Word: ashes
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...years past, I've had a hard time observing Lent. As a Catholic, I always wanted to be truly penitential. Unfortunately, this was difficult to do without any real vices. Once the penitential ashes from Ash Wednesday wore away, I was relegated to avoiding chocolate to demonstrate my piety. So I was delighted to acquire a bonafide vice at Harvard: cigarettes...
...prepared myself to foreswear cigarette ash on Ash Wednesday, I looked forward to regaining some respect. I started smoking while working as a doorman over the summer. A sandwich and two cigarettes made for the ideal half-hour break. So, as a smoker for the last eight months, I grew used to hearing my habit reviled as "filthy." Even worse, while I walked across the Yard, some of my fellow students would feign coughs near me. Since the dangers of second-hand smoke don't extend to wide open spaces, I understood that they were simply passing judgment...
...environment is seriously threatened by the prodigal garbage of the world's richest economy. In the President's own boyhood town of Whittier, a part of metropolitan Los Angeles, the once sweet air is befouled with carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, lead compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fly ash, asbestos particulates and countless other noxious substances. The Apollo 10 astronauts could see Los Angeles as a cancerous smudge from 25,000 miles in outer space. Airline pilots say that whisky-brown miasmas, visible from 70 miles, shroud almost every U.S. city, including remote towns like Missoula in Montana's "big sky" country...
Something fundamental was happening to communism as well. Reagan's 1982 prediction that it was headed for "the ash heap of history" was lost in a rising sea of angst, captured in a 1983 made-for-TV movie, The Day After, that dramatized the clinical horrors of a nuclear exchange. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. had broken off all arms-control negotiations and were arming rival sides in shooting wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua (whose anticommunist guerrillas would play a central role in the great Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan years...
Scenes from the whirlwind of press conferences that Paxon held to announce his retirement were somewhat surreal. Was it simply coincidence that Paxon chose Ash Wednesday to announce his retirement, or were the penitent ashes that graced Paxon's forehead symbolic of something greater...