Editorial, MSS Volume 9, Issue 2

It was only a few weeks ago that
students gathered, quietly, thoughtfully, in
the College of Religion here at Butler to
hear, by radio, the President of the United
States asking our Congress for a declaration
of war on Japan. Needless to say, it was
not a war of any American's choosing;
indeed the Japanese military organization
had made attack without any warningeven
while apparently sponsoring talk of
peace at our nation's capitol-upon U. S.
civilian settlements in the Pacific Ocean.

Even then it was accepted by most
Americans that the great fiasco of the
second decade of this century had to be
repeated.

But need it be? Need it be?

Here in the quiet halls of Butler University
it is difficult to realize that there
war. Men are drafted, or voluntarily
enlist, and leave their classes. There are
service clubs, a few wartime courses are
added; there are talk and rumors; sometimes
one hears that a friend or acquaintance
has been killed or wounded; one
worries when there is a lull after excitement.
But most of our war is still in the
newspapers.

We are yet able to look at this terrible
thing as the vision of man fighting with his
own evil, which he has carelessly allowed
to batten. We are still able to look upon
the adversaries of our armed troops as
human beings betrayed by their own
weakenesses and a few unscrupulous men.

The English department is still printing
MSS, wherein we hope are contained
the sensible realization and sometimes the
successful solution of some of the problems
which life presents to college students-as
well as the expression in artistic form of
emotions and ideas of college young people.

It seems to us that if MSS continues as
the quietly articulate voice of the literary
students of Butler University, it will be
serving a powerful, if obscure, purpose.

The facing of spiritual realities which
the production of any but the most superficial
literature requires is going to build
the only world of the future which will be
fit to live in. This cognizance of the truth,
this facing of realities, is blurred and
rendered impotent in a time of war by the
emotional and physical stress which everyone
undergoes. Men forget that they are
fighting ideas and spirits which they feel
are inimical; they fight as it were a personal
matter-man against man. They lose sight
of any real Victory, and come to think that
total destruction of the enemy is the only
one.

So we are going to continue publishing
MSS; for we feel that it is a manifestation
of the spirit that may prevent another
Versailles; another period of reconstruction,
inflation, speculation; another crisis and
depression; another Hitler or Mussolini and
all they stand for; another Munich.