The Old Year Couldve Been Worse Than it Was and 52 May Be Better. As we write this, the sun has broken out of the clouds and is dazzling down on a gleaming white blanket of snow. It seems symbolic. The old city, with its tired, crusted patches of snow here and there, was gettign pretty grimy. So was the old year 1951. Now as all America has noted, with sometimes unbecoming gaiety, and with all too little sober reflection we have a new year. It stretches ahead like fresh, untracked snow. Before we say last rites over 1951, let us note that, after all, it wasnt so bad at least not as bad as the cartoonists and the writers of year end pieces make it out. True, 1951 exposed what appeared to be an invidious, spreading rot in the moral foundations of this country; a rot that seemed to affect particularly vulnerable bureaucrats and basketball players. The old year saw, too, further deterioration of trust and cooperation between nations. It saw more inflation, and it saw Americans buried in foreign graves, victims of an unwanted, hand me down war from the year before. But with all that, 1951 was not an utter failure. A year ago, Americans with their token allies in Korea were digging in desperately south of the 38 parallel after the bloody retreat from the Yalu. New Years Day saw a new massive attack by the Chinese Communists. There was grim talk of another Dunkirk. Pentagon sources were hoping MacArthur could hang onto the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Today, despite the way negotiations drag on, there is real hope for the end of shooting and a peace that at least will not be disgraceful to the United Nations. A year ago, General Eisenhower flew to Paris to take over the building of the NATO Army. There were eight undermanned allied divisions in Germany then. No one believed a Russian attack could be stopped short of the English Channel or the Pyrenees. Today, Eisenhower has 28 divisions in Germany, and, as evidenced by the Nevada tests of 1951, plentiful promise of a stock of atomic weapons. A year ago, there was doubt American industry could arm the nation without a serious slash in living standard goods. But 1951 saw steel production at an all time high. Eight million civilian automobiles passenger cars and trucks rolled out of the factories, a record. And tanks and planes came off the production lines too. This year 1951 was a fabulous one in some respects. Man began playing with nature on a commercial scale, especially over drouthparches western rangelands. And, wonder of wonder, Utahns sat in their living rooms and watched on the spot, instantaneous action at home palte in Yankee Stadium. But 1951 has to leave to the future the determination of what man will do with rain making and across the nation television, along with all the other scientific and economic and political potpourri of the year. And now we have 1952 a year, undoubtedly, for higher prices and burdensome taxes; for peace, everyone hopes doggedly, in the Far East, for more tragic, unnecessary slaughter on the highways; for new disclosures of scandals in government; a year that dawns, ominously enough, with the two cent postcard, but that brings new hope for the nations six million bachelor girls this being leap year. A year it will be, too, for political decision. A year when Americans will vote for a presdient, for senators and representatives and governors and mayros and sheriffs and auditors and various board and commission members. Right here we would like to propose on resolution for Utahns. Let us resolve that we will pursue the path of good citizenship all the way, that we will do everything in our powers to put good men into offices of trust. That is the only resolution we wish to offer on this New Year Day. Our readers are entirely capable of making their own without help. And besides, New Years resolutions are becoming more and more meaningless, more and more only the butt of cartoonists quips. We like better the thought that every day is a time for resolutions. Every night fall is a time for resolutions. Ever night fall sees a day behind a new day ahead, a day for bettering our performance of the day before. Each day each moment, in fact is the beginning of its own new year. Let us make our resolutions day by day, minute by minute. Some folks call that repentance. Others call it progress.