Word: matter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...What Next?: Surviving the Twenty-First Century went to the printers, Russia has sent troops into Georgia and the global financial system has cracked so badly that some are pontificating about the end of capitalism. Yet Patten's ambitious book is so good that this inevitable flaw doesn't matter...
...world has already gained from the Obama candidacy. In one sense, and one sense alone, his skin color does matter. In Asia (with the exception, perhaps, of India), it is virtually unthinkable that an individual from a minority could rise to become a serious national leader. Whatever we may think of the U.S., of its hardly stellar handling of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, of its lack of oversight, restraint and thrift over the financial meltdown, the fact that a Barack Obama can overcome the disadvantages associated with being black and have a shot at the highest office...
...well, you’re either one tribe or the other, one guy or the other guy. Your calling as a humanist, as an intelligent creature, is to outstrip the conditions which you are landed with, to get some vision of a cultivated, tolerant, civic society. No matter how well-disposed you are, no matter how personally irreproachable your political or religious attitudes, you dwell in a place which is troubled. You’re answerable to that, especially when violence erupts, and lives are being lost, and lives are being taken...
...cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called “The Gravel Walks,” which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like...
...failed to do so because of a scheduling conflict; some were merely apathetic, others illiterate, and still others indecisive. Political participation is the bedrock of American democracy, and those citizens abstaining out of mere lack of interest should remember that their vote, however insignificant it may seem, does actually matter...