The Pittsburgh Press (February 9, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
A free soul
By Florence Fisher Parry
It was the tag-end of a torn, frayed day. The squirrel cage was revolving in its last frantic spasm before coming to a gasping stop.
I have to get out of here. I kept saying between my teeth. I’m tired, I can’t keep this thing up. Let me go, let me get out. I’m just one person. Stop heaping things on me. I’ve only one life and look at it – look at it – spilling itself in small futile dribbles…
WHAT? I have to wait for WHOM? Who’s he? I don’t know him… Oh, he’s here? Okay, Okay…
Yes, that was the way I felt when I met him.
I won’t name him – what difference? He is legion, I dare say. The world is full of Free Souls. I look into their faces and spot them… Free Souls. At peace with themselves and with others. Surcharged with a sense of Well-Being. Relaxed, as though their nerves were coated with oil.
Leisurely, too … taking time, finding it, somehow; using it quietly, not grabbing onto it as I do, only to have it elude me…
I see these Free Souls… often they are priests or other godly men. Sometimes they are women who have lived through great sorrow. But when you meet them and look for awhile into their faces, hear their quiet voices; see their repose – and quietude enters you, too; you are rested.
Now this person whom I met holds a very realistic job. He is in charge of all personnel in one of this city’s big business institutions. He handles all union contracts, spends many hours with union agents.
Yet do you know what he calls his job? A “STOP HATING” job. He believes – and practices – brotherly love.
The real bargain
He has never had trouble between Management – which he represents – and labor, which he makes an Associate instead of an Opposition. He really believes that all things can be resolved between employer and employee; that they can be made to understand the nature of each other’s grievance, if they can be persuaded to employ the word “Bargaining” with an idea of the true meaning of the word.
A “Bargain” is something mutually advantageous. It is NOT a bargain if it is unfair to either contractor.
He is, this man, a Believer, and a Lover of human beings. He thinks of people as ASSETS; he deals with them as another man might deal with investments. He would rather invest in a PERSON than a stock or bond. People have been his job, as long as he has been in business. Yes, it can be said that human beings are his career.
This being so, you can see why He is an Optimist about our economic future. He sees only prosperity ahead; it cannot miss; its PROVOCATION is too great. No monkey wrench will be big enough or mischievous enough to flop the machinery of the PROGRESS we are in for. Such a chance for rebirth has been thrown at us that, try as we may in foil its impact, it will literally bowl us over. And then – put us on our feet again, the rock bottom of a great new world beneath them.
He sees us catapulated into a new Era so splendid, so replete with opportunity, that we cannot gum it up! For IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING TO HINDER US, we are better off than we have ever been before, Richer. More privileged. More improved. More prosperous. Our children are entering a world of opportunity beyond the dreams of any poet or prophet.
Youth and the future
…He is not a young man; he has grown children; yet the privileges of the life ahead seem to him so thrilling that he recently has adopted two babies, so he can be closer at hand to the miraculous life that is to be theirs to enjoy, and all their generation. He spends two nights a week working with young folks – one a class of girls and boys in a Junior Achievement class; the other a night class of students employed by day.
He is not discouraged but he is saddened over the spectacle of such Pessimism as he encounters everywhere, among the very men who, in spite of all that they have, have lost their faith in America’s future.
These men, he reminds me, are men who have never made so much money as now – never mind how heavily taxed, how rigorously restrained.
They berate the OPA, the WPB, the WLB – every governmental control. They point out their every weakness and danger. Yet TO A MAN he has not heard one substitute recourse suggested.
He told me of a high executive in one of our most powerful industries who said to him: “The OPA has failed in preventing inflation, in assisting reconversion. Yet we are afraid to discontinue it for WE HAVE NO SUBSTITUTE PROGRAM to keep prices from sky-rocketing. I feel completely hopeless. The outlook is utterly black.”
“Come, come!” said my friend. “It can’t be as bad as all that! Let’s meet at lunch tomorrow and talk this thing over.”
“I can’t,” replied the pessimist, “I’m leaving for Florida. I’ll be at Palm Beach for the next month.”