The Charlotte News
Tuesday, December 24, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of Christmas Eve, in between the various tragedies of the day. And a concrete block pyramid does not a Christmas tree make. It is good, at least, that such a thing never caught on.
There appears to be for 1957 a dearth of Christmas-related programming, perhaps for the proliferation of Westerns and variety shows, the latter affording, no doubt, ample Christmas entertainment but of the ho-hum variety, causing eventually mental indigestion from glut, while the former left little room among the gunplay and skulduggery for Christmas sentiment
We do hope that the inconsolable little girl whose Boston terrier was dognaped by some cruel individual just before Christmas, as shown on the front page the prior Saturday, regains her appetite for life in due course, realizing in the process that placing too much emphasis on an animal can be unhealthy for the mind and lead to neglect of human responsibilities. Still, whoever might have done such a thing is worthy of little more than the fate of the bookie in this drama
Yet, because of the sacrifices from relatively small wars and due diligence exerted in the cold war, man survived the concoctions of man to find a different way of release from the paradoxical tension which inevitably besets life when faced with the need daily to survive against the harshness of the natural environment, a paradox extant since the beginning of time itself, one reason we have such holidays as Christmas to act as reminders of our ultimate humanity and its fragility when faced with the brute power of nature, far stronger than any force man can produce, even thermonuclear blasts. Humanity must ultimately win out over the beastly instincts with the one thing man has which the other beasts lack, consciousness, the ability to think and contemplate before acting out of instinct. We find humor in the absurdity of the situations brought to our attention by such presenters as Mr. Hitchcock, not because the human tragedies depicted are, in the abstract, humorous but because of their absurdity, the absurdity of making bad decisions when reaching the human precipice where that slight or wrong which is at hand is magnified in the mind so as to appear insurmountable without recourse and recompense, the slap of dishonor to one's humanity to be repaid within the rules of code duello, when the only way out of the inevitable dilemma faced by all appears to be the choice between the abyss of everlasting self-shame and persisting in daily existence, humdrum though it might be, replete with the usual anxieties which beset it. The escape from the dilemma only exists in the realm of thought.
The editorial page
for this date is here. If the staff of the newspaper took off the day in large part, though not completely, then so are we, as we are now caught up, more or less. Have a nice Christmas Eve and a joyous Christmas
Framed Edition
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