GRIPING IS GOOD FOR YOU
Parrish, Harold
Griping Is Good For You By HAROLD PARRISH MAYBE you're not fed up with the chiding we civilians have been getting for the griping on the home front, but here's one registered voter who certainly...
...Is the Army using its manpower to the best possible advantage...
...Remember Garrison and Lovejoy and John Brown whose gripes wiped out slavery ? Remember our American Revolutionists who griped and fought us free of foreign domination...
...Griping Is Good For You By HAROLD PARRISH MAYBE you're not fed up with the chiding we civilians have been getting for the griping on the home front, but here's one registered voter who certainly is...
...for big-business-men to beef about the way the Government is preventing them from making anything more than colossal profits on war contracts...
...It seems as though it's O.K...
...for some of our Southern supermen to wail about our practically giving the country away to the Negroes—but it's horrid if a common, ordinary citizen murmurs about some of the screwy things happening on the home or foreign fronts...
...for soldiers to gripe about (a) food, (b) clothing, (c) living quarters, (d) officers, (e) anything else...
...Isn't everything peachy...
...Is it necessary to draft fathers...
...We honor the Biblical prophets—conscientious gripers of the first water...
...More And Louder Griping And how can we expect our Government to do the things we want and think are right—by smiling sweetly, by bowing humbly, by wearing a stiff upper lip— or by raising our voices in a lusty, healthy, gripe...
...History's Glorious Griping Take that away from America and you have a nation of faceless, thoughtless, speechless men, men living under fascist domination...
...Me, I don't know, • but I'm going to gripe and gripe and gripe until I find out...
...If I may sink so low as to paraphrase a slogan from the advertising world, griping is good and good for you...
...gripe when prices are low because that causes depressions...
...No, watching all the things that are wrong and going wrong in the country, I can't help but believe that now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country—with more and louder griping...
...gripe when prices are high because that makes for less purchasing power...
...gripe at our Congressmen because they can't please everyone and their own consciences all the time...
...What are we sacrificing for...
...The first step taken by a tyranny or dictatorship is the suppression of griping—the abolition of free speech and free writing...
...Tyrannies Can't Take It We gripe on the ball fields at umpires and referees because they don't always give our side the breaks...
...Or come down to the present day...
...Edmund Burke, that great Englishman who defended our cause during the Revolution so eloquently in Parliament that he is required reading for every grade schooler, once said: "To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind...
...We didn't want gripers" might well be the epitaph on the tombs of Hitler and Hirohito...
...Some of the most famous men in history were gripers...
...What was it that overthrew the Chamberlain Government in England and led to the sweeping reforms which have taken place in that country since if not the audible griping of the English people ? Was it not griping that led to New Deal reforms in this country—the great public works programs, the establishment of Social Security measures, the setting up of the Farm Security Administration to help the small farmer...
...Why are so many war industries below their production goals...
...and the Magna Carta, a colossal masterpiece of gripery...
...We glory in the art of Van Gogh and Gaugin—super-gripers...
...Should the lower income tax groups be taxed more ? Is a sales tax fair or necessary...
...Because they come from an environment where griping is the national pastime...
...Speak of our chief rights in high-flown two-and three-syllable words—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assemblage, the right to petition for grievances—and they all boil down to freedom of griping...
...What are we fighting for...
...Remember Thomas Jefferson whose gripes led to a new concept of man's dignity and who once remarked, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing...
...Are the farmers getting all the help they need...
...What are we supposed to do—look at the cost of living shoot upward, flatulent statements concerning the stabilization of prices when we know that quality has been cut to bits, torpedoing of Government efforts to limit incomes, Congressional strafing of agencies like the TVA and FCC, postwar domestic planning left untouched, tax questions dodged by those we have appointed to solve them for us, black markets on the increase, butter practically unobtainable—and wear a Cheshire grin all the while, singing, "Gee...
...If there is anything left in this cockeyed world that is purely American it's the privilege to gripe— and gripe good...
...No...
...We brag about production wizard Henry J. Kaiser who griped about inefficient methods of production until his workers began to break all shipbuilding records...
...Which do you think would be more effective...
...Brother, if you know the answers to all these questions you can afford not to gripe...
...it's O.K...
...They griped and griped about the iniquities of their day and their words ring as loud and true today as they did then...
...We reverence the Declaration of Independence, a large section of which is devoted to downright—if beautifully stated—griping...
...Personally, I think that the only kind of squawk you can raise with a stiff upper lip is through a cornet...
...We hail the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright—chief griper against stuffy, stale traditions in architecture...
...the Rights of Man, a list of gripes...
...it's O.K...
...Our soldiers are the gripinest (and fightinest) soldiers in the world...
...Why do we allow profiteering...
...Remember Voltaire and Rousseau who griped tyranny out of France...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 16
