BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1948 HELPING EUROPE’S CHILDREN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 35, 6 April 1948, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1948 HELPING EUROPE’S CHILDREN

Tonight the Mayor of Whakatane, Mr B. S. Barry, will seek co-operation of the citizens of this town and district in the United Nations appeal for children. A public meeting has been called, and will commence at 8 in the Parish Hall-.

The place should be packed. The future of the world might well hang on the way in which the people of the democratic nations respond to this appeal. This is more than a matter of sympathy for some hungry little waif in a far-off country. This matter of famine in Europe touches us all closely, and may touch us all more closely yet if we allow it to go unchecked while we have any means at hand to help-to check it. One may forget the humanitarian angle if one wishes to. One may lack that sensitiveness that conjures up a vision of big, unnaturally big, tortured eyes staring desperately from emaciated faces. One may lack the imagination to see a little child stagger and fall to die in some foreign gutter. One might lack the conscience to feel a share of the responsibility. Yet lacking all those things, one cannot, dare not, ignore this appeal. For those children will not all die. The toughest, the most ruthless in gleaning sustenance, will survive. The ones who can battle along without parental guidance, with inadequate education, inadequate shelter will survive. And those who do survive will come to manhood and womanhood hating the society that put them through the hell of war in infancy, and condemned them to live through the hell of peace to maturity. Theirs will be an outlook cynical and hard, having faith in neither man nor God. Forced by circumstances to sustain life by what they could grab, would they be likely to be appalled at the thought of another war, or would they welcome the chance to hit back at the complacent citizens of the fat lands that could have helped but would not?

Never was there a greater chance to build goodwill in a generation. Never was there a greater opportunity to show that the brotherhood of man is more than a mere catch phrase and —from the purely selfish point of view—Aeyer was- a better insurance policy offered against wars and the conditions that breed wars.

If we help generously and willingly, they will not forget. If we ignore their plight, they will not forget.

World conditions of tomorrow are in the hands of the children of today. And the destiny of the children of the old world is in the pockets of the people of the new.