A Student Comments

            Unity and United Action. These words are the keynote to the youth movement in America today. Students as well as young workers realize that only by joining hands and fighting shoulder to shoulder can they hope to attain their minimum demands.

            The work for our successful November 8 peace mobilization was done by the broadest united front committee ever established in the college. The national committee sponsoring the demonstration represents youth in various religious, political, and educational organizations. Their fame has spread even to evil circles. William Randolph Heart has discovered the united front.

            In a long editorial entitled "Keeping Company With Communists" the Hearst papers throughout the country quoted the "amazing announcement" that: "Officers of the National Council of Methodist Youth, representing 1,600,000 Methodist young people today issued a statement supporting the Student Mobilization for Peace sponsored by the YM.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., the National Student Federation of America, the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the National Student League.

            With the masses of the American people solidly opposed to war. Hearst is afraid to refute openly the student demands for peace. He is forced to stoop to using the 'red scare," to call the peace-loving Christian youths "yellow reds."

            How do the Methodist youth answer this attack on the peace movement? Blaine E. Kirkpatrick, a leader of the Epworth (National Council of Methodist Youth) League, answers the question in an article entitled "Is the Epworth League Going Communist?" in the November 16 issue of the Epworth Herald:

           "No, the Epworth League is not going communist."

            "This is not to say that we would deny to any individual the light to hold whatever political views he may wish–even to the point of being a Communist..." he continued..

            The Hearst editorial tells us that the Christian youth organizations:

            ". .. were not instituted to promote disloyalty–nor to support such disloyal declarations as the yellow 'slacker oath' quoted and imputed to them by the Communistic 'Student Mobilization for Peace'."

            Mr. Kirkpatrick continues:

            "Being Christian certainly does not mean blinding ourselves to the fact that the world as it is is in many respects radically unchristian and needs to be changed."

            Will Hearst be able to intimidate Christian youth, by his red-baiting campaign? Mr. Kirkpatrick writes:

            ". . the chief drive back of the 'redbaiting' campaign comes from a small minority represented in the money power of America who have a huge stake in things as they are and who are fighting to prevent any changes which would disturb their privileges ..."

            "As Christian leaders. we must especially be on our guard lest we become the unwitting tools of such red-baiters as William Randolph Hearst, or Bernarr Macfadden, and by joining in the general shouting of the word "Communist" even at our fellow Christians, play into the hands of the real enemies of democracy."

            So youth of varying religious and political groups who band together to oppose war and fascism and defend our democratic rights, are mindful of the words of Abraham Lincoln. who also spoke in cause of justice and peace,

            "United we stand, divided we fall."

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May 20, 2004