Watching the World

Bacteria Are Resisting Drugs

◆ Once heralded “wonder drugs” are losing their ability to check or kill disease bacteria. Scientists say there is evidence that bacteria transmit to one another the ability to resist drugs. At first, the resistance was limited to a few antibiotics, especially penicillin. Now doctors have found bacteria immune to as many as nine different drugs. Ironically, the increasing resistance is blamed on the spreading use of antibiotics, which eliminate weaker bacteria and allow the stronger to survive, multiply and pass on to others the ability to resist drugs.

Warning on “Green Revolution”

◆ In recent years new high-yield varieties of grain have been hailed as at least delaying mass starvation world wide. Some of these varieties, particularly one grown in Mexico, have been exported all over the world. Rapidly they are replacing local types. However, reliance on just a few basic types narrows the genetic pool from which newer varieties can spring if today’s few popular types get into trouble. Graham Chedd of London’s New Scientist sounds the alarm of many scientists who note that if the few new types were to succumb to a disease, the results would be catastrophic, since there would be nothing with which to replace them quickly. This has happened before to other narrow-based crops. Chedd concludes that the potential for disaster may have been greatly multiplied instead of being eased by man’s tampering with the natural creation.

Arsenic in Poultry

◆ Organic arsenic is added to poultry feed to make the birds grow faster. Federal regulations permit one part per million in the liver and other organs of poultry, and half that amount in the muscle tissues. However, in January the Department of Agriculture disclosed that reports for 1968 and 1969, the latest years available, show that illegal residues of organic arsenic were found in from one fourth to one sixth of poultry samples taken.

Quake Damage Extensive

◆ The major earthquake that struck the Los Angeles area in February caused damage so extensive that one authority estimates the cost may reach 1,000 million dollars. The cost in human lives passed 60, with hundreds injured. Most of the dead were in a veterans hospital that collapsed.

Danish “Tolerance” Challenged

◆ Writing in Tidende, a Danish local daily, high school principal Gustaf Bengtsson noted that newspapers boldly carried advertisements for pornographic shows ranging from sadism to unnatural intercourse between animals and humans, because Denmark is “tolerant.” Youngsters roar up and down streets on motorcycles that make frightful noises, because Denmark is “tolerant.” He observed that “people must not be punished for a crime, so they must have a leave of absence from prison, because we must be tolerant.” He also said that it is called “intolerant” to express doubts about abortions, and that the fight against narcotics is halfhearted because of Danish “tolerance.”

Yet, Bengtsson noted that one of Jehovah’s witnesses was sent to jail for the third time because of his dedication to do God’s will. This school principal said of the Witness: “He is not in opposition to society. He does not invade churches and take possession of them, he does not throw stones, he does not smoke hashish and he is not afraid to work. . . . He will not bear arms. So into prison with him, not once to get it over with, but now for the third time.” He concluded: “There is something unbelievable about the tolerance in our country.”

Shirt-Style Changes Profitable

◆ Men’s colored shirts are ‘in style,’ largely replacing white ones in many areas. The Wall Street Journal shows the basic reason why: “It seems the men’s apparel industry has discovered what women’s clothiers have known for decades: If you want a customer to buy every year, you try to make last year’s fashion unfashionable every year.” What now? A shirt-manufacturing official said: “We’ve got them all wearing colors, and now we‘d like to get them all wearing whites.”

Huge Deficit Planned

◆ The new budget submitted by President Nixon to the American Congress calls for a planned deficit of $11.6 thousand million in the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1971. Many economists say it will actually end up much larger. For this current year ending in June, Mr. Nixon had previously forecast a surplus of $1.3 thousand million, but instead there will evidently be a deficit of about $18.6 thousand million. Such miscalculations are common, for in fiscal 1968 the deficit was $25.2 thousand million, six times what the then President Johnson had estimated. The theory of government now is that the way to prosperity is to spend more than you make. But how long would you remain financially solvent if you spent more than you made every year? Could a business operate that way for long?

Another Giant Topples

◆ Last year America’s largest railroad, the Penn Central, declared bankruptcy. In February it was the turn of another giant, Britain’s Rolls-Royce, Ltd. The symbol for quality automobiles declared that it was bankrupt, its expenses exceeding income for too long.

Killings Follow Business Failure

◆ When a person puts his complete trust and hope in material values and then these are taken away, he often cannot face the situation. This was so with a formerly wealthy Philadelphia businessman. His ball bearings distribution firm went bankrupt and he lost his home as a result. Unable to face life, he fatally shot his wife and four children, seriously wounded another child, and then committed suicide.

Canada’s Unemployment Woes

◆ In December of 1969, Canada’s unemployment totaled 4.7 percent of its work force. Eleven months later, in November of 1970, it rose to 5.7 percent. Then in the next month, December, unemployment shot up to 6.5 percent. Quebec’s Labor Minister Jean Cournoyer warned that his province’s 8.4-percent unemployment in December could lead to revolution if not corrected.

Welfare Rolls Continue Rise

◆ Today there are more people on relief in the United States than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The largest rise has come in the latter part of the 1960’s. Yet, that was a period of peak employment, heralded as the greatest period of prosperity in the nation’s history. In the last ten years, the country’s population grew 13 percent, but its welfare rolls grew 94 percent. The latest figure shows 13,200,000 on relief, costing $12.8 thousand million annually. And officials see no end in sight.

Working Wives

◆ Four out of ten wives in the United States now hold some type of secular employment. That is an all-time high. It indicates the financial difficulty many families are experiencing in these times of constantly rising prices. More than half of working mothers had children under 18 years of age. About one quarter of all wives in the country with children under 3 years of age were in the work force.

TV-watching Habits

◆ What kind of television-viewing habits do American youngsters have? Changing Times reports: “The average teenager leaves high school with a record of 11,000 hours spent in the classroom and 15,000 hours watching TV.” It is little wonder that so many youths graduating from high school are found to be poor readers.

Baby-Sitter Risk

◆ Parents who hire teen-agers as baby-sitters take a risk by entrusting children to the supervision of those who are not much older. In one case a mother of six children hired a 16-year-old girl to baby-sit. The oldest child, 10, saw that the sitter invited three male teen-agers into the house and that all four were smoking in the bathroom. The child suspected that these were not ordinary cigarettes. He called the police, who arrested the four, since it was marijuana they were smoking. The mother, who did not get home until nearly midnight, said that the baby-sitter “was the last girl I would have expected to do something like that.”

In another case, a 6-year-old Oklahoma City boy contracted gonorrhea when his 16-year-old girl baby-sitter sexually abused him. Parents, with whom do you leave your children?

“Absolutely Epidemic”

◆ California’s public health director Dr. Louis Saylor said that medical authorities in the state have been unable to cope with the “absolutely epidemic” spread of venereal diseases. Saylor stated: “We as physicians just don’t know what to do about it.” About 2,000 new cases of gonorrhea are reported every week, only one sixth of the actual total. Similar epidemics are reported in many other areas and countries, a direct result of the moral breakdown so obviously taking place in our time.

New York City “Dying”

◆ Editorial writer Stewart Alsop declared in Newsweek: “New York City is dying of a malignancy.” What is the malignancy? He says: “The city is being killed by heroin.” There are now at ]east 100,000 heroin addicts in the city, and he estimates that these must steal about $40 a day to support their habit. But he adds: “The real cost is the death of New York as a city . . . Rather than live out their lives in fear, those who can afford it are leaving the city. In time, unless the malignancy can be brought under control, New York will be a shell, its tax base wholly eroded, inhabited only by the very poor, and a tiny handful of those rich enough to insulate themselves from the surrounding sea of fear.” A city detective agreed, saying: “Let’s face it. We have anarchy here.”

Churches in Money Squeeze

◆ Nearly every one of Christendom’s churches in the United States is having a severe financial squeeze. Declining donations are blamed not only on the economic recession, but on the growing hostility of church members toward what the clergy are teaching and doing. Said U.S. News & World Report: “The concept that a dollar given to the church collection was a dollar given to God is rapidly losing ground with an increasing number of discontented people.”

Parochial-School Crisis

◆ The Roman Catholic parochial-school system is in deep trouble. In the last five years nearly 1,400 of its schools in the United States have closed or consolidated. The main trouble? Money. It is simply not coming in large enough quantities from the Catholic population. Last year revenue fell $265 million short of the $1.4 thousand million needed. Enrollment has dropped from 5.5 million to 4.5 million in the five-year period. A Massachusetts school official predicted a “deluge” of other parochial-school closings in the future.

Bishop Laments Drop

◆ In his first message of 1971, Episcopal Bishop Harold Robinson spoke about the plight of the Episcopal church in America, lamenting: “1970 has been a rough year and I sincerely doubt if 1971 will be much of an improvement. We have some long, dark, hard months ahead. . . . I look in pain at declining church attendance and support.” The swift decline in Christendom’s churches should make thinking members among them ask whether they would be in such a condition if the All-powerful God were backing those church systems. Obviously, he is not.