1949.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 497, 31 December 1948, Page 5

1949.

HE best preparation for 1949 is to forget all the follies, blunders, shattered hopes and failures of 1948 that are now only memories. The blunders for which we must still pay we of course can’t forget, but we should turn away for ever from the others. First there are our international dreams — friendship with Russia, peace in Palestine, democracy in Central Europe, order and sanity in China, and so on. Not one has come true; not one will soon come true; not one, if we had been more realistic, would ever have seemed likely to come true, or to have any substance in it resembling our airy visions. Nor have we steered clear of idle dreaming at home. We have seen houses going up that no family has entered, ships coming and going that have never ploughed the sea; we have had petrol for transport that has never left the wells, power for industry that has not been generated, paper for our presses that is still standing trees. We should have known better, but we at least know better now, and we should make the first cost of all those illusions the last. We should go into 1949 trailing no clouds of folly from 1948, but no numbing clouds of sadness either. We have not been dreamers all the time, or loafers all the time, or fools all the time, or wranglers all the time. Few of our failures have been catastrophic, and not many will be remembered in a month or two if we will let them die. It is too soon yet to say what historians will do with 1948, but if they find no spectacular victories to linger over they will have no black calamities to record except the continuing calamity of suspicion and misunderstanding. If they find it a year of great disappointments they will find the reason to be that it began with great’ expectations, most of them without firm foundation. That is a blunder we need not repeat.