Word: hopelessness
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Game 5 ended in pathos. Fischer's position became hopeless. Ten moves after he should have resigned, he moved his queen -- proud, powerful, the lion of the chessboard -- and retreated it to a corner where it cowered for protection behind three lowly pawns. As Jose Zalaquett, a top Chilean amateur player, put it, it was an almost physical retreat, a folding back into the fetal position, awaiting the final blow...
...even doom has nuances, and like Africa it has a thousand layers of meaning. The "margin" of one thing is also the center of something else. Africa has its own "centers," its resources of vitality and resilience. It operates by its own inner dynamics and metaphysics. Africa looks hopeless, but it is not. In many ways the continent is headed in the right direction for the first time in centuries. Real changes for the better are occurring. Africa is evolving African solutions...
Frustration over Africa has led some outsiders to the conclusion that Africans are hopeless at organizing anything. The reverse is true: they are ingenious organizers and able businessmen. The problem is bad government...
That may be cold realism. But there are times when realism, a clear-sighted understanding of how things are, shades into fatalism, an assumption that they must stay that way. Eagleburger says he learned from Baker's Middle East diplomacy that persistence in a hopeless task can pay off. But the most interesting paradox about Eagleburger is that a man who is by nature an activist -- a lifelong problem solver who fills up a room with his presence and energy -- also insists that "there are sometimes problems," such as Yugoslavia, "for which there is no immediate solution, and there...
...Project Freedom is saving lives. Frances Sandoval, founder of Mothers Against Gangs in Chicago, gets tearful phone calls from parents with kids too scared to leave a gang but terrified of staying in. "Unfortunately, there is very little I can offer them," she says. "In most cases it's hopeless unless they can literally pack up and leave. And we're talking about moving to another state...