Word: urbane
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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VERY FEW STUDENTS in these rural states choose to leave their cozy existence to seek adventure in the urban world outside. Of those who seek higher education at all, most attend local or state universities to learn a little, party a lot, get married and come back to their home towns. Many marry as soon as they graduate from high school and immediately settle into a life of moderate work, church functions, child-raising, putting on weight, and sitting on the front porch on summer evenings. Living a secure, contented life, these people become part of a strong, tightly-knit...
Certainly this is a rural-urban phenomenon, not something simply geographical. People continue to flock to the suburbs where neighbors move in and out so fast that any social bonds cannot last. The work force there is mobile. The chief mode of business is the monolithic, impersonal corporation, in which ties between workers are weak, and the alienation is intense. The only social unit becomes the family, not the community. And without the community to instill respect for conjugal ties, families often dissolve. Men, women and children are left alone and isolated in a volatile, confusing world...
...ideological or political goals. Violence is the attraction?the end, not the means. Notes Brian Jenkins, an associate director at Rand Corp.: "The act of terror itself is an ideology." Harvey Schlossberg, a psychiatrist who trains the New York City Police Department's anti-terrorist unit, contends that many urban terrorists are compensating for inadequate personalities. "If they cry and stamp their feet, no one pays attention. But by taking hostages, in a matter of minutes the whole world is watching. This helps overcome their ego deficit." What motivates many terrorists, observes University of Munich Political Scientist Kurt Sontheimer...
...young urban terrorist, in Europe at least, claims to speak for the working class. In fact his background is most often middle or upper middle class, and the common man is as frightened of his methods as is the millionaire. Franco Ferracuti, a forensic psychiatrist at Rome University, interviewed several members of Italy's notorious Red Brigade. He found that most of them came from well-to-do, churchgoing families and had attended universities, majoring in the social sciences. All had witnessed, and many had participated in, the Europe-wide May revolution of students in 1968; the Red Brigade terrorists...
There is no simple or definitive answer as to why West Germany has become such a fertile breeding ground for urban terrorists. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, speaking of terrorism generally to a group of European industrialists and TIME editors, correspondents and executives last week, suggested as a cause the loss of a sense of relevance by today's youth, combined with a loss of authority by democratic governments since the early postwar years. Many West German observers believe that the 1968 generation of student protesters developed an idealistic hatred of their country's sleek materialism during the "economic...