Word: wisdoms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...really believe that the all the people of the United States own the arts and the humanities in any real sense? Ownership of such goods is the result--as we students know--of hard work and study, not of abstract right. Item four is similarly insufficient: "Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants." This declaration borders on parody with its extravagant claims...
Scientists have assumed that any change caused by humans would occur over many decades. They are no longer so sure. As climatologist Peter deMenocal put it, "When I began my Ph.D. in 1986, the conventional wisdom was that it took 1,000 years to end an ice age; in '91 that figure was lowered to 100 years, and then just two years later, Richard Alley at Penn State published a paper about climate changing in two to five years...
...seen relatively few presidential characters on the big screen since the era of Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May back in the '60s. "People get enough of him on the news every night. They don't want to see him at the multiplex." This was the conventional wisdom in Hollywood at the time. Two enervating elections and four draining (though interesting) years of Bill Clinton later, you might think it would still hold true...
...body count at Rancho Santa Fe is a reminder that this conventional wisdom falls short. These are the waning years of the 20th century, and out on the margins of spiritual life there's a strange phosphorescence. As predicted, the approach of the year 2000 is coaxing all the crazies out of the woodwork. They bring with them a twitchy hybrid of spirituality and pop obsession. Part Christian, part Asian mystic, part Gnostic, part X-Files, it mixes immemorial longings with the latest in trivial sentiments. When it all dissolves in overheated computer chat and harmless New Age vaporings...
...ended and said, "that was cheesy." It was indeed. But they saw far more than the filmmakers chose to show them; they walked away, though only small children, with new understanding. I would not be surprised if, looking back years from now, they see something familiar in the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever...