MAKING AS WELL AS BREAKING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1941, Page 6

MAKING AS WELL AS BREAKING

4 GOOD CONSTRUCTIVE THINGS EMERGING. “I wonder how many of you feel, as I often do, that we are given too much news about destruction?” said Mi’ J. B. Priestley in a recent broadcast to America. “You know what I mean —you turn on the radio, or pick up a newspaper, and then you hear or read nothing but’ news of destruction: so many ships sent to the bottom of the sea, so many aeroplanes sent twisting and screaming to their doom, so many tanks and armoured cars blown up, so many enemy buildings destroyed. I know that all this destruction is vitally necessary, and that we shall have to have more rather than less of it before we have done. We all understand that. But there are times when we cannot help feeling weary of this unending stream of news about destruction. And if it were my job to give the people their news, I would see to it that they were always being told of something constructive happening, to preserve a rough kind of balance in the mind. It is a fact that many good constructive things are emerging out of this war. The worldscene is not entirely one of violence and destruction. The builders are about as well us the wreckers.”