The Right to Cheer

All roads in the Southwest led to old Santa Fe this week. There in the warm nights around the Palace of the Governors, the city was holding its 237-year-old fiesta, to celebrate the reconquest of the Indians by the Spanish. The fiesta would open, as it always does, with the burning of Zozobra, a 40-ft. effigy with a face of abysmal discontent (see cut). Zozobra, in Santa Fe folklore, represented Old Man Gloom.

Only 35 miles away from Santa Fe, at Los Alamos, stood the carefully policed, disquieting laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission. Unlike Zozobra, the atom's grim face could not be chased away by a burning in effigy. But it could be put out of mind--which is what most people in Santa Fe seemed to be doing this week.

In Washington, there were the usual miasmal patches of gloom: the desperate financial plight of the British, the menace of Communism in the Far East. Washington worried that the U.S. public too easily put these problems out of mind, or wished them away. But it was human nature to delegate worry. And Americans have never had much capacity for sustaining gloom. Besides, there was a chance that the world, in the long run, was not going to hell.

Yams & Couplings. There were even indications and promises of a good future. In such a commonplace as a yam, science was finding new hope for the ill (see MEDICINE). There were also new comforts to living. There was a 24-lb. sewing machine on the market which not only could stitch but could embroider, make buttonholes and darn socks. There was an announcement that the New York Central would soon have ready for wilting and near-sighted New York commuters 100 air-conditioned cars with fluorescent lighting and improved couplings to soften the shock of frequent stopping & starting. The rubber companies were testing an automobile tire that might run for 75,000 miles.

Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer, back from a trip around the East, had discovered that people "had an abiding faith in the soundness of our business economy." Last winter's decline of U.S. business had been interrupted. Manufacturers' orders for May and June had gone up 8%; job layoffs had dropped to their lowest rate since last November; the cost of living also dropped, if only an imperceptible .6%.

The Bountiful Earth. New technologies which had fairly revolutionized agriculture were producing another year of bumper crops. Under man's ingenious hand, was the earth becoming more & more bountiful? Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug said he was thinking of asking for a "few hundred million dollars" to harness the sun to heating plants and farm production.

At the United Nations, 550 scientists from 49 nations bent their heads over the problems of the old earth. They saw the present 2 billion population increased to 3 billion by the year 2000. But they were plunged in no Malthusian gloom. They could see, on the contrary, a day when the whole world would be better off. Science was the tool--but not the answer. The answer was man himself. Said The Netherlands' Dr. Egbert de Vries, expert on rural economies: "People are an asset, a natural,resource, and not a liability . . . Humanity has the right, the duty and the privilege of having faith in the future."

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