OPINION HOARDERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21987, 23 June 1933, Page 14

OPINION HOARDERS

Do you hoard? (asks a writer in an English exchange). Certainly not, you exclaim indignantly. You are not that kind of person. Why, you send stacks of old magazines to the hospital when you’ve done with them! •Cousin Ethel always gets your cast-off hats and discarded jumpers, and the jumble sale has never looked to you in vain. Only last week, you packed up a whole heap of gramophone records for the workhouse. Hoard indecdj No, your conscience is perfectly clear. But though you may not collect piles of yellowing magazines, and odd bits of out-of-date trimming, are you quite sure that your mind isn’t a bit of a glory-hole? Cluttered up with superannuated pieces of information, last year’s views on this year’s problems, old opinions and die-hard prejudices that would be better scrapped? “Opinions are useful as immediate currency, not for hoarding,” says John Drinkwater, the well-known writer. It seems to me that it is a very sound point of view. We have all met the type of woman who shivers all through the winter rather than have a gas-fire put in her room. “ In my opinion, they’re not healthly,” she says. She still clings to the idea that a girl who smokes and uses lipstick must necessarily be “fast,” that no nice girl would wear imitation jewellery, and that you can’t possibly be strong unless you eat meat twice a day. _ ' In vain you try to convince her that the gas fires of nineteen thirty-three couldn’t hurt a fly. The most blameless duchess, nowadays, wears lipstick and ropes of improbably large "pearls”! It is a scientific fact that there is as much nourishment in cheese as in beefsteak. But it is no good, she has formed her opinions, and she means to stick to them. Twenty years ago, she announced that in her opinion the Davis boy would never come to any good. . And though to-day, Ted Davis is a most steady and worthy member of the community, she persists in her opinionformed on an orchard-robbing episode when Ted was 10—that “ a boy like that’s bound/to end in trouble.” In the same way, her bad opinion of Winnie James, based on Winnie as a rather giggling flapper, remains unchangednow that Winnie is a charming and sensible girl of 24. And nothing will change it! .... , There are quite a lot of opinion hoarders about. People who seem to think its a sign of strength of character to stick to their opinions whatever happens, instead of admitting frankly that they were mistaken, or that times have changed. It is not strong, it is weak—the weakness of obstinacy, to continue to assert that in your opinion the Smiths’s marriage will never be a success. It is! That you will never like that Mrs Brown. You don’t know her! That youcouldn’t be happy in a flat. You’ve never tried! That you couldn’t possibly wear red. And That, you’ll never forgive Jack! Time alters everything, so don’t hoard opinions that could be changed, and ideas that are rusty. Get rid of them as ruthlessly as you would discard that cracked jug. You would throw away that moth-eaten fur, wouldn’t you? Well, why not rid yourself of a few moth-eaten ideas?