He felt erased, his suffering – which in the past had enlightened the public and challenged science – suddenly insignificant.
A league facing a challenge suddenly found itself in a crisis.
But such a challenge suddenly became harder to picture as the two sat side by side on national television and in community events last week.
Brian Fredrick, the vice-president for communications and development at the A.L.S. Association, told me, "The challenge suddenly made a lot of people who probably didn't even know who Lou Gehrig was aware of the disease.
But a bigger, more costly challenge suddenly loomed.
Because if I could live through that and survive, daily challenges suddenly don't seem so daunting.
Two big, nonviolent demonstrations against election fraud and for democracy have suddenly challenged the authoritarian rule of the career K.G.B. man Vladimir V. Putin.
Throughout Latin America, Vatican II sparked a severe crisis, as a reactionary Church hierarchy, aligned with oligarchs and dictators, was suddenly challenged by priests, nuns, and grassroots "base communities" that took the council as a mandate for social change.
With the expansion projects of Portugal and Spain throughout the world between the 15th and the 17th centuries, travelers, conquistadors, missionaries, art theorists, and collectors were suddenly challenged by the encounter with a myriad new forms, images, objects, sculptures, cities, monuments, and techniques those produced and developed in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
