WHITE CHRISTMAS

Last evening my wife and I appropriately started, on December 1st, our celebration of the Holiday Season by starting to decorate the house and by watching the movie WHITE CHRISTMAS on Turner Classic Movies. It's a great film, and as Robert Osbourne reports in the intro to the film, Danny Kaye (the number 3 box-office draw in 1954) is joined in the movie by Bing Crosby (the number 1 box-office draw of the time). What a different world it was then when the stars we most often went to see in the movie-theatres were song and dance men!
In retrospect, it seems to have been a much simpler time. Yet, I was in high school at the time, and I thought life was pretty complex. I think the difference is we now know how it comes out. Much of the "drama" of the time has evaporated. Today, we don't know how it will come out. And I think that it's fine to be a "spectator" looking back at the past, but we need to be a "participant" in our own time. Further, we need to be "activists" and "advocates" so that we help direct HOW it is going to come out. The complex issues of today, particularly as they bear on libraries, need our active, aggressive participation. We can't afford to be spectators. 50 years from now people may look back and refer to this time period as "the good old days", if we do our part well!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_%28film%29