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Show "Woe To Them By Whom It Comes" Dear Editor: From all indications and promise the year 1959 holds great hope for the future of American prosperity and progress. The Nations Business has pointed out that the last year's recession will be curbed by free spending which will be made . - possible by the Democrats. SPENDING, if one has the money, and the need to spend is one story which ends in a stable and definite prosperity program for a nation but "EASY" spending brought by no increase in either salaries or jobs but by the "EASY PAYMENT" method by merchants and loan companies, luring the inexperienced buyers with "BUY NOW PAY NEXT YEAR" and "ALL WE NEED IS YOUR SIGNATURE" the road is wide that leads to distinction - - .financially and many there are who travel it. Where will it stop? It is not the program of any one political party. Merchants have truck loads of attractive "BARGAINS" that sell at whatever cost financially, credit wise, business-wise, to the young, eager -home-owners who do not stop to remember that the "NEXT YEAR" talked about is already greeting them -even as they unload their latest "ON TIME" purchase. There is but little investigation done on salaries, credit back-ground, stability of position and if one has made an all but bankruptcy record for himself in the past, credit is ok'd for another ' long-term contract of suffering. It doesn't make too much difference what is sold on what terms. There was a case where a man was attracted to skin-diving skin-diving equipment. Dreams of diving through the seven seas probably flashed through his mind. The merchant who sold the man the equipment did not hesitate. He neither found out where the "EASY PAYMENT" would come from nor did he take the time to find out that the man was shackled by other such merchants with more debt than he could ever hope to pay out. Nor was there a sea, a pool or even a wet spot for this equipment to be used in this locale. He got the man's name on thte contract and that was all he was interested in. True, the buyer, had his "free agency". He did not have to buy. But the most important thing to this merchant was making a sale. What doth it profit them? Just about everything in this country has been getting bigger. This trend, the economists confidently tell us with hardly a dissenting voice, is not only sure to continue but to accelerate. They blue print a future of ever-increasing incomes, ever-improving ever-improving living standards, the mass enjoyment of luxuries which would have been beyond the imagination of man not long ago. This is fine. Almost everyone wants more money; more of the 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 small? 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 took centuries of turmoil, war and revolution to establish the rights of man - - the rights of the individual. They can be lost overnight by sins of omission 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. Walt Whitman wrote, a century ago : "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual -namely You". Man in the mass must never hide the face of the individual man. Why does man bind man? Why do they shackle him, Debt is but another form of living under a dictatorship. Joe |
