Word: direness
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...conflict in the Northwest would not be so easily resolved. After a decade of unsustainable logging, court injunctions and federal inaction, the situation was dire when Clinton came to the White House. Said the President: "We have to play the hand we were dealt." In April he convened the much ballyhooed "Timber Summit" in Portland, where he promised to break the gridlock. Clinton set up three teams to tackle the problem, of which perhaps the most important was the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team, or FEMAT. Dressed in jeans, flannel shirts and running shoes, the 37 members , could look...
Only a decade ago, for example, the West was seized with a near mass hysteria about imminent nuclear apocalypse. The airwaves, the bookstores, the Congress were filled with dire warnings about our headlong dash to the abyss. Indeed, those who refused to lose their heads were said to suffer from a psychological disorder. "Psychic numbing," it was called...
...reached political consciousness in a world where our biggest enemy suddenly stopped being the monolithic Communist empire, and instead turned out to be the insidious dictators of small nations. While in high school, we basked in the glow of corporatism; life never felt much more dire than a Saturday-afternoon detention. Then drugs stopped being cool as crack hit the scene. Casual sex became an even bigger taboo in the age of AIDS...
...divisive question about the use of military force is the concept of the "moral war," where the use of the military is constructed as a force of compassion. The "moral war" has coaxed typically liberal and anti-interventionist people into advocating militarism, most recently in Somalia and Bosnia. However dire the situations may be in these two countries, even a cursory examination in each case reveals that the moral high ground the United States takes is inconsistent with its policy. The United States went into Somalia to help starving people, yet the United States has not aided Somalian refugees...
Even if one does not subscribe to the tenets of pacifism, it is fundamentally paradoxical to claim the military should only be used in dire situations and then to honor rather than lament its use. In response to these issues, some of us will wear white armbands to Commencement as a symbol of our advocacy of nonviolence and disappointment in Harvard's choice of speaker. Rebecca Goldin '93 Jessica T. Pisano...