Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These days defeat and despair hang heavy in the air and sit thick in the interstices between us. Perhaps they always did--we're all mortal, after all--but they seem to grow and flourish especially in an environment where people know there are things terribly wrong with the world and have resigned themselves to the impossibility of doing anything about it. What was happening here five years or so ago seems to have been an attempt to deal with that despair by embracing and working toward an alternative vision of how things could be. That vision fell apart...
...THAT most Harvard students deal with their despair by assuming that things as they now exist are, if not actually good, at least unchangeable. If they don't seem particularly happy about this state of affairs--both for its larger political implications and for the distasteful adaptations andaccommodations into which it forces them--they accept its inevitability. The sense now seems to be that we are in the inextricable grip of the tough and sad business of life, and that college is a very serious and real affair where there is little room for slipping ever so slightly...
...failures of the student movement has been its too-specific focus on situations and villains, at the expense of examining the processes that create them and make them recur. Similarly, the despair in students' lives now is not the product of specific circumstances or individuals. It is a story without any villains, the story of what is left in the wake of a period of idealism and vision that failed. Its central characteristic is not an embracing of the status quo or a blindness to its failings, but a sense of its irrevocability. The vast majority of students here...
...Resignation is not the best frame of mind in which to go out into the world; it implies committing ourselves to lives in which we will continue to see wrongs all around us and, for reasons that are practical to the point of insanity, do nothing about them. The despair and defeat in the world, if we watch it and accept it, can only extend further and further into our own lives. President...
...family as sodium and potassium, is an accepted drug, but exactly who should be taking it remains in doubt. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug for use only during the manic phase of manic-depression-a violent swing of moods from mind-racing euphoria to utter despair. Some doctors feel that lithium is being touted so hard that programs such as Maude may cause a public clamor for lithium to combat both severe depression and simple cases of the blues. Says Dr. Samuel Gershon of New York University's Medical School, who has done extensive research...