Word: shiftlessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...memories were often harsh. The son of a shiftless, intemperate father, Shaw began tending the hardscrabble Alabama soil almost as soon as he could walk. When he was not plowing or picking cotton, he cut and hauled timber, hacked out railroad crossties, carved ax handles, wove baskets. At 21 he married, left his servitude to his father and entered another. Few economic systems can have been as cruelly deceptive as the one saddled on black Southern sharecroppers. They leased their land from whites, who also paid for the "furnishin' "-feed, fertilizer, tools-they needed to farm. At harvesttime sharecroppers...
...action is a bit shaky at first. A drawn-out scene introducing a band of "shiftless and lazy" characters is relatively unappealing. But the entrance of the skeptical Bill Walker, played with comic gusto by Dan Beckhard, threatens to shake the charitable base of the conversion-oriented mission. Beckhard acts as a conductor, setting the other characters on fire. They ignite at his caustic brutalizing of the mission's sacharine Jenny Hill...
...free spirit somehow blooming in a wasteland Western landscape. In the beginning-way back in 1925-a reasonable, ambitious rancher named Gid Frey loves her, but he is not "silly" enough for her taste. His buddy, Cowboy Johnny McCloud, also loves her, but he is too silly-or shiftless-for her. So she marries a real no-count whose fate (he dies a couple of years later) is no matter because before, during and after her marriage, Molly gives separate but equal bedroom time to her two true loves. In the process she bears a son to each of them...
...ambiguities in the law's view of family life become even more ambiguous when the law involves the payment of Government funds. About 62% of welfare recipients are women heads of household and their dependent children. Some politicians have enjoyed scolding these helpless people as shiftless idlers, but despite the law's gesture of protectiveness, a woman alone raising children is scarcely loafing. Nor can she do much better by trying to find work, if work exists. One recent study showed that a mother of three, after training for one category of available Government jobs, would gross only...
...ridiculous. You don't give people dirt to encourage them to work. There's not much incentive in that." On the other side, in the grip of inflation and rising taxes, those who pay the bill complain that too much is being given away to millions who are probably shiftless and lazy. In that view, welfare money means, as Ronald Reagan puts it: "A tax increase next year, the year after and the year after that, and on into the future as far as we can see." Thus the worst thing about the price tag of $14 billion is that...