Christopher Columbus High School - Anchor Yearbook (Bronx, NY)

Page 7 text:

THE FUTURE BELCNGS TO LIS 'B Now it is up to you. O f m 0 Ye No longer are you shielded beneath wings of protection. 'iz 31 J You must face the world alone. It is not a happy thought, because now the world is cruel, yet hungry and pitiful. And you the youth and future of this devastated world, are its hope. You ITlLlSt take on the burden your brothers could no longer carry, and guide the bedevilled. Take the golden threads of knowledge you have gained and weave from them the spirit of tolerance, generosity, and sacrifice. Accept your American heritage. Grasp its fortunes and do not let them slip through greedy fingers. Preserve it, and share the good and kindness of which you have so much. You are the sunrise in the East. Do not set until you can proudly glisten in a peaceful and beautiful sunset. Yes graduate, now it is up to you. 555. . Q 252 2132? .EE ish , fiRIiTTA SHOTILN n I fail . . 'F ' cf! ' game fl Wy 4 -fmt W ef' MJKMLJ 1 1 3' ,siylr riff , ., v ' i l' l DX 3 004 gtifi

Page 6 text:

.Wi wi lf' t'gfLiylt7J5fsi4iillifii DEDICATIO iffmf .MQ VVe dedicate this book to Me of the thousands of returning G.I.'s- returning to the world he helped to liberate. Four years ago Bill joined the ranks of our ever increasing armed forces. He's seen Tarawa, Saipan, North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. He represents your brother, cousin, uncle, sweetheart. He is your own hero-maybe not the Congressional Medal Winner-but nevertheless your hero. He's fought for youg he's won for you. He's given you the peace. On what you do with that peace depends the future of your country. As a future citizen, it's up to you to win not only the Victory, but the so essential peace. We cannot look ahead to the next twenty years and see another war-an atomic war-a war of total destruction. We must preserve Bill's peace. We must protect it. And as we love him for the part he has played in guaranteeing our future, let's add to Welcome Home the sincerest expression of our thanks. Let us make sure he and millions like him remain with us in a .peaceful world. VI, . i 1.1 17j ' ,VL Yi.NL,t.i MA. IO aw 1 ' , f M1 X 1 X A ,fi ki ! X ,Vw 4 P N A i.. rl ish Q N s . .lg L' A 42, c V 4 55. A ...D ,-w rf . 5. y , A QE - V x fe . WS? ,Q AA '

Page 8 text:

PRlNclPAL's PAGE YEARBOOK MESSAGE-JUNE 1946 What with gramicidin, penicillin, insulin, sulfa-compounds, vitamins, hormones, oxygen tents, iron lungs, transplanted corneas and other marvels of medical science, I am sure you are all going to live for at least sixty years more. I wish I were as sure that you are going to be at ease and happy in a peaceful world. I am not because I know that your lives are going to be worked out in the presence of a struggle between two opposed and irreconcilable concepts of human social and political organization, namely, democracy and totalitarianism. You must choose between them and the choice may not be easy, for two reasons. First, both have advantages. Second, the eHort to distinguish between them is confused by the claim of totalitarianism that it actually is democracy, and by the current tendency of democracies to adopt devices heretofore regarded as logical only under totalitarian forms of government. To clarify what follows, I propose the following definitions. Democracy is a form of organization in which supreme power resides always in all of the people and is exercised by representatives whom they elect and whose tenure of oliice they control, in which all the people have political and legal equality without hereditary or arbitrary differences in rank or privilege, and in which all individuals are free to assemble, speak, write, print, worship, form associations of any kind, including political parties, and in general to act freely within the limits of laws, the making of which embodies their consent to be governed by rules which they may change, repeal, or retain at will. Totalitariariism is a form of organization in which the state claims and exercises the right to dominate every phase of national life, and in which the government is so organiized as to be dominated by one political party or one power which does not permit recognition of or representation by any other political party. These are calm, objective, dictionary definitions. but the implications of the difference will leave no sensitive person calm. To say that totalitarianism is or can be democracy is an outright lie and should be recognized as such, no matter where it exists, what its local name is, who heads it, or what one's sympathies, racial, religious or political, may be. It is inescapably the rule of all by a part, the domination of everyone by a self-chosen fraction, a form of control necessarily self-perpetuating and therefore brooking no opposition, and compelled to maintain itself in power by using hired thugs, thought-police, spies, and a special-benefit-and-privilege party or army large enough to keep the people subdued. The membership of the party may change somewhat from time to time, through blood purge, starvation, or imprisonment, but the party and its control of the life of the nation continue. I said above that both systems have advantages. Democracy gives freedoms to the individual, but one of these is freedom to commit political suicide, to destroy freedom itself. Freedom to be a truly great spirit, or to be a wretch. Freedom to work for the common good, or to try to exploit our economy for selfish ends. Freedom for unlimited trial and error, for an ever-changing, never-at-rest effort to reconcile conflicting desires, to obtain agreement on one purpose out of many. In contrast to the unceasing turmoil arising from the exercise of individual freedoms in democracy, totalitarianism presents a picture of order, of definiteness, of singleness of purpose. There is no complicated structure of checks and balances between separately autonomous governmental bodies. There are no strikes in key industries to interfere with the operation of the national economy. No, indeed! And no danged nonsense, either, about individualistic competitive influences on the prices of commodities. No Fords, Kaisers, Chryslcrs, Endicott-Iohnsons, Crosby, Eric Iohnstons, International Harvesters, or Sears Roebucks. Deviators! Disturbers! Individualistic producers of disorder! There is one other advantage that totalitarianism has over democracy. It relieves most people of the necessity of thinking. You don't have to make decisions, they have been made for you. In a democracy you are forever being urged and exhorted and driven to think, to act, to join, to debate, to participate, to decide, to help make decisions because the decisions will be what you make them. No such goings-on under a totalitarian government. You don't have any individual opinions. Not out loud. This is it, brother, and you do it. Or maybe you'd prefer to improve your muscle-tone with a ten-year stretch in the salt mines? Who are you, anyhow? The State is the supreme source of power and that's where your orders come from. No deviationism. No opinionated individualistic side- slipping. No, you don't do any thinking on your own. Not even if you are a member of the Party. In fact, most particularly not if you ARE a member of the Party. fWell, boys and girls, which are you going to choose? For, choose you must. As I know you understand, I hope that, despite all its blundering and uncertainties in action, its turmoil and change and falling short of perfection, your choice will be definitely and permanently for democracy. I say this because I know it represents the greatest effort in the history of mankind to work out in practice the principles of Hebraic-Christian religion and ethics. I believe profoundly that all men were created equal and that they were endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. I believe that political power is a natural right of man, that the individual citizen is the source of power, that the control of power must be in him, and that the state is never rightly the master of man but a device created by him for the purposes of self-government. I am sure that you have these beliefs also. But I must warn you again that in a democracy we are free to destroy our own freedoms and that the transition from freedom to self-imposed bondage could be deceptively easy because it had been gradual. I was appalled to read in today's newspaper 4