Word: kinds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...species that can change its planet's chemistry just by day-to-day coming and going has, I suppose, achieved a kind of coming-of-age. We could celebrate or tremble. What do we do when it is not war that is killing us but progress? When it is not the actions of a deranged dictator threatening the world but the ordinary business of ordinary people? When there are no bombs dropping, nobody screaming, nothing to fear but a line on a graph or a handful of numbers on a computer printout? Dare we change the world on the basis...
...cowboys won -- everywhere nature is being tamed -- but victory over nature is a kind of suicide. The rules change when there is only one political party allowed in a country or there is only one company selling oil or shoes. So too when a species becomes numerous and powerful enough to gain the illusion of mastery. What we have now is a sort of biological equivalent to a black hole, wherein a star becomes so massive and dense that it bends space and time totally around itself and then pays the ultimate price of domination by disappearing...
...even when adoptive parents come forward, the foster-care and adoptive system can keep the children tantalizingly out of reach. Designed to be a short-term arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by parents who make little effort to regain their children but refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan...
Agencies are rethinking their opposition to placing black children with white parents. In 1972 the National Association of Black Social Workers charged that "transracial adoption" was a kind of cultural genocide that deprived black children of their racial heritage. At least 35 states imposed regulations requiring social workers to make every attempt to place children with parents of the same race. Transracial adoptions of all kinds dropped from a high of 2,540 in 1971 to less than half that number in recent years...
Even with American cooperation, that vision could prove elusive. The aging revolutionaries who dominate Viet Nam's 13-member Politburo are largely uneducated and rigidly dogmatic. They resist the creative solutions of younger technocrats and refuse to countenance the kind of political renovation that might stanch the flow of tens of thousands of refugees each year. Like the Chinese, they continue to believe that economic miracles are possible without political reform. "The Old Guard was good for war," says a Foreign Ministry official, "but not for peacetime Viet...