Word: assertion
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is not to deny that the men who resist the will of their captors often perform feats of heroism and that some would hold themselves in contempt if they failed to try. The struggle against the captor can become an obsessive way to assert one's defiance of a hostile universe. But the majority of men are not assailed by such temptations of existential heroism. For the most part, the U.S. serviceman fights hard, risks his life and sometimes gives it in the service of his country. It seems unreasonable to ask him to continue risking his life...
Many Jewish religious leaders are worried about another danger?that the Jew may be losing his identity. Today's militant black asserts his identity, and this, they argue, is a message that the Jew should understand and apply to himself. If the blacks succeed, and if in the process the U.S. learns better to tolerate diversity, Jews will be among the gainers, because they will be that much freer to assert their own identity. That will be the moment, many Jewish leaders feel, when Jews will come back into the civil rights movement?out of self-interest...
...have gotten it in the neck, too; yet they've been extraordinarily successful in this country. How do I explain their success and black nonsuccess?" They're certainly not going to conclude that Jews are better than black people. But there is a convenient alternative explanation. Just assert that the Jews were successful only by cheating, and that the people they cheated were black. So in one fell swoop you explain both Jewish success and black nonsuccess. But there are a lot of Jews who are so obviously good guys that it's hard to say that...
...rock and roll being submerged under the pseudo-heavy "sound" music of the more pretentious West Coast groups -- the Miami Pop Festival had enough talent on display to keep one's fears tiny. Country Joe and the Fish, say, who came on unprepossessing but grow in stature as they assert their calm and confident rapport with the audience all building up to that staggering moment when they launch into "Fixing to Die"--in such a way does rock and roll gell musical and spiritual elements to produce instants of screaming intensity...
...Republicans in control of the White House and all the big-state governorships except Texas, Congress becomes the Democrats' principal sounding board and fortress. In opposition to the White House but in firm control of Capitol Hill, the congressional Democrats thus have wider responsibility and opportunity to assert themselves than they have had with a Democratic President insistent on passing his own legislative program...