Word: shortly
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Unlike Sociologist Paul Hirsch, I am not convinced that a plausible defense can be made for excessive TV viewing [Oct. 20]. Television is a piece of technology that has not served society well. It stifles creativity, limits imagination and dulls character. In short, TV acts like an electronic pacifier...
...many people as somehow an institutional prop that we shouldn't throw out in an age of instability and rapid change. May be it is just one more thing that it is a little too much for people to be willing to comprehend and absorb in a relatively short period of time...
...again, emphatically. Watergate intervened, throwing an election to the Democrats. But then came Proposition 13, and inevitably behind it Ronald Reagan, the Kemp-Roth tax cut, an end to the Environmental Protection Agency, the death of the Equal Rights Amendment, a one-sided partnership between business and government. In short, the restoration of the same American dream that once made tranquil the sleep of Calvin Coolidge but haunted Herbert Hoover...
...sleep blissfully for the next 10 or 15 years--they years when our slide gains invisible but irresistible momentum--dreaming only of increased discretionary income. Reagan and his ilk, assuming they can avoid war and keep the Pentagon to five sides, will be able to solve inflation in the short run, and that's all that really troubles Americans. Reduced government spending, coupled with a traditional industrial base growing to meet the demands of Betamax-hungry consumers, will make the economy seem healthy compared to the current transitional chaos. And the political rewards of such success will go, naturally...
Even organizing a neighborhood, though, requires some interest on the part of the neighbors, an interest the opiate of short-term economic gain will dull. And anyway, the organizers will recognize soon enough that improving one corner of Cambridge while the country, and with it the world, heads toward cataclysm is like serving drinks aboard a 747 as it nosedives into the Pacific. When that realization dawns, survivalists won't be the only ones buying guns. Americans believe blissfully that political violence is impossible here, overlooking the wave of bombings that rocked this country in the late 1960s. Backed...