Word: hopelessly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...given moment is a belief in the idea that some sort of change or progress is being made. If we were to take a given moment (say, now), looked around us, and tried to justify what we saw as a finished product, we would lose ourselves in hopeless despair. We now justify what we are doing as being part of a process--since we can't justify what we are doing, we justify how we are doing it. This process has to have a direction if we are to proceed...
...respond to her, no way that he can free himself even for a day from the lure of the quasi-hallucinogenic Mexican drink, mescal. Near the end of the day, the consul stumbles away from his wife into the bar which has harbored his deepest depressions and his most hopeless binges. There he meets a group of Mexican fascists who accuse him of spying for the Spanish Loyalists, and then shoot him moments later, half in sport...
...that Kurt Vonnegut deals with in his novels covers the entire length of a given man's life. It is as if Vonnegut sees this, not as the unit of man's work that turns out to be the most meaningful, but rather as the unit of man's hopeless groping for meaning that finally runs out on him. Yes, his characters do come up with sentences that explain their purpose in life, sentences which send us, the readers, into chuckles of heart-warmed complacency when we discover them; but Vonnegut's people never stop hoping for a better explanation...
Penologists already agree that only about 15% of convicted people are so dangerous or hopeless as to require imprisonment. The new consensus is that many offenders should remain either in or close to their communities and be taught how to cope with life and work under close supervision. Toward that end, Menninger's most intriguing idea is the establishment of psychiatric-help centers for criminally inclined misfits. Unfortunately, he is quite vague about it. If the centers resembled public mental hospitals, which often lack procedural safeguards, the "treatment" might be worse than imprisonment. Menninger's book deserves...
Helpless and Hopeless. A likely answer is that people are just plain scared of crime, and so, as a result, they either ignore it or else demand harsh retaliation. In turn, the U.S. penal system punishes criminal symptoms rather than cures criminal causes. The product is more crime...