Word: underclass
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HISTORICAL significance of the 1980s is that the Winners, in the rush to defend their privileged positions, forgot that the rest of society existed. Granted, the Winners do a lot of agonizing about the plight of the ghetto "underclass." And then there...
...raise them, and those who can afford kids aren't having them. O.K. then. Who should raise the first generation of 21st century teenagers? The healthy, efficient yuppies, who just might be able to fit a child into their Filofax schedules? Or the chain-smoking unmarrieds of the underclass, with lives of noisy desperation awaiting them like so many episodes of Married . . . With Children? In a society where childless can still be a near synonym for lifeless, are the "wrong" people having too many kids? Are there any right parents...
...deficit that neither political party is willing to confront, a kind of neurosis of accepted limits has taken hold from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other. Whatever the situation -- the unprecedented opportunity to promote democracy in Eastern Europe, the spreading plague of drugs, the plight of the underclass, the urgent need for educational reform -- the typical response from Washington consists of encouraging words and token funds. Yet voters, especially the better-organized ones, continue to demand -- and often receive -- more benefits and services while rejecting higher taxes...
...fostering the growth of a black middle class, dispensing thousands of city jobs and using minority set-aside programs to direct a portion of city contracts toward black-owned businesses. Unfortunately, they have fared no better than their white counterparts in solving the intractable problems of the growing black underclass...
...strained credulity with prissy pronouncements. The media are culpable as well, for sensationalized coverage that has often served to glamourize the menace they are decrying. Then there are the social-policy conservatives who purport to see no connection between the flagrant neglect of the economic problems of the underclass and the current crack epidemic. And sad to say, well-intentioned parents can also contribute to the hysteria by viewing drugs as the sole cause of their children's problems, rather than as a symptom of family-wide crisis...