Word: final
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...shots go, theirs wasn't heard round the world. But the students are foot soldiers in a growing revolt being waged in classrooms, car-pool lines and statehouses across the U.S. The enemy? The standardized exams being taken by so many kids in the final days of the school year. Unlike the fill-in-the-bubble tests of yesteryear, which often did little more than single out kids for accelerated classes, this exhaustive new breed of tests is increasingly used to determine not only whether students get diplomas but also whether the school gets funding and teachers get raises...
...universality of the horror, to trivialize the deed by stipulating that it was a "hate crime." Further, suppose the people who did the daily work of Auschwitz really were "just following orders"? Was Adolf Eichmann executed in Jerusalem for the state of mind in which he pursued the Final Solution? No doubt quite a few Nazis could honestly claim that they were not anti-Semitic. Who would care to blaspheme by saying, "It's not so much that they killed 6 million Jews, but that they were so hateful about it"? In a decent, intelligent society, deed overrides motive; motive...
...create a single movement, but Draskovic's withdrawal makes that very unlikely," says Anastasijevic. "Besides, right now the European soccer championships are on, and everyone is at home or in cafes watching the games on television - the revolution is postponed." And while student actions may resume after the final whistle blows, Slobodan Milosevic's grip on power looks even firmer today than it did a year ago, when he surrendered Kosovo...
...this time, through the scrupulous, if self-interested, exercise of their franchise, boomers will yank the reins of society out of the hands of their children. In every other sphere, we may be every bit as faded as a poster from the original Woodstock. But here, in one final effort to forestall Boomerdammerung, we will summon the vigor to plant our solipsistic flagpole, piercing the heart of the larger society...
Thus casual Friday may not be our final legacy after all. Instead, we may create a gerontocracy of such unity and might that it will either utterly dominate the American political map or provoke all-out generational warfare. In a nation in which only 66 million vote in off-year congressional elections, a bloc of some 80 million people motivated by their desperate self-interest will become dauntingly powerful...