Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-10-24
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

Dear Sir: You say in recent
article: The craze today is for actuaiity.
The World War put an end, in
thousands of minds, to the old
fashioned blinking of facts. Mankind
took the war raw and now it is willing
to take the worst and the best of every
thing else without the batting of an
eyelid.'
You are, believe. quite right in
that point of view. And yet, there are
a great many other things to be said
and which should be accepted as form
ing a part of that circle of modern
ideas.
able to face facts, rather than blnk
them. What 1 do vigorously contest
is the standpoint since the war--as
wildly demonstrated by the people OF
our world today-Which may be best
described in the words, Eat, drink and
be merry etc.
II have no doubt you will under
stand perfectly what I mean. 1t does
seem that there is -lH"k of stability,
lack of appreciation of right values.
some kind of a 'fXation' in the mind
of the layman that he must take what
he can today, in case the world
shouldn't be here tomorrow; some
what nervous, somewhat hysterlcal
viewpoint of things-just as though he
could no longer see any beauty around
hin-that the sun and the blue skies
were n-eXistent-that he was looking
on things through black-colored glasses
in toto, and in fact, that there was
no hope in life!
This is what I see as I look around
me and this is the psychology Of it as
&c tool 70 ind
would you explain it except by certain
kind of hopelesSneSS or lack of faith in
the future, tendency toward the line
of least resistance lack of detefmlna-
ton and proper self-control?
"In any sane conception of life, the
affairs of the immediate present must
be ineXtricably woven or linked up with
some part of the future. Only in that
way can there be real constructive
effort, in the interest of an individual
or of a nation. Those units of ma
tional life, who suck the orange dry
as though convinced that never again
would there be an orange to suck, are
not building up; they are, in fact, not
only destructive of themselves and their
generation, but they are deliberately
pulling down the structure their fathers
built up for them by Self-control and
Self-Sacrifice. How else do they think
this prosperous country rose to the
pinnacle of its success? If a gang of
parasites had landed on Plymouth
Rock, instead of a body of men with
invincible, sterling qualities, what then
of this great country?
"Hope is life. Where there is no
hope, there must be pesSimiSm. Those
contemporaries of yours who act in the
way you say-What star have they hitch
ed their wagon to?-'A RESENTER.' B"
X X * X
Our correspondent has touched on
some very worthwhile matters, it seems
to us. There is all too evident i'll the
United States today belief that youth
and health are all that count.
To listen to some people talk and
others write, an unSuSpecting person
might get the idea that there was no
such thing as a middle-aged man or
woman in America, and that an elderly
man or woman was something unknown.
Our common daily chatter Is all OF
health and "suntan," yet it is common
knowledge that thousands OF great hos
pitfalls throughout the Nation are filled
to capacity with suffering.
The hosts of optimism sometimes
seem to have overridden our wise
common sense as a mass of people.
Every individual knows that sickness
and death exist, and that there is Suf-
fering everywhere, but when we get
together we seem to prefer to talk about
something else.
This lack of common consideration