Word: heroics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Others flee the field because of the risk of malpractice suits. "In the E.R. you're a sitting duck for malpractice, and people here know it," says Dr. Rosenthal. For all their heroic efforts, emergency-room doctors have little chance to establish a continuing relationship with patients and little time for tenderness. The waits can be long, the treatments painful and the sheer volume of patients high. "You have to work quickly during an emergency," she says, "with a lot of angry people, in a climate in which lawsuits are used by people to express their anger...
This triumph of apolitical bourgeois democracy has been a source of dismay to some. They pine for the heroic age when great ideologies clashed and the life of nations turned on a vote in Congress. On the contrary. I couldn't be happier that the political century is over, and that all that's left is to shuffle cards on the cruise ship. The great disease of the 20th century was the politicization of life. The totalitarians, left and right, showed the way, politicizing everything: economics, education, art, religion, family life. Not even genetics could escape politics. One remembers with...
...heroic romanticism of these lines echoes my own sense of life as both wonderful and tragic. Another aspect of the truth that complements Goethe's metaphor is contained in these lines by the postwar poet Alexander Mezhirov...
Mezhirov understands that heroic exploits are not ends in themselves but are worthwhile only insofar as they enable other people to lead normal, peaceful lives. Not everyone need spend time in the trenches. The meaning of life is life itself: the daily routine that demands its own unobtrusive heroism. Goethe's lines are often read as an imperative call to revolutionary struggle, but there is nothing peremptory or fanatical in them once they are stripped of their poetic imagery. Reflections rejected all extremes, the intransigence of revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. It called for compromise and for progress moderated by enlightened...
...Have and Have Not, Wesley, a Black deckhand, is used solely as a foil to highlight the white protagonist's heroic qualities, she said...