Word: placide
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While the baby boomers had a placid childhood in the 1950s, which helped inspire them to start their revolution, today's twentysomething generation grew up in a time of drugs, divorce and economic strain. They virtually reared themselves. TV provided the surrogate parenting, and Ronald Reagan starred as the real-life Mister Rogers, dispensing reassurance during their troubled adolescence. Reagan's message: problems can be shelved until later. A prime characteristic of today's young adults is their desire to avoid risk, pain and rapid change. They feel paralyzed by the social problems they see as their inheritance: racial strife...
...learned to live with -- and in the end any situation seemed acceptable as long as it was "under control." Was it not a bit inconsiderate on the part of all those Poles, Hungarians and Czechs, of Charter 77 and all, to rock the boat? And now even the placid, nondescript East Germans were taking to the streets, without giving a thought to the delicate balance of power prevailing in the Old World, to the problems of NATO, to the risk involved in any sort of change...
...placid taxi driver called Life, that identity means confinement to a segregated township. There, boredom and despair are as palpable as the omnipresent automobile carcasses and piles of beer cans. Jaiprakash Bhula is an educated Indian haberdasher, contemptuous of racial decrees. His question gnaws at South African policy: If whites really believed they were better, "would it be necessary to create laws guaranteeing social, monetary, and political superiority...
...congenial and compassionate sex," he embarks on a quixotic quest for female companionship, only to experience shattering disappointment at the hands of those he seeks to love. Lewis' Bildungsroman is an ironic twist on the 19th century romantic novels he studies in his library carrel. This hero struggles for placid domesticity; it is the women who behave like cads...
...Hugo could not destroy what most people come to the Caribbean to find. It could not make the sea less bright or the sun less clear, or bestir the starfish or break the spirits of the islands' hosts. The present flurry of activity may be at odds with the placid island tempo, but it reflects that most precious tourist commodity: the desire to please...