Word: habited
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Watching the war in the South Atlantic-remote and ominous and obscurely disgusting-we keep telling ourselves that we cannot do that sort of thing any more. Once we could indulge ourselves. No more. We will find some substitute, a methadone to ease of the habit. We will take up a surrogate for war-a sport, perhaps: planetary killer golf, or perpetual Olympics. We will meditate, to keep our tempers, and chant a sweet Quaker om. We will sublimate the black bats of our rages into butterflies...
...have peace without war? Our moral rhetoric today tends to call war "futile" and "pointless." But, historically, almost all societies have seen the point of war; at any rate, they have always waged it. Today, the civilization's sheer annihilating capabilities make war seem a grotesque old habit of the race, with nothing to recommend it. But at one time, war was young and stirring and beautiful-or at least it had that side as well as its awful stricken one, its waste of life, its writhing and refugees. War made the adrenaline run, it gave life drama...
...closeness can be contagious. Explains Nick Newman, 15, Muller's chief disciple at Ridgewood: "The more you do on the machine, the more enjoyable it gets. It becomes habit forming." In Alpena, Mich., youngsters who had learned computer skills in junior high were devastated when they got to senior high school and found too few machines to go around. Says Alpena Elementary School Principal Burt Wright: "I've got high school kids begging to come in after school and use our machine." The truly addicted-known half scornfully, half admiringly as computer nerds-may drop out almost entirely...
...believe most people do not depreciate gay people because of a deep seated sense of malice, though some undoubtedly do. When I look back on my own experiences. I engaged in the typical high school joking about gays simply out of an insensitive habit, not because I truly detested them. An attitude not deeply held is relatively easy to overcome...
Everyone has an internal sense of history's motions. What is the appropriate time frame for a war, for example? In an earlier age, a pair of countries tenaciously aggrieved could spend 100 years at it. But that is exceptional-war as a kind of habit. Human memory is usually too short for that. War after all requires a certain amount of concentration...