Word: helplessly
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...primal, universal fantasy. Most people who indulge it probably imagine the advantages that H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man expected from it, "the mystery, the power, the freedom." But novelists, those eternal spoilsports, keep pointing out the fantasy's downside. Wells' protagonist eventually despaired of himself as a "helpless absurdity" before being hunted down and beaten to death. Now two contemporary writers, an artful veteran and a clever newcomer, offer variations on the theme that are hardly more optimistic. Their central characters, while not quite killed, lose virtually everything else along with their visibility -- jobs, apartments, girlfriends, respectability. Invisibility, these novels...
...Watching helpless New Orleans suffering day by day left people everywhere stunned and angry and in ever greater pain. These things happened in Haiti, they said, but not here. "Baghdad under water" is how former Louisiana Senator John Breaux described his beloved city, as state officials told him they feared the death toll could reach as high as 10,000, spread across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. No matter what the final tally, the treatment of the living, black and poor and old and sick, was a disgrace. The problem with putting it all into numbers is that they stop speaking...
...family and I were among hundreds of Westerners trapped in Japan during WW II, fortunately many miles from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By August 1945, the helpless people of Japan were starving to death, and there was widespread homelessness. I shudder to think what devastation one more winter would have wrought had the war not ended. As terrible as they were, the atom bombs saved more lives than they destroyed. Lucille Apcar Mariposa, California...
...brawl in Detroit affect you? It was the worst. One, my little boy was there. Two, I just finished hip surgery, and I really felt helpless that I couldn?t do anything to correct the situation or alleviate it in any way. The most incredible thing was leaving the arena and watching the players? kids and how sad they were. How they reacted just blew me away. Even though it damaged our sport, hopefully we can all learn from it and move...
Lincoln refused to tap into this source of power, and Douglass became increasingly frustrated with him. By arming only white men, the Union fought the rebels with one hand, he complained. "They fought with their soft white hand, while they kept their black iron hand chained and helpless behind them." Douglass's frustration turned to contempt in August 1862, after Lincoln met with a delegation of African Americans and urged them to emigrate to Central America. "You and we are different races," Lincoln told his black audience. "We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other...