April 12, 1935 - NOW OR LATER
A great question is rising in people's minds-shall we live for now or for the future? And the answer seems to be now.
The Washington Daily News—Thursday—April 12—1935 Page 29
NOW OR LATER BY ERNIE PYLE
(While Broun is on vacation)
I AM a secretary in one of the greatly publicized New Deal agencies," writes W. D. "My roommate and I feel that one of the paradoxes of modern civilization is the fact that so large a part of humanity is condemned to the treadmill of toil, and is deprived of life's joys and beauty.
"Most of one's waking hours are spent in a struggle for mere existence, for the bare necessities of life. All else must be put aside until that far off and all too distant day when one can realize the fruit of his life's labors, If he is fortunate.
"Having worked thru the seven years of the depression it has been impressed upon me the futility of striving to get more than one jump ahead of the wolf. Today one may be working and thinking that he is well on the way to success and security. Tomorrow brings the awakening, and all too soon the hope and peace that one nurtured within the heart is gone forever and a substitute of bitterness and despair is left to no console."
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I FEEL FREE to quote this from W. D's letter, for she practically took the words right out of my mouth. Not only out of mine, but out of thousands and maybe millions of other peoples. It may be good. or it may be bad, but that's the way a lot of people all over this country are thinking now.
In the past few months, traveling about the United States, I became aware of a very striking change in the philosophy of people. It has always been the American tradition to work hard, save your money, and pile up as much as you possibly can to leave your children when you die.
But now there is an attitude of "why bother?" People say. "Why try to save your money when maybe the bank will close and you'll lose It all?" People say, "Why try to accumulate property and extraordinary comforts when maybe we'll have a revolution and It'll all be taken away from us?" People say, "Why waste the good years preparing for the far-off years of old age, when maybe things will be so different by then we won't need money or It wouldn't do us any good if we had it? And anyhow, we'll have old-age pensions by then."
Such words a few years ago would have shocked most of us raised to the American standard of thrift and self-sacrifice for some nebulous and sort of holy "rainy day." In my youth it was almost sinful even to consider yourself in the present tense: you lived and worked and planned for some stranger who was to be yourself when you were old and gray and dependent.
But that idea is changing. It Isn't a feeling that has suddenly engulfed the country, by any means, but it is a feeling that is coming to more and more people as the depression years grind on and each year grind finer and finer. Maybe an eth-nologist, with his form sheets and past performance charts on the rise and fall of human civilizations, could tell you what it means. I'm sure I can't. But It seems to me that it might mean either one of two things: that our civilization is growing up to a climax of intelligence that will work out into a fuller life for us all; or else that we've reached the peak, have started to break, and from now on are on our way down to utter misery and extinction. I cannot, anywhere in the crystal ball, see the same road ahead that we have been traveling over.
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IN DELVING around among minds, including my own rather odd one, for a reason for this change, it seems to me that it is based upon a disillusionment, and a loss of our sureness. Children have always been confident there was a Santa Claus. Americans have always been confident, even to the point of not even being conscious of the confidence, that our future was bigger and better, upward and onward. But gradually in the last few years it has dawned upon us to start wondering if it is true. People are beginning to be a little incredulous of the snugness of our futures, Individually and as a civilization.
I don't mean just a lack of confidence in getting over this depression, or a lack of confidence in what the Administration will do next. No, It's much beyond that. This is a profound puzzlement. They're not sure any more where we'll be 25 or 50 years from now, or what kind of a society we'll be living In. So they say, "Well, It's too big a gamble for me, let's live while we can."
It isn't the same "what the hell" feeling that led us dancing and shouting into night clubs after the war. That was a release. This one is more thoughtful, more resigned, more somber. We don't know what's coming, so why count on a plan of life which may never unfold?
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D. WANTS to know whether she and her roommate W. should save their money for a year or so, and then strike out to see the world. "Do you think we should be content to grow old and dreary and forfeit our desire to travel?" she says.
I am no Dorothy Dix of travel literature, but to any one with the gypsy foot and the gleam in his eye who asks, "Should I be leaving now?" I can only answer, "Sure, why not?"
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