Almost 50 years ago, on Sept. 23, 1949, the world passed into a cloud of fear. President Harry S. Truman announced that the Soviet Union had the capacity to wage nuclear war. Over the next decade the prospect of mankind wiped out became the subject of novels (On the Beach) and concern that led some to construct backyard fallout shelters.

Labor Day these days is one of the least significant holidays on the calendar. It used to be one of the most joyous, when it celebrated the efforts of union founders who struggled against great odds and did much to improve the lives of very poor people.

It can be exciting again, if it becomes a day to remember those who face obstacles but never, never, never give up.

We see and enjoy such stories in movies. Sports films like Hoosiers and Rocky capture the spirit of the underdog who trumps talent with gutsy persistence.

Sprawl. That's the six-letter dirty word Al Gore's campaign folks utter a lot these days. Their enemy is urban sprawl, the move to the suburbs of hundreds of thousands of former city-dwellers, many of whom-the horror!-like to eat at fast-food restaurants and shop at malls.

If President Clinton reluctantly went bowling, picked up a ball, and then watched as a small earthquake made all the pins in every lane fall over, he would claim credit for rolling a dozen strikes.

If Bill Clinton, excited by the success of the U.S. women's soccer team, donned shorts to play in an exhibition game and mistakenly kicked the ball into his own goal, he would instantly trade jerseys and claim that he had purposely scored the winning goal for his new team.

On May 1 I noted that we were looking forward expectantly to the inaugural four weeks of the World Journalism Institute (WJI). Now that 25 students who were admitted have come to Asheville-alas, we had to turn more away-we've plunged into study of the differences between moralistic, happy-talk journalism and biblical journalism that I described in that Mayday column three months ago.