Word: plights
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Plight of Gifted Children What does it say about the future of the U.S. when school districts like that in McHenry County, Ill. [April 23], spend $700 more on each handicapped child than on each gifted one? Although it makes us appear humanitarian, it also indicates dangerous shortsightedness...
...plight of U.S. passenger travel is downright humiliating when it is compared with the superb services of, say, Japan, France and Britain. British trains run so close to the mark that passengers carp about a five-minute overdue arrival. Japan's celebrated bullet trains, at up to 130 m.p.h., make the U.S. counterparts seem like earthworms. Naturally such service does not come free. Britain subsidizes its trains at a yearly rate of $728 million, Japan (with less than half the U.S. track mileage) at $4.1 billion and France at $930 million...
There has been little problem finding American sponsors for the Indochinese. After seeing a documentary on the plight of the boat people, Governor Robert Ray of Iowa wrote President Carter and said his state wished to add 1,500 more refugees this year to its current Indochinese population of 3,500. Ray offered those arriving last week "a new beginning, an opportunity to build new lives for yourselves and your children," and called on lowans to "remember that our own ancestors were also boat people...
Intentional deception sometimes leaves the citizenry in a plight as awkward as Hendrie's. Last month a former ranking employee charged that the Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corp. of Niagara Falls, N. Y., had kept workers in the dark about the hazards of toxic chemicals they dealt with. Federal atomic authorities, it was disclosed last month, were encouraged by President Dwight Eisenhower to confuse the public about the risks of radiation fallout during the atomic bomb tests in Nevada in the 1950s; Government officials refused to warn inhabitants of nearby regions that they were absorbing possibly lethal doses...
Plainly the citizen's plight is not subject to quickie remedy. Yet any solution would have to entail a shift in the relationship between the priests of knowledge and the lay public. The expert will have to play a more conscious role as citizen, just as the ordinary American will have to become ever more a student of technical lore. The learned elite will doubtless remain indispensable. Still, the fact that they are exalted over the public should not mean that they are excused from responsibility to it-not unless the Jeffersonian notion of popular self-rule...