Essays from the Past

By James E. Tague

These essays were written more than twenty-five years ago for different newspapers. They contain thoughts on various subjects prevalent at the time, and were printed as opinion articles. Their relevancy remains so intact today that Jim decided to collect them from various files and republish them as a book. Most were printed in a local newspaper, the News of Delaware County where he had an opinion column, and then reprinted in other papers. As mentioned in the preface, his concerns about the steady erosion of the values and principles he once knew, have continued unabated to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 5, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465314802

James E. Tague

Jim retired from Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) and resided in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, for nearly fifty years but now lives in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. He and his late wife, Lois, had four children. While James, Patricia, and Steven still live in the Drexel Hill area, their daughter Kathleen died in 1994 at the age of twenty-nine. A Korean War air force veteran, Jim served in Wiesbaden, Germany, from 1951 to 1954. He has a BS degree in economics from Villanova University and an MA degree in liberal arts from Temple University. Jim has published several children’s stories, a book of essays, a book of limericks, and The Last Field Marshal, a book on World War II. All can be found on his website www.jamesetague.com. E-mail him at [e-mail].

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Copyright © 2008 by James E. Tague.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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DEDICATION

To my wife Lois, who has always provided me with her support, encouragement and direction. Her proofreading ability and precise comments, helped shape these essays. Hopefully, the words express the emotion, and the emotion has captured the thought. JET

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Preface

No matter one’s desire, a life once lived is never lived again. Returning by memory however, can recall part of that past, and once resurfaced can be examined from one’s current perspective, now broadened and lengthened by a span of many years. This always provides a unique and interesting experience, as one is provided a window to look into his own past and relive a specific time in his life gone forever.

At some point during mid life, my focus had begun to evolve from playing sports, making a living and raising a family to include an interest in politics, news events and involvement in the community. This interaction produced a growing concern as to the direction in which the nation and our people were headed. As a means to vent my frustration, I complained to anyone who would listen. One day my wife Lois told me, Don’t tell me! Write a Letter to the Editor. Thus began a means to reply to what I saw as a steady erosion of the values and principles I had grown up with. After a series of such letters, opinion page articles and essays in my company newsletter, I was asked to submit a weekly column to the local newspaper. Forced to meet a deadline and with a chance to react to current events and problems, I began my own commentary on subjects which I felt needed discussion.

For some unknown reason an author often becomes enraptured by the thought process and passion exhibited by himself as a young adult. Essays written by a person, when examined after more than a quarter century of further growth and experience, reveal much of his inner reaction to what now have become historical events. It becomes even more intense, when there resides a history in writing of those thoughts and emotions, securely contained within a specific time frame.

It is with this thought in mind that I have resurrected some forgotten articles that I wrote, concerned with the problems during the late 70’s and early 80’s. It was quite surprising that so many of these past essays have remained relevant to the continuing problems of today, and the critical challenges still facing our nation after so many years. My concerns regarding the decline in moral and family values, political ideology, the persuading agenda of the press, disruptions in the legal and social order and the polarization of our political process remain paramount. Yet one is forced to move on, and how much of one’s current thinking can be attributed to the past is certainly debatable. The remains from the insights of that crystal ball from the past, are now but pieces of broken glass, but their reflections still haunt me. JET ■

Contents

Energy: Let’s be Practical

Dethrone King Oil

The United Nations Just Has Too Many Members

Don’t Shut Out Energy Know-How

Nuclear Power Can Provide Energy

Will America Survive the 80’s?

Our National Abdication toward Apathy

The Recycling of our Major American Cities

The Russian Bear and The Paper Tiger

Trouble Trio: Inflation, Involvement, Idiocy

Terrorism: The New Political Activity

Values Neglected in this ‘Age of Rights’

Facing the Soviet Threat in The Middle East

The Press and the Power to Abuse

November 1980: The End of an Era?

Election 1980: A Return to Moral Values?

The Handwriting on The Persian Wall

Is Mr. Reagan a Man for All Seasons?

Striving for Cheap Energy the Goal for 1981

Will Reagan Return to Truman Doctrine?

Make Cuba Pay the Cost of Revolution

The Catholic Church And Political Activism

Tax Cuts Amid the Democratic Minefields

Conservatism, Communism, And Catholicism

Let’s Take The Chill Out Of The Draft

Is Price of Electricity the Cost of Jobs?

King Oil: Still Center Stage in The 1980’s?

Private Enterprise—Key to The Future

When a Bar of Soap is Like a Drumstick

Ireland: One Country And Two Peoples

The Concerted Assault Upon Reaganism

Fiction, First Amendment Interpretations

Our ‘Arch Conservative’Takes on ‘Henry’

Israel: A Superpower in the Middle East

The Soviet Union at a New Crossroad

Energy: Let’s be Practical

The Philadelphia Inquirer–(May 2, 1977)

Listening to President Carter on the energy problem makes one wonder when the wishful thinking political aspects of the situation, will give way to the wisely practical realities, and impel the President toward more nuclear power rather than less. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Carter criticized nuclear power and called it a last resort, but as president he better resort to it at last, or face the very catastrophe he predicts.

His plan for conservation is useful, but hardly a solution or even a real energy program. Most certainly, nuclear generation is a viable program and most of Europe recognizes this fact and leads the way in production. Over the last several years, we have witnessed a ludicrous litany of folly and misjudgement.

In 1969, the Santa Barbara oil spill caused such a wail of anguish that it effectively halted all offshore drilling, leaving us years behind in developing our own petroleum sources. Concern for the environment, quite legitimate when taken as part of the whole, caused a five-year delay in construction of the Alaskan Pipe Line. It should have been in effect in 1973 which would, as it turned out, have helped to alleviate the effects of the oil embargo. We have even halted the construction of a nuclear power plant now underway due to a two-inch darter fish, whose existence was only recently discovered.

We have even fallen victim to half-baked and undernourished statistics, which overestimated our oil and gas reserves and detailed an optimistic picture of yet undiscovered quantities of oil just waiting to be tapped. We encourage and allow, by failing to resist, those Washington polemicists to make cheap headlines, which are as full of political nonsense as they are sorely lacking in economic sense.

We have seen a self-appointed minority effectively kill off nuclear power generation by regulatory delays and alarmist headlines. Their method of analyzing becomes paralyzing and serves the ultimate objective of disrupting the natural functions of supply and demand in a free market. Delay after delay has turned the factor of costs into a prohibitive bottom line.

We must educate this element in our society and progress toward the obvious solution. We need full-scale nuclear production, stripped of delays, and increased coal production, free of stringent pollution controls, to replace oil and gas consumption.

It might be true that a catastrophe is standing right on our front step, but there is no reason we have to open the door. ■

Dethrone King Oil

News of Delaware County–(September 15, 1977)

If one were to choose a single event during the 19th century, which had a profound effect on all human activity during the 20th century, my selection would be the first oil well drilled in the United States. When Edwin Laurentine Drake completed his 60 feet, 400 gallons a day operation at Titusville, Pa., in August 1859, he ushered in an energy age which has influenced mankind on an unprecedented scale. One might add that during this century an incident of similar magnitude occurred in December 1942, when Enrico Fermi released and controlled the energy of the atom.

In the opinion of this writer, it altered life on this planet and both of these energy sources will continue to dominate our existence in the future. Therefore, determining which of these sources should take priority is of utmost concern. As the growth of nuclear power encounters the expected opposition and fear, which is a natural outgrowth of man’s doubts about controlling his own discoveries, there is a strong tendency to lose perspective. We watch the proven technology of nuclear reactors discredited by excessive fears and the specter of runaway radiation.

At the same time, the United States annually consumes an amount of oil, equal to 20 percent of its proven reserves, while uranium resources are barely used. The cost of energy has skyrocketed from $42 billion in 1972 (3 percent of GNP) to 136 billion in 1976 (8 percent of GNP). Faced with a situation that President Carter has called, The greatest domestic crisis our nation will face in our lifetime, we continue to import record quantities of foreign oil. With all the strident protest and newsprint emphasis concerning the safe control of nuclear energy, we seem indifferent to the growing reality of oil polluted oceans.

Headlines, about such catastrophic oil spills as the Torrey Canyon disaster off the Scilly Islands, are soon forgotten. Time has a way of doing our forgetting for us and the danger of oil reaching our beaches, once out of sight, indeed goes out of mind. Crude oil is certainly one of the most complicated natural chemical mixtures on earth. It has a variety of chemical and physical properties, which can burn, coat, smother and poison, leading to an ecological imbalance in the cycles of nature.

Oil spills at sea should be of paramount importance to everyone living on this globe, two-thirds of which is covered by salt water. From the first oil tanker in1869 of 794 tons, we have escalated to the current Globtik Tokyo with a deadweight of 476,253 tons. In addition, several 555,000 ton ships are now on order. The need for oil is mirrored in the line of tankers which ribbon the oceans and form a queue at every major port.

The National Academy of Sciences presented findings in May 1973 indicating that an estimated 1.4 million tons of oil are discharged into the sea every year during routine shipping operations. In addition, accidents annually dump another 350,000 tons into our oceans. A British survey of tanker accidents published in 1973 showed that during the ten-year period 1959-68 a total of 13,379 accidents occurred to tankers throughout the world. In contrast to the laxity evidenced in controlling the transportation of oil, we find the nuclear industry crippled by overwhelming regulations and endless injunctions. It is even more frustrating in light of the fact that there has not been a single accident of any significance in any of the 176 nuclear power plants now operating in the United States and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, we experience continual oil spills which are never cleaned up. We can only surmise the effects these moving oil spills have on plankton, animal organisms that are responsible for the primary production of 90 percent of the living material in the sea. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer, reported drifting black lumps of oil that were seemingly endless, when