Word: humanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...referendum begins by "demanding that Israel end its violations of Palestinian human rights." This assertion of unilateral violations is neither helpful nor accurate. While we acknowledge that some Israeli soldiers have behaved improperly in certain situations, the framers of the referendum do not recognize misconduct on the part of the Palestinians...
...political problem with a painfully human face. Unlike the arcane theories of Star Wars or the complex calculations of the budget deficit, homelessness is no abstraction. The homeless confront urban dwellers every day: sleeping on sidewalks and park benches, begging pedestrians for loose change, huddling in doorways for shelter or meandering the streets muttering to themselves. In cities that have flourished during the Reagan years, there are more homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression...
...conceivable answer. Dukakis could have vented anger at the premise of the question or passionately explained his own feelings of outrage when his father was badly mugged. Such a response would have been a perfect way to introduce his view that the legal system is designed to temper human impulses for hang-him-high vengeance. But even as his political dreams hung in the balance, Dukakis mustered all the emotion of a time-and- temperature recording. He managed to turn a question about his wife being brutalized and murdered into a discourse on the need for a hemispheric summit...
...easy-listening tone was established early in the debate, when the Vice President interrupted moderator Shaw, who was trying to pose a hypothetical question about Dan Quayle's becoming President following Bush's death. "Bernie!" Bush interjected at just the right moment, conveying with that single word the natural human reluctance to dwell on one's own mortality...
...sociologist of religion Emile Durkheim once said that the contrast between the sacred and the profane is the widest and deepest of all contrasts that the human mind can make. In retrospect, in the churchier precincts of the memory, the election of 1960 has, for some, a numinous glow. The election was the prologue to everything that happened after. It was the American politics before the fall. Its protagonists went on to their high, dramatic fates. Perhaps part of the magic of that race is that we know the tale to its dramatic completion...