Word: meanness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Everyone is for law and order, or at least for his own version of it. Few Americans can define precisely what they mean by the term, but the belief that law and order is being destroyed represents a trauma unmatched in intensity since the alarums generated by Joe McCarthy in the Korean era. The issue has virtually anesthetized the controversy over Viet Nam. It has distorted debate over pressing urban problems. It has perverted the presidential election, the closest thing in this secular republic to a sacred collective...
...with which to counter the militants. All at once, Northern liberals discovered that integration could mean demonstrations in front of their schools, protest marches on their main streets. All at once, Negroes were not just a faceless social cause, but a community of individuals, some of whom could be as intractable, nasty, destructive-and racist-as some whites had been all along. And through these discoveries ran the nagging realization that the more the Negroes got, the more they demanded. That this is a universal human trait was beside the point...
Whatever the solution, the question for Americans is not what's wrong with the police, but what citizens can do to help. For all its Birchite origin, there is no real alternative to the right-wing slogan, "Support your local police." In its proper definition, support would mean paying higher taxes for higher wages to attract better policemen, and for modern equipment to match modern tasks. It would also mean a constant concern for constitutional rights-and utmost respect for the cop who guards freedom as zealously as he upholds order...
...shepherds have an uncanny knack for avoiding booby traps (apparently, their ears can pick up the tiny sound made by the breeze on a taut trip wire). One handler, Marine Sergeant Roy Jergins, says: "I walk where my dog walks, and I walk right through the booby traps." Mean sentry dogs who attack anyone but their handlers guard key U.S. installations. Tracker dogs, Labrador retrievers trained in Malaysia, are used to sniff out enemy withdrawal routes. After one recent ambush in III Corps, a tracker led a U.S. unit on a 51-hr. chase that ended at an abandoned...
...colonies and keeping dissent well under control at home. But at the same time he said that his regime would seek greater communication with the people. He did not elaborate on what form that communication might take, but Portugals' long-oppressed liberals dared hope that it might mean a relaxation of the rigid press censorship that has stifled free expression in Portugal for decades...