To Vitalize Democracy TO PRESERVE America's democratic ideals and advance this nation's democratic progress, our democracy must be vitalized. In actual practice it must be brought up to the level which approximates its potentialities. In contrast with Communism, democratic principles and values centered in the individual must be convincingly demonstrated before the world. How can the vitalization of democracy be achieved? To this key question no sufficient answer in words or action is yet forthcoming. Democracy's most insidious problems and obstructions are internal. Many of the "leaders," who profess devotion to democracy, are not themselves democrats. They areto coin a fitting word-demautocrats, who want to prescribe their own nostrums for the rank and file. That's one side of human nature -the will to boss and tell 'em. The other side is human apathy. Most people are active for personal objects, but regarding public welfare they are passive. Rather than bestir themselves, they let such things go. Their apathy paves the way for bosses, and bossing protracts their inertia. John Daniels But democracy, if more than nominal, must be a way of life which is of and by as well as for the people. It cannot be handed out or down by any elite portion to the rest. That is make-believe stuff. Nor can enactment of any number of individual rights and protective coverings do more than half the job. The other half is individual responsibility. Inherently the only real and adequate way to vitalize democracy is by each individual's taking himself in hand and making himself an active and positive unit- an electron, so to speak-of democracy. Yes there's no getting around it. Here in last analysis is something the individual must do of his own volition, if it's done at all. The demautocrats, however willing, simply can't relieve him. Verily he must be born again. How much actual democracy we have now in the U. S. A. would require more than a Gallup poll to find out. No doubt we compare favorably with other countries classed as democratic. But we are far short of democracy's potential integrity and power. In the degree that we approximate that potential we shall be able to demonstrate to the world that genuine democ(Cont. on page 60) NEW OUTLOOK "Man! man is thy brother! Give to thy brother what he has not, and supply thy own deficiencies from what he offers thee. The right hand must aid the left, the East must unite with the West; the young must join hands with the old . . .” EDITORIALS What the New Year Says WITH EACH New Year, we are like the phantom listeners Poet Walter de la Mare tells about. We stand quietly listening while the year just beginning knocks at our door and says, "I kept my word. I came. I'm here." So it always is. The New Year is always the Traveler, "knocking on the moonlit door." Always, too, the Traveler has a speech for us. He wants to tell us that what lies ahead is something connected and continuous, reaching out of the past and present into the future, and that as the earth spins on its axis and the seasons roll by and a new calendar is tacked on the wall there is no such thing as "off with the old and on with the new." There is only growth and change and the cycle of birth and death, which is the cycle of renewal, which is eternal beginning. This time, the New Year has a rather special message for the many folks who want all problems solved at once or who are inclined to look ahead to the next 364 days foreboding. uneasiness or with What the New Year has to say is this: "Greetings, everyone: From where we are (which is always now) we'll go about our business. A lot of business has stacked up, hasn't it? You see, there's always so much unfinished business that we never quite catch up with ourselves. And so we have to peck away at each day's tasks knowing there'll still be many loose ends left lying around when this year comes to a close. "Here's this peace business, for instance. Maybe it's more exact to say 'war and peace' business, for it's all the same thing. As Korea has written it plain for all of us Amerito see in the blood of young cans, we've got to work—even fight, if need be for peace. But this sort of challenge tends to mix us up so that we find ourselves spending generously to prepare for another war while at the same time trying to finance peace on a shoestring. Look at the figures: NEW OUTLOOK "This coming year, even with a new Republican administration determined to trim the budget, we Americans are going to spend about 60 billion dollars for military purposes as against 17 billion for peacetime pursuits. "All this is because we can't believe in the reality of something we have never experienced. Or maybe, on the other hand, we can. There was a New Year's Day a little over a century ago which dawned on a generation of Americans who had shown throughout the year just ended that they could believe in a future only dimly seen. Critic Bernard DeVoto has called that year 'The Year of Decision.' The decision was the decision of the American people to embrace their continent, to span it and claim it from the crude outposts on the Missouri all the way across the rolling plains and the high mountains and the forbidding deserts to the far Pacific. Sometimes with bravado, often with heroism, frequently with suffering, but always with a sense of adventure, they carried out that decision. "The Mexican war was finished. Texas became a republic. Westward the Mormons trekked toward Utah. In the passes of the Sierras the Donner Party perished, while below them, in the valleys, the Bear Flag revolt and the landing of Commodore Sloat at Monterey proclaimed California an integral part of American territory. "From the Virginia Tidewater to the shore of the Pacific three centuries came to climax in the 1850's. Then Americans settled down to develop their land, to exploit it, to bind it together and defend it through four wars and a hundred years of expanding marvels. "Which brings us today, to another 'year of decision' in which many decisions, all of one piece throughout, are waiting for us and for the world at large. "Primarily what faces us today -at the outset of 1953-is a moral decision. We Americans need to get ourselves straightened out in this respect. In the necessity of resisting Communist aggression we have adopted a policy of expediency. We have been on the side of freedom and independence in Korea, for example, but against this side in Tunisia and throughout the Arab world. We have attempted to purchase the support of our allies in the United Nations-particularly France and Britain-by stringing along with policies of colonialism. and exploitation which should not be our policies. "The result is that to much of the world beyond our shores-to the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa-we seem to be talking out of both sides of our mouths. "This is why 1953 calls for a new American Manifesto. We should announce to all the world that this great nation, which itself was born NEW OUTLOOK NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS have formed a capital staple for the use of a certain class of humorists, whose humor consists in a satirical portrayal of their own want of manliness (or womanliness). We refer to the humorist who gives you an elaborate account of how he made a spasmodic determination to rise betimes in the morning, how his indolent body came out victorious, and how he then gave up the struggle for all time. Certainly there is plenty of the grotesque in our petty human nature with its puny virtues and pigmy will, and the subject is a fit one for satire, if only we bear in mind that there is a serious side to the question. For instance indolence may be comic, but it is also deadly serious; for life cannot all be passed in a spirit of lighthearted burlesque; moments of hard, ruthless reality will come at times when the bumpers are empty. And there is such a thing as a stable resolution. But, we can engineer any durable reform in our scientifically study the dynamics character and habits, we must first of the matter. A habit is the product of years of steady growth, large, solid, knotted and gnarled with maturity. A New Year resolution is usually a mere penknife threatening it with instant and total eradication. What ought that man to be called who hopes to succeed in such a project as this? So much for the consequences of confining exact science to the province of solids, liquids and gases, and approaching the problems of our moral nature with a thunderhead ignorance that would shock an aboriginal. 50 A well-known maxim avers that, in all circumstances wherein it has been ascertained that a preliminary effort has been attended with a partial or complete lack of success, it is advisable, and even urgent, to repeat the endeavor; or, to give the more familiar versified form of the apothegm:-"If at first you don't succeed, Try, try again!" There is more in this adage than commensurate with the old; an axe, At the New Year, therefore, let The principle of continuous effort is familiar enough in other branches of daily life, but it needs to be applied thoroughly and carefully. There must be no loss of ground, no retrogression, or the accumulation will be on the wrong side, resulting in a negative quantity. A well-sinker cannot bore onehundred feet in one blow, he can do it after many days of continuous drilling; but he must always keep ahead of the obstructive forces or his hole will be filled up faster than it is sunk. So with our new habits; we must not think that a succession of failures will breed eventual success; rather that a succession of small victories will ensure final conquest. To gain a little, and then to hold that little firmly till we can add more to it-this is the way to win much. Of course there must be in our heart a never-failing desire to achieve our end. We must want to succeed, and keep on wanting. If the resolution should be the result of a mere whim, inspired by a book or a sermon, in a weak nature with no real bent in that direction, then there is no mainspring and the effort will perish along with the desire to make it. But, if we have a real desire to form new habits this NEW YEAR, a desire that is based on a profound conviction of the need therefor and on an undying dissatisfaction with the old habits, then patience and lapse of time are all that is needed to ensure success. There is nothing abstruse about this method, for in NEW OUTLOOK |