Word: powerlessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...disaster in Vietnam, the U.S. grew so timid about flexing its muscles in the Third World that it lost the will and ability to defend "legitimate interests" there. As a result, when the Tehran mob broke traditional standards of international law and took the embassy occupants hostage, America felt powerless to respond. To avoid such embarassing nuisances in the future, the Pentagon's friends in Congress argue, the U.S. must develop a "quick-strike force" able to dump a motorized division anywhere in the Third World within 60 days. Congress approved such a force two years ago, but it took...
...took some 60 Americans as hostages. Their demand: surrender the deposed Shah of Iran, currently under treatment in Manhattan for cancer of the lymphatic system and other illnesses, as the price of the Americans' release. While flatly refusing to submit to such outrageous blackmail, the U.S. was all but powerless to free the victims. As the days passed, nerves became more frayed and the crisis deepened. So far as was known, the hostages had been humiliated but not harmed. Yet with demonstrators chanting "Death to America" outside the compound, there was no way to guarantee that the event would...
...Chief Justice Earl I Warren, the Supreme Court fashioned I a goad for social progress out of two 14th Amendment phrases-due process and equal protection of the laws-with specific application to civil rights and criminal law. Liberals praised the court for championing the rights of the traditionally powerless-blacks, the poor, criminal defendants. Others denounced it for excessive zeal and social meddling...
...national problems are not failings of the system or unfortunate deviations from the norm, and electing another Kennedy on a white horse will not help. When the system works perfectly--business as usual--the poor, the powerless, minorities get screwed. The left should realize it has little future in presidential politics and throw itself into community organizing...
...donkey's silent writhing drives Rosa from her country. The beating captures in one unbearable moment the essence of South Africa for Rosa Burger--her implication as a white in blacks' suffering. As a white spectator, she is powerless to stop the donkey's suffering or those of the blacks in her country...