Watching the World
Dying Church
◆ Regarding the Church of Scotland, the Scottish Daily Express of November 7, 1970, stated: “It is dying in a state of respectability, complacency and unbelief. Few of its 1,000 ministers and 48,000 elders . . . accept the Bible as the infallible Word of God . . . Christ’s miracles, described in such details in the four Gospels, are openly derided and scoffed at.” The newspaper also observed that only a few thousand out of 1,200,000 members take the trouble to attend, and teen-age members “are pitifully few.”
Selling Sewage Water
◆ A county in Southern California is selling reclaimed sewage water for irrigation uses. A separate system of pipelines delivers the water to a golf course and a tree farm. Plans have been made eventually to sell it to homeowners for watering their lawns and shrubs. This is the first time that reclaimed sewage water has been sold through a metered system in the United States. In 1963 the county built a lake of reclaimed sewage water. It proved so successful as a place for the public to boat and fish that more lakes have been built and four are open to the public. Each year about 300,000 people visit them, paying an admission charge. A separate facility for swimming in the purified sewage water has been built at these lakes.
Dangerous Sniffing
◆ Children from the ages of eight to fourteen are especially susceptible to the dangerous fad of sniffing glue and household products in aerosol cans. According to Dr. George R. Spratto, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Purdue University, the children “have no idea of the hazards.” These children will apparently believe any tale they hear about how to “get high.” It was observed by Dr. Spratto that some children have died from sniffing hair spray in a plastic bag because the spray “made their lungs stiff as a board.” Others have sniffed the spray from a can of cooking oil which “coated their lungs with oil so that oxygen couldn’t get into the blood stream and to the brain.” Children who are sniffing Carbona, a cleaning fluid, can experience serious liver and kidney damage.
Handcuffed Fur Coats
◆ Shoplifting has become such a serious problem in New York city that stores are handcuffing fur coats to their racks. Thefts during the past few years have been increasing at a rate of about 25 percent a year. Although this hurts the stores, the customers are the ones who pay for the losses, in higher prices. A city official observed that 45 percent of the shoplifters are housewives, 50 percent teen-agers and the remainder professional thieves. It is such a serious problem nationwide that one study of the problem concluded that “we may soon become, if we are not already, a nation in which the majority of people have shoplifted.”
VD Pandemic
◆ According to the American Medical News of November 23, 1970, venereal disease in the United States has reached “pandemic proportions.” Syphilis has reversed its downward trend of recent years and is rapidly rising. The surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service said that gonorrhea is “out of control and must be considered a national epidemic of major proportions.”
Tape Pirates
◆ Music recording companies are unhappy about the growing practice of pirating their music tapes and selling the copies at a price much less than the original tapes. One group openly calls itself The Pirates and another The Counterfeiters. When they sell them to stores the first group admits that its tapes are pirated. The other group even copies the original packaging of a music tape and then sells its copies as originals. These are only two of many groups doing this. The copies sold by these two groups accounted for approximately one fourth of all tapes sold in 1969. Interestingly, the stores and customers that buy the pirated tapes do not seem to mind being parties to the dishonesty.
Sex Encouraged for Children
◆ In England the National Secular Society is advocating sex education in schools that will provide special places for copulation, masturbation or homosexuality with the blessing, “If you want to do it, we hope you enjoy it.” Its booklet Sex Education, which was written by a teacher, expresses the view that young people should be provided with a private and comfortable place for sex rather than letting them do it in dark corners and in automobiles. Is not a raising of moral standards what children need rather than encouragement to lower them to greater depths of depravity?
A Dangerous Sport
◆ The growing popularity of engine-powered snow tractors in the United States and Canada is creating a dangerous sport. Bad accidents are mounting. People have been colliding at high speed with automobiles and fixed objects such as low-hanging clotheslines, low wire fences, and so forth. Some have fallen through thin ice and drowned. Last year serious accidents with these vehicles involved drivers ranging in age from five to ninety-three.
Laymen Hit Church Wealth
◆ The National Association of Laymen stated that the Catholic Church in the United States has wealth that it estimates at $45 billion. Joseph O’Donoghue, the executive director of the organization, said: “We’re always taking, taking, taking and never giving.” He then asked how the church can ask for contributions while holding “larger and larger assets.”
Aspirin Side Effect
◆ According to Dr. Vernon M. Smith, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, intestinal bleeding may be due to aspirin. In a study of one hundred patients with gastrointestinal bleeding “94 percent had taken aspirin within hours of the onset of the hemorrhage,” he observed. Aspirin apparently inhibits the action of the platelets in the blood from forming a plug to stop bleeding.
Addicts’ Worst Enemies
◆ The “friends” of drug addicts are actually their worst enemies, being the cause of their starting on the road to drug addiction. A study by Friends of Psychiatric Research found that 84 out of every 100 addicts studied were introduced to drugs by their “friends.” They usually began with marijuana and moved to other drugs until finally becoming heroin addicts.
The Church in Quebec
◆ After commenting on the political corruption that existed in Quebec under Premier Maurice Duplessis, the newspaper The 4th Estate, of Halifax, N.S., Canada, said in its issue of October 22, 1970: “Despite the fact that some readers will be offended, it is essential to record also that the graft, corruption, dishonesty, abuse of citizen’s rights, thievery, law-breaking, cruelty and inhumanity had, at the very least, the tacit blessing of highly placed officials of the Roman Catholic Church—many of them still in places of influence in the Church’s Quebec hierarchy. In truth, a Duplessis or a Houde would not have been possible had the Church not ignored what they were doing. The Church did what it had done historically when its safety and influence seemed at stake: It turned its back on decency but this time it backed a loser with the result that the church’s influence in Quebec has reached an all-time low and is still ebbing.”
Churches Financially Pinched
◆ More and more churches are being pinched financially as insufficient money contributions come in to meet their expenses. This has been reflected in drastic cuts in the number of staff members. The Episcopal Church has cut its headquarters staff in half, the United Presbyterian Church eliminated fifty positions last year, with a possible tripling of this figure in 1970, and the National Council of Churches cut its staff by 15 percent. The Roman Catholic Church is having problems financing parochial schools in particular. Ten were recently closed in Buffalo, N.Y.
Nuclear Nightmare
◆ The United States and the Soviet Union have been steadily increasing their nuclear arsenal, with the result that they now have thousands of weapons in the megaton strength. One megaton is nearly equivalent to all the bombs used in all wars man has fought. Bernard T. Feld, a nuclear physicist, observed that up to “20,000 megatons of fission energy would be released” in an all-out nuclear war. The use of antiballistic missiles would increase this figure to “50,000 megatons.” This would result in a massive radioactive contamination of the environment. Certainly man’s need for a righteous world government to rule in peace is becoming ever more urgent.
Charity Helps Few
◆ The welfare department in the city of Montreal, Canada, reported that some charitable organizations were using less than half of the money they collected to help people in need. One organization spent 56.4 percent of its collections to finance its drive for contributions.
Catholic Teachers Leaving
◆ A computerized census of Catholic schools has revealed that the number of Catholic teachers has dropped more than 25 percent in five years. The reason appears to be that teachers in increasing numbers are leaving their religious orders and there is a steady decline in the number of people entering such orders.
Priests Quitting
◆ Thirty priests have left the Oklahoma diocese in the past five years to follow other pursuits. According to the Oklahoma City Times, this is “not a unique situation. It prevails in the Catholic church across the U.S. and throughout the world.”
Books Reduced to Cards
◆ A boon for libraries is a system that reduces 3,500 books into a tray in a filing cabinet. A card that measures six inches by four inches is able to hold the equivalent of six or seven entire books, a total of 3,200 pages. The pages are photographed and then reduced in size and put on plastic-coated cards. Special machines are used to enlarge the page images to fit a reading screen of eleven inches by fourteen inches when a person wants to do research in one of the books.
Grade-School Smokers
◆ Parents should begin early to educate their children about the harmful effects of smoking. A survey of almost 1,000 Michigan schoolchildren between the ages of ten and fifteen has found that 13 percent of them smoke cigarettes. More than half of the smokers said they started smoking before the age of ten. Twelve of the young smokers said they started at the age of six. Among the smokers, the survey indicated, the average nine- to twelve-year-old smoker consumed three to five cigarettes a day.
Quick Fingerprinting
◆ Now New York policemen are being equipped with fingerprinting equipment as they go along in their everyday line of duty. When a crime is committed and a fingerprint is revealed through dusting, a photograph of it is taken with a Polaroid camera at the scene and developed within ten seconds. Rapists and burglars have been arrested quickly with the new technique.