Word: apartment
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When TIME decided to take a trip and ask some questions about what is holding us together as a country and what is pulling us apart, we took to Highway 50 because it would let us take our time. As transcontinental roads go, it is more like a street than a highway, a long, lazy course that skips the Beltway and heads right downtown through the clutter of our lives, with plot twists and cattle crossings and slow, shaggy climbs through the mountains with warnings to stay in low gear for the next 17 miles. The road begins in Ocean...
...with the uniquely American faith that community and freedom must be compatible. It may be that the greater glory of the place is that we are able to be so divided over so many things yet still keep discovering ways to link ourselves and express those differences without flying apart. The telegraph. A love song. A protest march. The voting booth. And if all else fails, there's always the road...
There are still issues pulling us apart. The most prominent, as it has been throughout our history, is race. At a town meeting on affirmative action in Sacramento, we saw glimmers of potential accord, but there remains a conflict between two basic approaches: giving no special preferences based on skin color and finding ways to ensure that all citizens share equally in the American Dream. We also met people, like those in the coal mines of West Virginia, being left behind by the new economic forces...
...sounded like Marilyn Manson (rock bogeyman). A few of them sounded like the Brady Bunch (holy innocents). A lot of them reminded us of Lisa Simpson (cartoon goddess--aware of life's shadows, inclined to make for the light). Three-fourths hold the sobering belief that we are pulling apart as a nation rather than coming together. But 81% said this is a good time to be starting out in life. Even more, 86%, thought their education had prepared them well for life after high school. They like their parents; they like their teachers. To misquote Sally Field, they like...
...didn't accomplish. One item on the agenda at Rio, for example, was a renewed effort to save tropical forests. (A previous U.N.-sponsored initiative had fallen apart when it became clear that it actually hastened deforestation.) After Rio, a U.N. working group came up with more than 100 recommendations that have so far gone nowhere. One proposed forestry pact would do little more than immunize wood-exporting nations against trade sanctions...