Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From prosperity to torpor in two decades...
...Brandeis quintet had gone into its swan song and had yet to emerge from the profound torpor. In a singular exhibition of botched marksmanship, the Judges repeatedly rent the oxygen with reckless abandon from any and all points on the floor, as their shooting percentage rivalled the life expenctancy of starved fruit flies...
...individual initiative and social concern for progress. "What holds back many LDCs is the people who live there," says P.T. Bauer. "Material achievement depends primarily on people's attitudes, motivation and mores. In many LDCs, popular mores are often uncongenial to economic development; there is widespread fatalism and torpor and preference for a contemplative life." For many traditional African societies, work is considered only a means of survival rather than a way to improve one's living standard...
...three weeks before they were found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair. Evidence suggesting that their "confessions" had been coerced slowed the process not a bit. Later investigations strongly suggested that the two men were innocent but by then the local law was back in its familiar subtropical torpor. So it was not until last week, twelve years after they were first locked up, that Pitts and Lee were finally set free...
...that some of the old values and restraints have been battered by recent upheavals?war, riots, assassinations, racial strife, situational ethics, the youth rebellion. As disillusionment sets in, fewer and fewer Americans look to the churches, schools or Washington for moral leadership. Stern observers of today's widespread ethical torpor tend to agree with the 19th century French criminologist Jean Lacassagne: "A society gets the criminals it deserves...