How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
82/400

group. This tragedy of birth in a minority racial or religious group is the more significant because the child of the under-dog is kicked early in life. The cruelty of children is well-known. Any discouraged child is quick to seize upon the false discriminations of society and vent them upon members of the “ under-dog group ” to bolster his own sense of security. The child who has fled in shame, anguish, and complete perplexity when the cry “ Ikey ! ” has greeted him on the playground, can hardly be blamed for later in life. 5. Emotional Attitudes of Parents and Teachers Our attitude toward the task of creative self-sculpture is largely determined by the emotional attitudes our parents, guardians, and teachers expressed toward us when we were very young. Whether we go at our task courageously or whether we cringe and hesitate ; whether we set impossible conditions for happiness or whether we take our material as we find it, hew merrily at the rock of our heritage, and occasionally take time out to help a fellow-worker, depends very largely upon the form and quality in which we, as children, experienced that quintessential determinant of human happiness men call love. To begin with, when a child is born and begins his life in the environment of adults, he is in the position of an outsider looking in upon a scene in which he will later participate, but which, as yet, withholds its secrets. He has but the vaguest idea that he will grow up and master the mysteries of speech, of walking, of turning darkness into light, of “ going out ”, of telephoning, or of driving a car. He sees that his parents are definitely “ in They move in ineluctable ways ; at their com¬ mand food and clothing appear, and at their despotic word one arises from a warm bed, or one withdraws from the bright circle of the fireside and is exiled into the lonesome limbo of the night. The child senses that his parents stand in vague communication with an even developing inferiority complexes