Word: despairing
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...regional-theater heartland, in which everyday characters, often from the Midwest middle class, respond to family crises in the plainsong cadences of naturalism. For these people communication is hard enough; eloquence would be a suspect luxury. You have to listen hard to catch both the humor and the despair in a mother's complaint on returning from the supermarket: "Why are modern groceries so heavy?" (from Lee Blessing's Independence, a mother-and-daughters drama that plays like Crimes of the Heart without Henley's savory moonshine kick). Often in these works, nothing happens; usually, that...
Even allowing for the normal campaign hyperbole, this year's litany of despair about the U.S. is ridiculous. The material and professional attainments of the Democratic candidates disprove their own notions of national despondency. As they have searched for dark corners over the past months, often dominating the public dialogue, the American people were quietly going in the opposite direction. George Gallup a few days ago released a survey concluding that "the mood of the nation today is the brightest it has been in five years, with 50% now saying they are satisfied with the way things are going...
...News Is Wrong. Using census data, polls and economic research, Wattenberg concludes that any way you measure values and quality of life, America comes out a "pretty strong and healthy society." He believes that programs like those L.B.J. started have done wonderfully well but that Washington, which needs despair to feel useful, refuses to see the successes clearly. "Back in the 1970s we went through a period of 'the carcinogen of the month,' from Love Canal to acid rain," relates Wattenberg. "All we heard about was the evils of Big Government and big corporations. Now we learn that...
...second worst thing that can happen to a people is to be conquered. The worst is to live through the ordeal that follows: to submit. The suicides, the alcoholism, the mists of despair that today envelop many reservations all seem legacies of a colonial past that won't go away. "Winter in the blood" is the way James Welch, the Montana Blackfeet novelist, describes the consequences--a freezing up of the Indian psyche in the face of daily deprivations of the spirit. "I was," he writes, "as distant from myself as the hawk from the moon...
...millions of American children are either hungry or malnourished; over one million suffer forms of child abuse each year; and over 22 million, more than 20 percent of the nation's children live in poverty. Unless these abuses are corrected, and quickly, the next generation will grow up in despair...