Word: oaths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wistful inner ear, one imagines a soft transcontinental buzz, the sound of 13,000 consciences alert and intricately working. "Well," says each troubled voice, "I'd like to strike. I think we have plenty of reason to strike-wages, hours, job strain. But I signed an oath when I took the job. It would be dishonorable to strike. We have to find some other...
...waves in a sea shell. It did not occur to the air-traffic controllers to deliver that sort of archaic soliloquy, haunted by scruples. Most of them judged, briskly enough, that their desire for a 32-hour week and a minimum of $30,462 per year superseded the oath to which they once put their signatures...
...moment the issue of the violated oath did not come clear. It was deflected a little by a legal question: Don't all workers have a right to strike? Yes, said the American Civil Liberties Union. Not if they are government employees, said a 1947 law and the Reagan Administration. The strikers chose the A.C.L.U.'s view of things...
...beyond transient legalities, the strike opened the door upon a more primitive question: What is the worth (moral, financial, mystical) of a person's oath? What do we mean when we promise, when we vow, when we pledge our word? Whatever their union's legal case may be, the controllers did take an oath; was that not a binding deed? Many Americans found themselves distantly disturbed that what was once a matter of some human solemnity should be brushed aside as if it were merely a technical detail. The social edifice shuddered slightly; down in the basement...
...mutual obligation (and perhaps by an equal and opposite network of betrayal). The system starts with nods and smiles and wordless understandings; it elaborates itself interminably through certain assumptions, casual promises, oral agreements, laborious plans, written contracts and formal vows, and ends finally in that thunderous atavism, the solemn oath: the promise with a jolt of the sacred in it, the upraised hand, the divinity standing by to witness...