Word: reiche
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...veteran of the election trail, Diaz found the spirit of the Reich campaign refreshing. She was working alongside young people—many of them volunteering for a politician for the first time in their lives—and older volunteers working for a candidate for the first time since their youth...
...candidate was an academic who got waxed by a ruthless politician. But as I closed the striped curtain on the voting booth, and again as I read election results online that night, resignation—and not my father’s optimism—dulled my disappointment. Robert Reich had lost and this, I knew, was a symptom of the grinding Massachusetts political machine and of America’s inexorable slide to the right. I knew I would asphyxiate if I held my breath waiting for these things to change...
...something Reich said when he spoke in the Science Center days before his defeat kept flinging itself against my thoughts like a June bug against a window screen...
Don’t succumb to cynicism, Reich had told the college students jammed into Science Center A. But cynicism, especially where politics is concerned, is the bulwark of our generation. What else could protect us from the political scandals of our youth—from the dimly-recalled Iran-Contra affair, from Bill Clinton’s indiscretions, from the muddle of the 2000 presidential election? I have been a cynic since the onset of adolescence—have been proud of my cynicism, have recognized it for the sturdy rampart it is, have smiled wryly as it, undented...
This, I think, is what Robert Reich must have seen in us: the cynicism that hardens into apathy. He must have seen that what protects us from disappointment is something more poisonous than our parents’ idealism. He must have known that by refusing to have our hopes in politics dashed we have refused to hope at all. He must have known that, crouched behind the bulwark of our cynicism, we were powerless to improve the world. He must have known that we can only feel the optimism that propelled our parents if we stand up, lower our pasteboard...