Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cavalry trooper recently dragged a wounded white from a rocketed hootch when no other black or white dared to venture in. A black Navy medic who had been in Viet Nam only two weeks fell on a grenade near Danang to save a white Marine and lost his own life. When black Lieut. Archie Bigger was three times wounded capturing enemy artillery pieces, eleven whites held, him aloft above the suffocating napalm smoke until a rescue chopper arrived. On Hamburger Hill, a white paratrooper tried vainly to breathe life into a fallen black medic...
...believed that racial troubles in Viet Nam are getting worse. Only 6% thought that racial relations were improving. "Just like civilian life," one black Marine said, "the white doesn't want to see the black get ahead...
...Viet Nam and his suffering at home. These men are a new generation of black soldiers. Unlike the veterans of a year or two ago, they are immersed in black awareness and racial pride. It is only this fall and winter that they will be returning to civilian life in the cities. If they find that nothing has changed there, then they could constitute a formidable force in the streets of America, schooled and tempered in all the violent arts as no generation of blacks has ever been...
...Mighty Oilcan. Dirksen was apparently serene about such political transmogrifications, which struck others as a trifle manic. "Change," he once observed, "is inherent to life. The only persons who don't change are dead, or involuntarily confined in mental hospitals." More than an ideologue, Dirksen was a total and masterly politician. His 35 years on Capitol Hill equipped him with intricate parliamentary skills, and his basic instincts were conciliatory. "The oilcan is mightier than the sword," he believed. Moreover, from his first days in Washington until his death, his primary concern went to the heart of public policy...
Lexicographer Bergen Evans of Northwestern University believes that euphemisms persist because "lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable." It is virtuous, but a bit beside the point, to contend that lies are deplorable. So they are; but they cannot be moralized or legislated away, any more than euphemisms can be. Verbal miasma, when it deliberately obscures truth, is an offense to reason. But the inclination to speak of certain things in uncertain terms is a reminder that there will always be areas of life that humanity considers too private, or too close to feelings of guilt, to speak...