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I fftuiKlitt T&it& and 2Jt?r Highland HJarotttatt WEIMAR JONES Editorial Page Editor THURSDAY, JANUARY 7. 1960 NEEDED: A New Liberalism In addition to Senator John F. Kennedy, Massa chuetts Democrat, whose candidacy long has been taken for granted, there now is one potential Pres idential candidate ? Governor Nelson Rockefeller, of New York ? definitely out of the race, and an other ? Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, of Minne sota ? definitely in. Senator Humphrey, who last week formally an nounced his candidacy, might have been wiser to withdraw also ; because his chances of winning the Democratic nomination .seem little better than were those of Rockefeller in the Republican convention. Each man faced an almost insurmountable har rier. In Rockefeller's case,/ it was the opposition of most of the Republican politicians; in Humphrey's, it was the fact that he is hopelessly behind the politicial times. For though he is considered the most progres sive of the progressives, Humphrey, paradoxically, looks not forward, but backward. He would return to the programs of the New Deal. Yet it must have been twenty years ago that F. D. R. himself announced that "the New Deal is dealt"! Like most of today's so-called liberals,, the Min nesota Senator seems blind to the fact that the Situation that demanded the New Deal no longer exists; that Vastly changed conditions have created wholly different problems; that the times call for new solutions. How can we, in a time of fear and uncertainty and confusion, shift the emphasis from policies of temporary expediency hack to the principles of right and justice and honesty? IIow can we, in a time of big business and big labor and big government, protect the ritfbts and freedoms not only of minorities like labor and the Negro, but also ? and primarily ? those of the in dividual citizen? For rights and freedoms arc meaningless cxcept as they apply to the individual ? to you and me. 4 And how can we, in an age of cold war, with its inevitable trends toward military decisions and mil itary secrecy and military mass thinking, safe guard our national security AND .keep the things that make our nation worth saving? Those are among the questions that demand answers today. And becouse they deal with freedom and with the principles that are the only basis for any lasting freedom, the answers must be liberal answers. For what does liberalism mean, if not liberty? To find answers, we must look backward, yes; but farther back- than the New Deal. We must look back to the principles on which this government was founded. But, because all liberalism seeks a better world and a better life, we must look for ward. too- ? forward to new ways of making tho.se old but changeless principles apply to new and ?changing conditions. * * * So far, neither partv and n<> leader gives evi dence of even recognizing 'that problem, much less grappling, with it. Yet the times demand a new 'and liberal ap 1 proach to it ; and the chances are the people, ahead of their leaders, as usual, arc ready for it. Such a new liberalism is overdue. And, sooner or later, it will emerge as a political movement. It will because it must. 'We Take Hills Slow' (Curtis Ross in Waynesville Mountaineer) It would be interesting to know ju.st how much publicity the football team here brought the community sports papers over 1 the state carried the stories, and in the Leaksville area, the banners and publicity there perhaps put Waynesvllle on the lips of people who had never heard of the town before. The fact that th" (team' Is named after the section, gives added publicity, as it associates Waynesvllle and the moun tains. , , The letters, "WTHS ' fascinate those not familiar with their meaining ? Waynesville Township High School ? one fan from Martinsville. Va., attending the play-off game, asked: "What do the letters mean?" She was told. V "I tried to figure It means 'We Take Hills slow'" she aiy swered. i 1 i' . ? 1 I Quiet minds can not be perplexed or frightened, but go on ? in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like .i clock during a thunderstorm.? Robert Louis Stevenson. wkm m 'Soy. Do You Need A Shave!" Strictly Personal By WEIMAR JONES I Isn't It remarkable how much of our time most of us use up doing the things we have to, and how little we have left to do the things we want to? X got to thinking about that today, and trying to figure out why. One explanation may be there are too many things that fall into the "have to" classification. What I mean Is, If there were Just .more things we wanted to do, tiiere'd be bound to be fewer things left In the "have to" class . . . and life would be a lot pleasanter. Usually, though, I don't believe that's the trouble. The real reason there are so many things we do because we have to Is there are so many we've pushed ? and I do mean pushed ? * out of the want to class over Into the have Jo. we push them 'there by post: poning them and postponing tHem and postponing them until the very thought of doing 'em literally makes us a little sick. Take this column. As a rule, I write this column for fun: and when I do, there's no postponing and nagging and worrying. But this time? I knew a week ago there was supposed to be a "Strictly Personal" column for this issue of The Press. But I postponed it, just once. After that, I was lost! I could have gone on and done it six days ago or one day ago or an hour ago. But did I? You know tne answer to that as well as I do; you do, that is, if you have as much of that strange and exasperating thing we call "human nature" as I have. No! 1 didn't write it six days ago or one day ago or an hour ago. I didn't write It till the very last minute Yet I wasn't able really to enjoy all those six days of not writing it, because I couldn't get it off my mind: and each tlmr i thought about It. it seemed to me it was going to be harder and harder and harder to write. You'd think I'd write two or three columns in advance and have 'em to reserve, wouldn't you? (Would you, really? Do you do that about about your work?) Well, give the editor his due: I have done that, several times. On those occasion*. I've spurred myself to write not Just one column for that week, but two or three, so I'd have ctae or two on hand for the times I might have neither the time nor the urge to write one. And what happens? You know what. happens! You know, that is, if- ydu have the same brand of hu man nature I have. The very next week I find half a dozen good reasons why "I can't write a column this w?ek" ? and I pro ceed to use up my reserve supply! There's another reason, it seems to be, why we have so little time to do the things we want to do. It's because we spend so much time ? so much more time than necessary ? doing the things wc have to. Take this very column. I really haven't been so pro crastinating as what I've said above may sound like. For I reallj have sat down at the typewriter, two or three times, to write it. I played with this idea and that idea, and I got exactly nowhere. My typewriter fingers thumbs and my in fingers seemed to be all big toes. ? I couldn't type and I couldn't think. Why? Well, once again, if your human nature is like mine, you know the answer. I couldn't because I didn't h?ve to. So I just fooled around and got nothing done. There's one other angle to this situation I never hare been able to. figure out. Writing this column usual# Is fun; and the reason it's fun Is that, sometime during the week, , I get an idea that makes me want I to write It. J But in far too many Instancafl that idea never gets on papefl something else intervenes righ* then. There's an editorial to be written first, or there's a letter that ought to get on the next mail, or there's a bit of business to be attended to. And the first thing I know, the urge is gone. When at last I come back and start to pick up the idea that seemed so bright and new, it's be come drab and threadbare. And if I force myself to go on and write about it, what X write is likely to be drab and threadbare, too. So there must be something wrong with the way I use my time. (Do you have that trouble?) It isn't, of course, that I haven't enough time; I have all there Is.' It's that I never seem to have enough time at the light time. Freedom, Limited (Washington Post) Pope John XXIII has in effect counseled the rewriting of the Constitution of the United States along with the organic law of many other countries. His call for legal "limitations In the exercise of freedom of the press" in order to "protect morals from being poisoned" amounts to a substantial repudi ation of the theory under which press freedom serves the larger interests of society. His advocacy of legal restrictions Is, we think, altogether the wrong remedy for the evils he protests, and it cannot but cause deep misgivings among many persons who shun anti-Catholic bigotry. This is the more dis maying because Pope John has been in so many other respects an enlightened and liberal prelate. Who is to Interpret for purposes of law what undermines "the religious and moral foundations of the life of the peo ple?" The Catholic Church? The Methodist Church? The Pres byterians or Mormons or Orthodox Jews? Citizens have been properly suspicious of the efforts of government in the do main, and they are not about to assent to such an admixture of church and state In the exercise of legal authority. Indeed, precisely because of the strict separation of church and state there is no strong anti-clerical tradition in the United States of the sort that has developed in Prance, Italy and even England. When any religious organization seeks to extend its primacy in spiritual affairs through an attempt to write its views Into temporal law, it invites a dangerous and divisive reaction. One may suspect that some American Catholics will be very much concerned privately about the ef fect of the Pope's statement. No one can question the right of the Catholic Church to de cide matters of faith and morals for Its own adherents. The heirarchy also has full right to speak out on what it con siders to be evils and abuses in the society generally, includ ing excesses of the press, and thereby to influence the cor rective process. But no religious organization has the right, at least in the United States, to impose its doctrines upon others through the medium of public policy. 1 There are many restraints upon the press, but it cannot be made formally accountable to either spiritual or temporal authority for decisions that are in the theory of the Constitu tion matters of individual conscience and responsibility. Un questionably freedom of the press means freedom for error and even abuse. The authors of the guarantee of freedom of the press held the conviction, however, that there is no one final, immutable standard of truth. The practical mean ing of this precept, as applied to contemporary affairs, is that unless there is freedom to err there can be no real freedom to approach the truth. LETTERS A Great Man Dear Editor: When a prominent citizen dies we often read flowery eulogies. We list his clubs and honors. To those of us who have worked with him and who knew him well, Nath Pennington was as fully deserving of a eulogy as many prominent men. Nath thought for himself and those tlK>ughts stimulated those to whom he bothered to communi cate them. Nath understood mechanical principles as well as many engineering graduates and could apply them. His knowl edge was not unlettered, he read as few college students read. Nath would be furious at me for revealing this, but when many others sought to escape military service, Nath was de termined to serve in spite of poor health and age. For a re freshing change, I would like to present this simple eulogy in behalf of one who joined no clubs and who was complete ly unaware of the very high esteem in which all of those who knew him held him. He was a quiet man, a good man, and, in my book, a great man. ' JACK CARPENTER North Georgia College, Dahlonega, Oa. < P. S. Nath, like myself, once helped print The Franklin Press. DO YOU REMEMBER? Lookinc Backward Through the Files of The Presa 65 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK (1895) Two bag-pipe tramps in all their glory and noise struck town Saturday. The average thermometer last Saturday morning was slight ly below zero. Franklin High School opened again Monday, after a sus pension of one week for Christmas. Professor R. L- Madison, of Cullowhee High School, was in town Monday, looking after important school matters. As we did not meet him, we cannot give account of the business he is looking after. 35 YEARS AGO (1925) Messrs. S. J: Dean and Oliver Hill, from Etna, made a pleasant visit to Franklin last Saturday. Mr. T. W. Angel, Jr., enjoyed the holidays with his family in Franklin. Mr. Angel is an electrical engineer and holds a lucrative position with the Westinghouse Company in Atlanta. Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Higdon spent the holidays with home folks in Franklin. On the first of January, Mr. Higdon will ,be located in Gainesville, Ga., where the Higdon Motor Company will have charge of the Buick agency. 15 YEARS AGO (1945) T/3 James Norman Blaine, son of Mrs. David Blaine, recent ly spent 29 days here, after 30 months' service in Australia and New Guinea. Mr. and Mrs. John Wallace, of Franklin, Route l, have an nounced the marriage of their daughter, Miss Alice Wallace, to Sgt. Robert Lee Reynolds, of Otto. 5 YEARS AGO (1955) Bids for construction of Franklin's propbsed municipal building probably will be invited next week. i OBSERVERS SAY . . . 3 rurday Isn't Big Day Any Mere THEY DON'T KNOW FRANKLIN! W E H in Sanford Herald This being Saturday, what could be more appropriate than to note the passing of Saturday as the big shopping day in Sanford, and for that matter, hundreds and maybe thousands of other small towns and cities all over our nation. When I moved to Sanford in 1930, Saturday was the busiest day here. That was when the rural people came to town en masse, to tend to their courthouse business, to do their shopping, to greet their friends and socialize. Saturday afternoons were busy, but the main activities, whatever the season, didn't, start until after dusk. Before that time, folks, jockeyed for parking spaces on the main blocks, so they could sit in their cars and watch streams AH! SO THAT'S THE REASON . . . The housewife spends a third of her time in the kitchen, says an appliance manufacturer. We find it hard to believe. A third of her time in the kitchen? After the perfection of canned food? After precooked foods? After frozen foods? After ready-mixed cakes and pastries? After do-it-myself stoves? After whole meals ready to just heat and eat? She spends so much time there because the kitchen is poorly planned, the manufacturer says. Oh ... we see. That's where the telephone is. ? Savannah Mornins News. of humanity making the rounds of the business blocks. No store closed before 9 o'clock Saturday evenings, and many stayed open until 10 and 11, and an occasional entrepreneur kept his doors opfn until midnight. Barber shops did their biggest business from 4 o'clock in after noon until maybe 11 o'clock Sat urdays when tired barbers locked their doors and called it a day. The National Retail Merchants Association is authority for the statement that Saturday is no longer a big day in. the country towns of America. It says Thurs day is the big marketing day. In our area, the NRMA is wrong: Fri day is the biggest day. Time may yet move the busiest day in this locality back one more day and make it Thursday; It's already got to Friday. Way back when. Saturday was the recognized day for ingather ings of people, and business, pleasure and politicking were con centrated into that one day. Earlier pay days.' easier and quicker transportation have changed all that. Several years hence, Thursday may be the big day in Sanford. BIGGER, BETTER BOMBS AND PILLS One blessing about the bigger and better atomic weapons is that medicine is keeping step witW bigger and better tranquilizing pills to reduce all the tensions produced by bigger and better bombs. ? Greensboro Daily News. NO SMARTER; THOUGH Not So Dumb, After All PUBLISHERS' AUXILIARY Whewwww . . . That's supposed to be a sigh of relief, and we're not sure how it's spelled. In fact, there are a considerable number of things of which we are not sure. The only difference now Is that we are no longer afraid to admit it. Since the beginning of the TV big money quiz shows ? and the spectacular display of knowledge shown by the contestants ? house wives, department store clerks, taxi drivers as well as college pro fessors and band leaders ? we have been going around with the feel ing that we are a little dumber than everyone else in the world* We don't know the middrti name of Charles the second's (or is it eighth?) third wife . . . We don't know who was the first left-handed batter who hit 'COR I! Ul'T GOOD MANNERS' Attempted Censorship Usually Fails - And Creates New Problems By WALTER SPEARMAN (EDITOR'S NOTE: Professor Walter Spearman, of the I'ni verslty of North Carolina, spends a part of each summer as director of the Chatauqua Writers' Worxhop. at Chatau qui. N. V. Below is an excerpt ?from a talk he delivered there last summer.) Censorship usually brings on Its own debacle ? and there is no greater evidence than the recent furor over whether the Post Office Department has the right to ban the mailing of D. H Lawrence's classic novel. "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Here Is a book that was hailed as a classic by literary critics, but bock in the 1920 s and 1930 s it was rend only by a curi ous few who brought in copies from Europe. Now that the post office has tried ? unsuccessfully to ban it. the book is high on the list of best sellers ? not be cause of its literary merit. I sug gest. but because of the publicity aroused by the attempts to censor It. Censorship of movies and tele vision shows in recent years has been almost as ridiculous. Lieo Boston, writing about Hollywood, reports some of the censorship protests that have come to the movie stars. The American News paper Guild objected to movies that showed reporters as Impolite, intoxicated or unscrupulous. The Audubon Society complained of a story that had an eagle carrying off a child. The Glass Blowers Association complained that the movies were giving free advertis ing to canned beer, and a group in the canning industry insisted that the movies were advertising bottled beverage*. And all of you know that in recent yefars stories or radio pro grams using Negro dialect have practically disappeared because thay were considered insulting to the race. Goori-by, Uncle Remus and Stephen Poster. Similar taboos have been point ed out in the area of television. If a performer is shown sitting In a dentist's chair, he must not Indicate any pain or fear ? for that would offend the dentists. The Warehousemen's Association asked that crime dramas stop hav ing so many of their crimes take place in warehouses ? It was bad for the profession. Policemen ob ject to plays about crooked cops. The French don't like their countrymen to be depicted as villains. Neither do the Japanese, the Germans, the South Ameri cans ? and probably the Rus sians. And in the very moving "Playhouse 90" dramatization of the Nuremberg Trials, the words "gas chambers," an important part of the evidence of Nazi war crimes, had to be cut out ? be cause one of the sponsors was the American das Association, which was unwilling to have the magic word "gas" used in such an unpleasant connotation. Radio and television have been, from the beginning, an even less two-way communication^ than the newspapers. If we don't like a newspaper, we can write angry letters to the editor ? and prob ably see them published, or we can burn the newspaper to vent our wrath, or wrap garbage in It. with a satisfied feeling of placing like things together. But radio and television sets are too expensive to burn ? and you can't use them very effectively as gar bage dispose-all either. All we can do is turn off the set ? we can't talk back.. In spite of the vast potentiali ties of television and the millions of dollars poured into it, there still seems to me a lamentable lack of good programs and an appalling oversupply of poor ones. For one good "Omnibus'' or "Playhouse 90" or the McCarthy hearings 'or a political convention or a t fnnard Rprnstein or an Edward R. Murrow, there seem to be hundreds of stereotyped Westerns, frightful horror show.-,, meretricious variety shows and sudsy soap operas. There are two reasons for the low-lntellectual-calorie diet of TV. First of all. It Is a mass medium and must appeal to the masses. The second reason is that it is such an expensive medium that the advertisers are determined to get the most for their money, so they want a program that ap peals to everybody and offends nobody. The programs, as you can see. are not really arranged by the broadcasters but by the advertisers. I cah't leave television without putting in one good word for the educational television and the magnificent Job it has done to lift the quality of 'TV throughout the nation: Perhaps the last word on TV should be given by St. Paul who I always thought was an apostle rather thfen a prophet. But in his lettter t J the Corinthians so many years atfo. he made this prophecy. "Evil communications corrupt sood manners'* . . . and he must have been talking about television. lor a .388 batting average ... If that's possible. I We can't even name the Presi dents backwards much beyond Wilson . . . Much less vice presidents. ' , But the relief is that we no longer feel so terribly Ignorant. After all. intellectual achieve ment Isn't directly related to the memorizing of a set of encycLo pedlas ... or memorizing a lit of answers to questions you know are going to be asked. Most certainly the ego in others was also deflated when they watched contestants answer with apparent erudition questions that merely baffled most home viewers. A question arises; Is It better or worse that our ego is rising again, inflated with the knowledge that maybe we aren't so dumb after all? It doesn't make us any smarter, but it does make us feel just a little better. One reason that reading such a chore is because so many writers have so little to say. ? Berthoud, Colo., Bulletin. WHAT MAKES HARD READING
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