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Show w"- - . ".w VBi Friday, January 2, 1959 THE UTAH STATESMAN Page 3 Progress vs. Just about everything in this country has been getting - bigger. This trend, the economists confidentially, tell us with hardly a dissenting voice, is not only sure to continue but to accelerate. They blueprint a future of incomes, living standards, the mass enjoyment of luxuries which would have been beyond the imagination of man not long ago. We are on the verge of explosive in physical sciences. The age-ol-d of are mysteries being fathomed, space and soon will be mysteries no more. The miracles of nuclear physics are at hand. Longer, healthier, happier lives for all are promised. And we are not alone. All over the world, peoples and nations are swept along, to varying degrees, in the same ever-increasi- ng ever-improvi- break-throug- ng The Titan r Who MaAnt Time hs tide. This is fine. Almost everyone wants more money, more of things that money can buy, more of what we know by the word "progress." Yet a nagging question arises the biggest unanswered question that confronts the changing world. While Just about everything is. getting bigger, is the greatest resource of all getting smaller? That resource is the individual. Not just people in the mass, but individual people each different each unique, each a spirit as well as an appetite. Is the individual in very real danger of being dwarfed by the bigness around him, and of being reduced to a statistic? It's easy enough to say that it can't happen here, even though we have all seen it happen in vast reaches of the earth. Easy enough, but untrue. This nation was founded on certain concepts the fullest freedom for all, an unflogging sense of the spiritual nature of man, a passionate regard for the worth of every individual being. But these, like all other concepts and philosophies, will wither away to nothingness unless they are eternally prized beyond all else and faithfully protected. They must be supported in absolutely specific ways. They demand the highest degree of individual independence and responsibility. If, for instance, we give to government the initiative and the power to regulate and dominate our lives in the name of security, the ultimate end will be security of the penitentiary. Power once granted to government must always be balanced against a greater power in the hands of the people. We pride ourselves on our material achievements. But pride can result in a deadly blindness. Other nations, whose concepts are utterly opposed to ours, are producing their own wonders. Communist Russia and Communist China are, so to speak, moving mountains. The whip and the chain, used with dedicated ruthlessness, can also get out the goods, while the soul of man dies. It took centuries of turmoil, war and revolution to establish the rights of the individual. They can be the rights of man lost overnight by sins of ommission no less than sins of commission. A people whose eyes and minds are fixed on material ends alone will not long remain a free people. They will become merely instruments of power. There is no foreseeable limit to what we, through our economic, social and political organizations can achieve. It will be the ultimate irony if, in the light of this, we surrender the individual to material bigness whether in government or any where else. We never had a more urgent need to uphold oge-ol-d principles and convictions that make for the only worthwhile Mwd of progress confidence in something, faith in ideals, fairness, the determination to defend what one believes to be tfa&n T (ea4 t Tim WtiA i 7 &uccee4 Mooa h tv right Walt Whitman wrote, a century ago: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual namely to You.'' Man in the mass must never hide the face of the individual man. UTAH FEDERATION OF OTEEFBtlL V REPUBLICAN WOMENS 2AEGIS CLUBS THE KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY SINCE 1810 i' .L It PROOF 056 WATERFIll AND FRAZIER DISTILLER? COMPART, IARDSTOWR, i; KENTUCKY |