Word: well-off
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Lacroix was born in 1950 into a well-off bourgeois family of engineers, and home was, on the whole, a comfortable cocoon for a little boy who can remember sketching all day long when he was three. The designer-to-be was particularly impressed by his grandfather, whom he describes as "very arrogant, like an actor." It is now a secure part of fashion legend that one day the old man asked Christian what he would like to be when he grew up. "Christian Dior," he shot back...
...concerned with the refinements of structure than with the shock effects of tabloid anecdote and an outraged moral tone. On the city's welfare system, for example: "The Poor are the most important people in New York, for their social welfare billions blow through the air for all the well-off to grab; where are the rich supposed to get their money from, the rich...
...Gorbachev's birth. Andrei's son Sergei drove a combine for a nearby government machine-tractor station. $ But Mikhail could hardly have helped hearing tales of the disruption that continued during his infancy. As General Secretary, Gorbachev has defended the collectivization and even the repression of the kulaks (well-off peasants), who were deported or executed as class enemies. But perhaps because of boyhood memories, he has criticized the brutality shown to a less prosperous group, the so-called middle peasants. A classmate remembers that as a college student after Stalin's death, Gorbachev spoke of a middle-peasant relative...
Denial extends to affluent communities as well. Police are often easily intimidated by a husband's clout in the community. Doctors turn away well-off women in the mistaken belief that they are simply overwrought or exaggerating. When a Los Angeles woman who endured weekly beatings throughout a 31-year marriage finally confided in her physician, she says, "he just looked at me strangely and changed the subject. Professionals don't want to admit that they, as a group, are not perfect...
...UPPER class nevertheless flagrantly ignores the very laws it has passed to control drugs. While they hold the rest of the population to a "Just Say No" standard, well-off adults and their children follow different rules. Stockbrokers and jet-setters snort coke at home while their sons and daughters smoke pot at parties. They know they are breaking the law, but they just don't care beyond their fear of getting caught...