Missouri Watchman
September 2013
In going through some of dads (Elder Frank Walker’s) ministerial notes on sermons given, I ran across this article were printing for the
September Issue. Written by a man whom many have heard for years both on radio and on TV, spot appearances at least!
His Name? PAUL HARVEY!
Does he need any introduction? For most of us the answer is a resounding NO! His Trade-Mark Intro, “The Rest of the Story” was both well known and looked forward to by the majority of his listeners.
The article we’re reprinting here is probably 50 years old, BUT the problem is certainly alive and well ‘WORLD WIDE’ both today and yesterday, and nearly out of hand and not getting better by any stretch of the imagination!!
According to the article we find that many, many church members/attendees are drinking in moderation with some of those moderates falling on their faces from a genuine lack of the moderation thereof.
The Article is introduced by copying the attendant labeling thereon and showing its origins as being used in and from Idaho. Whether a total abstainer or a Conservative drinker Please note the results of drinking as Medically recorded.
Paul Harvey Aurandt (September 4, 1918 February 28, 2009),
[1] better known as Paul Harvey, was an American radio broadcaster for the ABC Radio Networks.
[2] He broadcast News and Comment on week-day mornings and mid-days, and at noon on Saturdays, as well as his famous –
“The Rest of the Story” segments.
From the 1950s through the 1990s, Harvey’s programs reached as many as 24 million people a week. Paul Harvey News was carried on 1,200 radio stations, 400 Armed Forces Network stations and 300 newspapers.
_________________________
IDAHO-NARCOTICS-ALCOHOL-EDUCATION FOUNDATION INC
Rt. 1 Box 248 Boise Idaho, Robert W. Hoag Executive Director
This educational service provided free of cost to schools by Idaho Citizens.
MIND IF I DRINK?
What is it? Alcohol requires no digestion. It is absorbed through mucous surfaces. Usually a person first feels his drink when the concentration of alcohol in the blood stream is .05 per cent. That is when the central nervous system first is affected.
Solutions stronger than .7 per cent reaching the brain cells may cause permanent damage–known as Korsakoff’s psychosis. Failure of memory may be a symptom, as when actor John Barrymore, in his last years couldn’t remember Shakespearean lines he had recited all his life. The .7 per cent solution similarly causes cells in the liver to die. These are replaced by scar tissue. Cirrhosis of the liver. That’s what killed Mr. Barrymore.
But it is the potential permanent damage to the brain cells which has greater social implications. Once recommended for medical use, subsequent experience at Mayo and Johns Hopkins has confirmed that there is no ailment that is improved by alcohol. The President’s heart specialist, Dr. Paul Dudley White, advises against the use of alcohol by heart patients because of the fattening effect on the heart.
I have drawn no distinction in this discussion, among several alcoholic drinks, because of the argument that one is harmful and another is not, is not valid. There is, by weight, precisely the same quantity of alcohol in one jigger of whisky-or in one glass of wine-or in one bottle of beer. Different amounts of liquid, but the same amount of alcohol.
Dr. Henry W. Newman of the Stanford University Medical School refers to alcohol as a toxic. That is a Doctors word for poison. His research has established that, far from being a stimulant, alcohol is a powerful depressant on the nervous system, except that too much of it usually makes you regurgitate, it would be fatal. One ounce of alcohol retards muscular reaction 17.4 per cent increases errors due to lack of muscular co-ordination, 59.7 per cent. That is one ounce, one jigger!
Dr. Newman confirms that brain tissue is gradually destroyed by indulgence in alcohol, and such tissue does not replace itself. In lay language, parts of the brain die under repeated doses.
The National Institute of Mental Health reports: That of the 140,000 alcoholics committed to civilian mental hospitals, 24,000 have chronic brain syndrome, Permanent brain damage. The problem is not a new one.
Read this quote please: “Whereas the use of intoxicating liquor as a beverage is productive of pauperism, degradation, and crime, and believing it is our duty to discourage that which produces more evil than good, we therefore pledge ourselves to abstain from the use of intoxicating liquor as a beverage.” Those words were spoken by Abraham Lincoln in 1847!
Today…
Yale studies estimate 5,015,000 alcoholics in the United States, one million of them women. They may be ladies and gentlemen of distinction, but they have lost control of themselves. More than half of all arrests in the United States last year were related to Alcoholic beverages, fifty-nine per cent of all arrests!
There is one arrest for drunkenness somewhere in the United States every six seconds. Three million every year. Prison Wardens surveyed estimate that from 80 to 85 per cent of all the convicts are there because of alcohol.
New York’s Welfare Commissioner, Henry McCarthy, tells me that one fourth of all his city’s 40,000 dependent children families on the city’s welfare rolls are there because of alcoholic fathers.
Here’s a man biting a dog: Twenty-six out of every 100 pedestrians killed by cars had been drinking. We hear a lot about the dangers of driving after drinking. Walking after drinking is more dangerous. It’s 18 out of 100 drinking drivers that get in trouble. It’s 26 out of every 100 dead pedestrians. Alcoholism is the Nation’s No. 4 health problem. The fourth worst disease, it’s at epidemic proportions. Alcoholism is the No. 3 killer in our nation, outranked only by heart disease and cancer.
Now, Perhaps a man has a right to rot his own liver if he wants. It’s a free country. But to damage his brain, if that damage, temporary or permanent, might injure another, is something else again. Americans are not free to injure their neighbors. So freedom must not be confused with license.
The Russians
The Russians are taking this subject with sudden seriousness. Khrushchev sounds like a reformed drunkard, the emphasis he is giving to temperance talks.
This could be why. Historian Arnold Toynbee in his book called Civilization on Trial traces the rise and fall of others before ours. Toynbee says that out of 21 civilizations preceding this one, nineteen have been destroyed by a mixture of atheism, materialism, socialism, and Alcoholism.
Are the Communists really going on the wagon? Khrushchev is a strange caricature of Carry Nation. Yet I understand his reputation as a drunk exceeds his actual consumption of the stuff. Be that as it may, He can still decree: Don’t do as I do, do as I say!
Russians have been ordered to sober up. In Russia—they don’t have to ask people to do something or reason with them as to why. They just order it, Sober up! And arbitrarily raise the prices for vodka so high most people can’t afford it.
In Eastern Europe drunkenness is part of the communist way of life. Some theorize they are thus escaping the reality of their austere economic Conditions…
But that argument loses credibility when you see the epidemic drunkenness in ours, the richest nation on earth. In Minsk a party leader said, ‘The time has come to crack down sharply on drunkenness and moonshiners.’ He denounced glorification of drinking in films and plays.
The Russians publicly cracked down hard on one of their star soccer players for drinking, obviously to make an example of him. In Hungary a parliamentary commission, a government agency, has been setup to fight drunkenness.
In Poland the government ordered and arbitrary 15 per cent reduction in the number of liquor shops and 20 per cent reduction in bars and cafes and established ten medically supervised sobering-up stations. In East Germany the communist government has raised the legal drinking age from sixteen to eighteen.
If you read Izvesta, the Moscow government newspaper, you’ll see that Drunkenness is considered public enemy No. 1 in the Soviet Union. The paper states, Fifty per cent of all accidents and 70 per cent of all crimes in the Soviet Union result from drunkenness. It admonishes parents who give their children wine to keep them quiet. Russia, with no inherent religious restraints, has a more acute problem than we, at the moment.
Which of us finds the best answer first, might well determine which of us survives as a nation, and which of us joins Mr. Toynbee’s nineteen others which drank themselves to death. The United States, however, is in first place. This is the most inebriated nation on earth. I mean it. We have the world’s highest known rate of alcoholism, with a 44 per cent increase since 1940.
In the United States
Ten thousand Americans will be killed this year by drinking drivers. 250,000 alcoholics will be in mental hospitals. Four million alcoholics
will be outside institutions. And 60,000,000 and this is the figure of the most immediate concern to society social drinkers will be gradually contributing to the malignant growth of this problem. Do taxes legalize liquor? For every dollar of income a state derives from this source, it spends four dollars.
Policing the liquor traffic and repairing the damage it does, so just taxes is not a valid reason to say that a legally dry state might better vote itself wet.
A Yale University study states that merely handling drunks who have committed no other crime costs the average American city in excess of $1,000,000 a year.
Psychiatrist Dr. William Menninger says that American industry is populated by 3,400,000 problem drinkers, that industry is annually paying for a Billion dollar hang-over. It’s been only since November, 1956, that the American Medical Association has officially recognized alcoholism as a treatable disease and called on all doctors and hospitals to accept alcoholics as patients.
Bishop Fulton Sheen only half agrees with the disease theory. He says alcoholism may end as a disease, but it begins with an act of the will.
The use of intoxicants is presently paraded in subtle and not so subtle advertising in a manner that suggests to the rising generation that no happy social life is possible without them. Not only is drinking thus given the stamp of approval, but is actually surrounded with and aura of positive virtue.
Young people cannot be expected to discipline themselves. We have problems enough with adolescent use of even stronger narcotics, which they are eager to buy, even illegally, once they are hooked. Besides I’m not passing the buck. I’m not saying, “What are we going to do about our children? I’m saying what can we do about ourselves?”
Thoreau said it: ‘There are thousands hacking on the branches of evil – to one who is striking the root.
What is Being Done
Up to now we’ve been trying hit-and-miss efforts, trying to plug up the cracks in the old booze barrel, but each plug seems to result in a wider crack. In South Carolina you can buy booze only between sunrise and sunset.
Georgia says No to Whiskey, Yes to wine. And remember, there is precisely the same amount of alcohol in a glass of wine as in a jigger of rye. In North Carolina a seventeen year old can buy a drink if he can prove he’s married. The Wisconsin Restaurant Association has done away with bars and bartenders in the state.
Wait a minute.. They just changed their names. In Wisconsin, hereafter, bars will be known as beverage centers and bartenders will be called beverage hosts. I know it sounds silly, but desperate people have taken frantic measures to try to force the toothpaste back into the tube. It would be humorous, if it were not so serious.
In New York there is a limit on the amount of package liquor one person may buy at one time. The limit is fifteen gallons. Some would tell you religion is the answer. But the Census Bureau says 96 out of every 100 Americans subscribe to some form of religion.
So by the Census Bureau’s own figures, there are a lot of drunks in church. NO, religion per se is not enough. Unless it is a religion that defines and demands and inspires you personally to abstinence. This thing has become so undeniably chronic that it’s even brought our nation’s churches together. They’re overlooking ancient differences on other issues to try to do something about it.
For generations some denominations have required total abstinence. Some have approved moderation. For the first time in its history, however, the National Council of Churches has adopted as its official policy a statement endorsed by 34 denominations. It recognized that, once drinking has passed a certain point, it becomes alcoholism, persons in need of diagnosis, understanding, guidance, and treatment and especially of the divine love which the church can bring them.
I know that doesn’t really say much, but it shows the urgency of the situation when 34 different denominations are willing to sign any one statement on a controversial subject.
What Can be Done
Now if this appraisal of the facts has left you convinced that an epidemic is sweeping our nation and somebody should do something, you’re going to want to know who and what. So, if we’ve pounded the nail clean through, let’s clinch it on the other side, because this is on thing you can do something about. And nobody else in the world can, Just you. Individually, personally, you.
Paul Harvey has not sought to scare you about Cirrhosis of your own liver. Your liver is none of his business. You are now however, a mite concerned about our nation’s future. And so is he. But what you do about it you must do voluntarily, individually.
If there’s a law against it, you’ll resent that invasion of your privacy and rebel against it. If somebody tells you it’s immoral, you’ll look for excuses.
I’m going to tell you something that one man said to me, and you just might discover some larger significance in his reasoning. There is an acquaintance of mine who reasons thus: “whereas alcoholism is on the increase in business, and whereas alcoholism reduces efficiency and erodes away the brain of the alcoholic, maybe I can play it smart. I’ll abstain. I’ll stay sober, and mark time, while my competition reduces itself from first rate to second rate. Then I’ll have it made.”
Now this, let’s call it ‘selfish approach’ worked for him. Previously folks had tried shaming him, Talked to him of his wife in rags and his children in want. Talked to him of hell- fire and brimstone, but the more they tried to shame or scare him, the deeper they drove him into his alcoholic retreat. Then he started figuring this new way. Play the odds. Odds are that his business rivals are going to bottle their way down while he battles his way up.
Purdue took a survey of high-school students and found that more than 37 per cent of them admit they drink. What an advantage this creates for those who don’t. They are the squares. The drinking third, the more they dilute their intelligence, the less competition the others will have for whatever they want to do or be. The motive, as I say, is selfish, but it works. And I wonder, if we, having tried all other quick cures might not consider this one.
Americans are threatened now by a very real economic competitor. The Communist third of the world is tough and strong and dynamic and expanding, but drinking. If we could play it smart—If while they pickle themselves into a second-rate power, we could remain first rate—Then it would be we who would surely inherit the earth and the goodness thereof.
It’s just a thought. It might not work. Maybe there aren’t enough Americans who care anymore. But on the other hand, maybe there are.
Remember Historian Toynbee’s formula for destroying and empire. A mixture of atheism, materialism, socialism, and alcoholism. Once the Roman people were tough—prosperous— But power, indulgence, luxuries, free bread, free circuses, easier living made them soft. And what happened? In 410 Rome was invaded by barbarians. But the barbarians were sober, tough, ambitious, hard-working barbarians.
I’m just a reporter, sitting in the press gallery, watching while a generation gets itself stoned.
End of Paul Harvey’s Article
With more and more denominations of Churches cutting a wide swath in required obedience to the TRUE GOSPEL of Christ and going for a Social application thereof, if any-it’s time to look at the Literal Law of the Harvest Body-wise as well as the Spiritual!!
See the front page scriptural quote and also Proverbs 20:1, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. ” (Front pg. scripture Proverbs 23:31-35 KJV)
Yours in Christ
Lloyd Walker
Comments/Questions?
Email: [email protected]
Contact# 417-632-4602