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Show Outlook For the New Year If there is one word which describes the condition under which we and all civilized peoples live today, it is the word "Distraction." This is a common enough word, but it has wide and significant sig-nificant meanings. For one thing, the dictionary tells us, it means a drawing off or diversion of the mind. It means confusion and perplexity. Then, at the far end of the spectrum, it means aberration, frenzy, even madness. We have plenty of distractions as the New Year begins. The cold war goes on and on, ever broadening, with no end in sight. The world's eyes were recently riveted on an unprecedented unprece-dented meeting of chiefs of state at the United Nations in New (Continued on Page Four) Outlook For the New Year 1 (Continued from Page One) York where, literally, one well-aimed rifle shot could have marked the beginning of World War III. We have just gone through a political campaign of unique intensity, in which the decision was agonizingly close. We have witnessed a reign of terror in Africa which reads like a chapter from the Dark Ages. We have seen the establishment of what amounts to a Communist Com-munist dominated state a few miles from the Southeastern tip of this nation. And in a single year some 40 new countries ' with their own flags, parliaments, aspirations, and latent and unknown powers, have come into being. On top of all this, we have our deep and passionate controversies con-troversies at home as to what should be done in such diverse fields as education, medical care for the old and indigent, the production of electric power in the nuclear age and, above all, the proper role of government in ordering and directing the lives of the people. t So "Distraction" is the symbolic word. Our minds are torn in a hundred fragments. The problem has been compounded to an enormous degree by magical progress in the arts of communication, com-munication, visual and verbal. In a matter of seconds, some event taking place half a world away is made known to us, in word and pictures. In a matter of hours, we ourselves can physically travel half a world away from our homes. It is no wonder that, living as we must int his turmoil, it becomes, as the old French proverb has it, more and more difficult to see the forest because of the trees. Fundamentals become dim and may even be lost beneath the cruel and blinding light of changing and threatening events. But some things do not change. That is what we, because of our heritage and because of our inescapable position as leader of a free world confronted by a slave world which wants to destroy us, cannot afford to forget. The question is :t What is it all for, this spending of almost unimaginable resources of energy and treasure on a scale never before so much as approximated in history? Why may we be asked, as a people, for personal, material sacrifices greater than any we have yet known? There is a simple answer that we must defend ourselves and our friends among the nations against the forces of darkness dark-ness which are our enemies: But that is not the whole answer by any means. The real answer is that we are doing this if it is to have any real and permanent meaning at all in order to preserve the best and oldest ideal that history knows, which is freedom. Freedom means many things. It means a high degree of personal responsibility and pride, in which one cares for himself and his family without looking to government for aid unless no other avenue is open.- It means, in the fine old sense of the phrase, a government which is the servant and never the master of the pople. It means that leadership and national purpose come from the pepple and are not imposed upon them from above. It means a deep spiritual belief that every man is important, as a person and an entity and that men" in the mass can never be allowed to submerge the individual and make him a number among faceless millions of numbers. Whatever we have done, are doing, or must do, will be worth veery necessary cost if this ideal is kept bright and shining before us. But if we lose it if we allow the individual to become a powerless, driven pawn in a game played by rulers everything worthwhile will be lost too. ' |