So let’s help them, if that’s what they want, and the place to begin is literacy. And this is the first literacy conference held in the United States. I wish I could say there had been more but there haven’t, this is the first one, and small though it relatively is to the size of Texas, it is enormously important. There is a much greater crowd here than we see, there are a billion and a half people, there are three out of every five of the human race. They are determined to no longer be hungry, destitute, down there where they are. They are reaching up their hands, their two hands, one over to us and one over to the communists. You say to them “Be careful, those communists will make slaves of you.” They laugh at you. They say, “We’re at the bottom now. We never were free. What is this stuff you talk about in America, this freedom? What does it mean? We’re hungry, We know what that means.” If we don’t help them we lose them … a billion and a half people. That vast army that is now determined not to stay down, you THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 6 April 11, 1959 can’t tell them the communists are lying. You can’t tell them to lie still, because they won’t, they will hate you for it. They are coming up as our friends, if we help them up. If we don’t help them up, they are going to come up as communists and destroy us. If they are your friends, they’ll lift this world, along with you, to a new high, and if they are your enemies they may drag the world on their heads, like Samson did, like Hitler did. They’ll help destroy us in the process. That’s why this is an important night tonight, far more important than even this great state of Texas. It is an important evening for all mankind. The trouble is our country does not know what I’ve been telling you. It is very easy to save the world if we undertake it. I was hoping Point Four would do it, I was glad for what it has done, but I now know it’s not enough. And the people in Washington know it perfectly well too. In addition to what the government has doneso often for selfish r e a s o n s, driving shrewd Yankee bargainswe’ve got to do a deed of compassion, not because we want to help ourselves, but because its the Christian thing to do, because we ought to have done it long ago, because this thing the communists want to do, threaten to do, to the world has touched our consciences … We were lopsided in. our philanthropies … well-meaning though we were, and we have neglected these poor people. They’ve got to have first literacy; then the books that tell them how to help themselves up out of their misery. It’s a huge problem. Just this week, I talked to the Ford Foundation about money. You know what they answered? “We’ve studied that problem, it’s too big, we don’t have the money to do it and so we’re not going t i o touch it unless we can succeed.” I went to the Rockefeller Foundation, and they said the same thing, “too big for us.” I talked to Stanley Kresge, head of the Kresge Foundation, they have about $75 million, and he said, “It’s far too big for us.” It’s too big for government, too big for business, too big for the philanthropies, .so nobody is doing it. We are losing the world on the front of literacy and education. We are holding our own, maybe, on the economic front, but we’re losing on the educational front because we haven’t yet seen that we have to do that. I for one don’t want to spend my money, pour it down a rathole, $40 billion for the military, $3 billion for technical and economic aid, and then lose the world. That’s what we are .doing. Is Christ Pleased So I want to propose tonight one more thing that we’ve got to do. We’ve got to mobilize … If in each church, 100 people would form an army of compassion, $1 a week … that would be $5200 a year and then I’ll tell our Mission Board Secretary we want you to send a literacy expert or a journalist who will write the things those people need to help themselves, and an agricultural expert, those are the three main things. I believe our country is overripe … for such an effort. Our people are in a state of frustration and disgust; we don’t like to be hated … but we don’t know what to do. We are ready for the greatest deed of compassion the world ever saw. We reach out there, help those hungry, desperate people up and then Christ will smile. You think your Christ is very pleased with America when America places $21 in church overhead, for her own church expenses, then sends one dollar abroad to help save the world? If we asked Christ first, do you think he would say put $21 in stained glass windows and in a tower and then send a dollar abroad? The Christ who said, “I am hungry and thirsty and naked and sick and a stranger and you help me when you help them.” That’s Christianity. The 250,000 churches in America … could send an average of one person each abroad … and the secular institutions, the PTA, women’s clubs, colleges, Rotary … could send 250,000 more. History is going over the Niagara rapidly. I also know America is going to change it. We want a change and we know now we have to do it ourselves, government doing all it will, business doing all it will, philanthropies doing all it will and then the church can send the army that has the love to Christ to teach them to help themselves. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, but all are frightened. That is why this meeting tonight is not just a nice little thing we are doing. It is a part true not a very big part yetbut big in potential. I am telling you the vision that has got me burning up … and then this could be one of the most important meetings ever held in Texas because of what happened afterwards. Why sot Anises paw insurance prebtans with ow Oahe Too win bo weds, so oblispation.