Word: truisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This was a year that disproved the truism that scenes of tragedy all blur together, that photographs of famine in Biafra and Ethiopia, Sudan and then Somalia just pile on in layers, forming a callous around the conscience. Brought face to face one more time with starvation, the world did not just shrug. And pictures gave other conflicts their own unforgettable faces. Some of the video-game visuals from last year's fighting in the Persian Gulf were strangely antiseptic, an invitation to forget that war is the mass production of individual suffering. The photographs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where...
...saddest truism in Russia is that life is harder now. Not that ordinary citizens ever lived very well, but most could afford the basics. Today soaring prices and an almost totally worthless currency have reduced even that way of life to a bare minimum. Look at what the unfulfilled promise of reform has brought the Vaktin family...
...peace in the 21st century, heralded by the lifting of the nuclear arms threat in the 1990s. In the century ahead, the world will contain more democracies than ever before, and they will dominate in Europe, the Americas and the countries of the Pacific Rim. Since it is a truism that democratic states do not make war on one another, warfare should become essentially irrelevant for these nations, most of which will reduce their armed forces to the minimum necessary for individual or collective defense. "We're not going to see nation-states bullying one another as they have...
When a shop selling nothing but biographies opened in Greenwich Village in New York City a few years ago, it affirmed both a well-established truism (Manhattan is a bookwormy hothouse) and a brand new one: as this century winds down, the number of biographies manifestly exceeds the supply of deserving subjects. How much did the world need an account of the life of Elton John, let alone the two that were published this year...
...truism to say the problem most often begins at home. When parents are not able to transmit the values of achievement, the ever present peer group fills the vacuum. Moniqua Woods, 12, a student at the Webster Academy in Oakland, says it is easy to spot neglected children because they "come to school every day yawning and tired. You know they stayed out late that night." Concurs classmate Mark Martin, also 12: "Some of the kids' parents are on drugs. You go in their house, and you can smell it." Such a homelife can further strengthen the attitude that school...