Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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California's current mood does not greatly surprise its demographers. Having skewed its population by welcoming successive waves of youth, it is now suffering the "baby-boom doldrums" of a generation confronting its inevitable mortality. Sociologists view the despair as something that logically follows a period of growth, the end of heady promise. But they worry about the effects of a prolonged malaise. Observes University of California Sociologist Neil Smelser: "There is abundant evidence that California is presently in a state of psychological depression because of the hollow notion that things are running out. Californians believe the best...
...children, who have no memory of swinging London and cannot find jobs. Detractors of punk would argue that these children are coddled by a very expensive welfare state and are feeling sorry for themselves. Still, the Sex Pistols' pile-driving Anarchy in the U.K. is an anthem of despair. The British punk bands are a community linked by anger and frustration. They are, within the music world, a rebuke to the bourgeois excesses -and smooth musical stylings-of such stars as Elton John and Peter Frampton...
...have come to rule the township with a mixture of brutality and bold authority that both fascinates and frightens their elders. These junior enforcers have capitalized on their legacy as the heirs of the martyred youths who led last June's upheaval, and on a general sense of despair and futility within the urban community. "We may still be children," one of their leaders says, "but politically we have been through very much." The Children are now seeing to it that almost everyone else in Soweto follows their lead...
There are not three Jarndyces left upon the. earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court...
...important and protest? Or just take a stand and be quiet? Or, simply, how many of us consider any moral issue to be important? Jonathan Ratner is right in that students feel impotent in face of Harvard's institutional immobility and that we can only overcome our "politics of despair" by daring to try. But who will? --Federico Salas...