IT IS WHAT THEY JOIN THAT SAVES THEM

Now AND THEN I learn a great scientific truth by hanging around and listening to the talk of friends who work in Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology laboratories, for sooner or later at a social gath- ering those boys will drift into shoptalk. It is inevitable, for science and what they are doing in their mysterious laboratories is the dominant and universal interest of their lives. One evening, listening in on the deep talk of several of them, I overheard some inside secrets of those small, unseen chemical units we call “atoms.”

One of the fascinating things those scientists said about atoms was that “atoms never roam around alone; they are always joined to other atoms.” Then one distinguished Tech scientist added, “If you want to get a hydrogen atom away from an oxygen atom you have to induce it to join itself to something else.

‘They are incurable joiners; and their capacity to join is called, in scientific terms, their valence . . .” Now I like that word “valence” and I am going to help my readers” by teaching them a new word—at least it was new to me. Valence is the measure of the extent to which an atom is able to combine di- rectly with other atoms. I like to tell church people, fraternal organizations, and family units that their valence means their salvation.

It is what they join that is their strength and their salvation. If you will determine the valence of a man you will know what he is worth to himself, to his family, his business, his noonday lunch club, his lodge, his church, and his nation. It is his capacity to join himself to other units to make the whole organization strong. The “lone wolf,” as we call him in American life, is not of much value to any organization—from a football team to an army.

This simple symbol might even be carried into the contemporary national and international problems of this day. It is what we join that saves us, and if we refuse to join up with a united world organization we are likely letting ourselves in for an even more destructive world war. If we continue to be isolationist and national- istic, as we did following the last war, we are in for destruction. It is what we join—it is our valence—which gives us strength in this world.