Word: shiftlessly
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...considered a burden, and no one is much richer than anyone else. The trespasser is unknown, there are no clear-cut property lines, merely undefined boundaries that stand open to visitors-who are welcomed with refreshment. Unemployment is high there, sometimes reaching 40%-not because the society is shiftless, but because it believes that only the able-bodied should work, and then no more than necessary. Food is abundant and easily gathered. The people are comfortable, peaceable, happy and secure...
...laughs that arise from calculated invention. A Puerto Rican widower, Popi (Alan Arkin) holds down three jobs to keep his family together. He is kept so busy that his children's hour is shrunk to a minute, and his two boys, Luis and Junior, are reduced to shiftless street Arabs...
...technique. In Newton (Mass.) High School, electronics students learn radio repair with vacuum tubes instead of solidstate sets. And in classrooms from Bangor, Me., to Beverly Hills, Calif., future auto mechanics finish their courses with out scraping a knuckle inside an automatic transmission (though 80% of U.S. cars are shiftless). One-half of all shop students in the U.S. are plugging away at home economics and agriculture-hardly critical crafts-while only 15% practice more pertinent skills such as industrial design, medical technology and visual communications. "I worked in the shops for four years," says one still-unemployed electronics graduate...
...fact, in the nation, to this extent: it has allowed white people, with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation, only the Negro they wish to see. As the walls come down they will be forced to take another, harder look at the shiftless and the menial and will be forced into a wonder concerning them which cannot fail to be agonizing. It is not an easy thing to be forced to reexamine a way of life and to speculate, in a personal way, on the general injustice. -- James Baldwin, Harper's Magazine, October...
Predestined Harbor. For shiftless, Kentucky-born Ben Purnell, the road to Benton Harbor was a circuitous one. After traveling around the U.S. in the 1890s in a carnival wagon, he landed in Detroit and made off with 200 followers of the Israelite faith founded by 18th century English Fanatic Joanna Southcott. Because the Lord was "bent on harboring people," Purnell decided that Benton Harbor was their predestined home...