Word: 80s
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Perhaps the most telling sign that even America's softest hearts are hardening is a radical reframing of the debate into terms that reject a sympathetic view of the homeless. In the '80s, the issue's leading spokesman was Robert Hayes, founder of the Coalition for the Homeless, who identified the three main causes of homelessness as "housing, housing and housing." People who challenged that thinking were accused of blaming the victims. Today the leading voices are authors Alice Baum and Donald Burnes, who claim the very word "homelessness" is a misnomer coined by activists to persuade the public that...
...middle decades of the century, there was an apparent consistency to the kinds of people who waited in line and their reasons for being there. But the massive expulsions and migrations of the 1970s and '80s, combined with the recent geopolitical switch from the cold war to the new world order, scrambled all that. These days, by the time people get permission to leave, their initial motivation might have disappeared, sometimes replaced by another. Nonetheless, the longings themselves are familiar: to escape war, to find religious freedom, to join relatives, to make an honest buck...
...Baptists," Yuri explains matter-of-factly, his gaze direct and intense."We have always been persecuted here for our religious beliefs. We always will be." Some Americans, familiar with the Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, assume that religious discrimination in Russia ended along with mandated Marxist atheism. But the Khamovs, whose fellow Baptists make up less than one-half of 1% of the population, say otherwise. The motherland, they say, has simply exchanged a state credo of godlessness for an older tradition: the hegemony of the Russian Orthodox Church. Yuri smiles as he recalls...
...business already flows daily through the city's seaport and airport: perishables from Latin America, electronics from the Far East, perfumes and alcohol from Europe. Going out are the goods -- everything from bulldozers to blenders -- that Latin America needs to rebuild its infrastructure after the dormant decade of the '80s. In return, Central America, Chile and Brazil send about 350,000 tons of refrigerated produce annually to Miami. The airport runs the largest cut-flower operation in the world, daily processing 15,000 boxes of buds from south of the border...
Curriculum changes like these -- which really amount to a rethinking of what is required to be an informed citizen -- have become commonplace since the twin phenomena of political correctness and prescribed multiculturalism emerged into national consciousness at the end of the '80s. Like much else in American culture, the changes have been most visible first in California, the place where the face of the nation is changing most rapidly. There, Hispanic and Asian presences have both fueled and complicated the p.c. and multicultural debates that initially arose out of polar conflicts between blacks and whites or men and women...