Word: normalization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Today the fastest-rising practitioners of the sneak attack--what the Pentagon likes to call using "asymmetric warfare" to slip past America's vast military superiority--are fanatics pursuing hate. "The normal restraints on the use of violence don't apply to them," says Steven Simon, assistant director at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. These kinds of terrorists, he says, "want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead." More important, he adds, "they want God watching. That's why they don't care about claims of responsibility...
...their victims they seemed pretty normal at first, even admirable. Reinaldo Silvestre, a charming Miami con man with no medical training, is alleged to have operated on his plastic-surgery patients by shoving implants into their chests with a spatula; several were permanently mutilated. A drifter named Luis Garavito confessed in October to kidnapping, torturing and killing 140 children over five years in Colombia. Dylan Klebold went to the prom (and Eric Harris wanted to) before shooting up Columbine High in April. Predators with such little regard for morality and human life defy rational explanation, right...
...headed into the last week before Christmas vacation, Columbine High School was enjoying its first full month without a single warning or suicide or other incident related to the April 20 killing of 12 students and a teacher. School life was returning to some semblance of normal. But then came last week's release of videotapes made by the Columbine killers, first reported in TIME. And then on Wednesday a student using an Internet chat room received an anonymous threat against the school--which moved authorities to close the school and postpone exams. Back came the horrible memories...
...Principal Frank DeAngelis bunny-hopped with Snoopy. The crowd rocked when the band sang Noel to the tune of YMCA. Tim McLoone, president of Holiday Express, the concert's headline act, announced, "At 6:30 this morning they told me school was canceled. Do these people ever have a normal, dull day?" And the crowd roared...
MEMORY CHECK The Alzheimer's Association is urging families to take advantage of holiday reunions to assess elderly relatives for that most delicate of problems: memory loss. An association poll reveals, however, that 1 in 2 persons incorrectly believes normal forgetfulness could be Alzheimer's. To provide some better guidance, the group is offering a booklet of warning signs to those who call 800-272-3900. Among the disease's indicators: preparing a meal and forgetting to serve it; putting things in wrong places, such as a watch in a sugar bowl...