The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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NEW YORK, Thursday—I suppose it is natural that the spokesman of that nation which has inspired the Communist Chinese attack in Korea, should belittle any effort on the part of the United Nations to prove that the Chinese are really aggressors. He also states that there is no chance that the Chinese Communist government will consider stopping at the 38th parallel merely because 13 nations joined in asking them. Fortunately, this statement has not come from the Chinese Communists themselves, as yet.

After all, Russia's men are not dying in Korea. Chinese men and the men fighting for the United Nations are the ones who are suffering there.

The spokesman of Russia must do all he can to prove that there is a justification for China's sacrifice. China would not be so anxious to have her men killed if she once realized that she was marching against a friend and not a foe. So the Russian spokesman must go on with his wearisome propaganda and his oft-repeated lies.

We go about our daily occupations but every now and then we realize how easily the whole world could be changed in the twinkling of an eye and what we know as civilization might disappear from the face of the earth!

Andrei Vishinsky made all these remarks in a meeting of the General Assembly in Lake Success. There was considerable interest in this meeting and in the fireworks in the Ad Hoc Committee.

But we in Committee #3 spent an hour and a half discussing what we would do and then before lunch did remarkably little, even though we sat until 1:30! The fact that we did vote on one resolution was only due to the chairman's persistence. He would not let us go to lunch till we had voted.

It seems almost foolish to take time at present to talk about matters that might help to draw us together rather than to divide us in this world. But it may be helpful to concentrate on the things we do to improve our friendships throughout the world so that we may someday be better understood.

There is an organization known as the International Mailbag Club, Inc., in Cincinnati, Ohio, which seems to be doing a very good piece of work. At the top of their small folder they have printed a verse!

"There is a destiny that makes us brothers,
None goes his way alone...
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back into our own."

The purpose of this club is "to promote the fellowship of man, to bring cheer and sunshine into the lives of handicapped persons, to create projects and markets for the purpose of allowing handicapped people not only to find a place in the world, but to make them financially independent, if possible; to promote international peace by the exchange of ideas and correspondence; to dispense information and news concerning welfare and friendship projects and for cooperation in projects of other organizations of similar type."

This sounds to me as though they might do great things, but they must begin at home. And if they move slowly they will, I feel sure, grow steadily.

E.R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1950, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, December 8, 1950

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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