The generic elements — the slow gathering of evidence — forces the past, by degrees, into clarification of the present, but with this twist: we are what the past has made us, yet at any point we could have chosen differently.
"We've tried on a daily basis to see if there were things out there that could make us better and yet not hurt us".
Proponents of Washington's devastating weak-dollar policy have promised for years that devaluations would make us more competitive, yet jobs, capital spending and innovation keep moving abroad to avoid the shrinking dollar.
We like routine to make us feel safe, yet change is really the only safety.
Those precious, tender moments of pause are what make us most alive yet most vulnerable.
LORD, make us selfless, but not yet.
Neoliberalism promised to make us all free – and yet today we can't escape its clutches even in old age.
So the message of the season can be read as something akin to the young St. Augustine's prayer: please, Lord, make us different, but not yet.
Now, she's chosen the latter method of surprise to make us crack a smile yet again: She just admitted that she had a short-lived modeling career at Abercrombie & Fitch.
We're all word people, so this made us laugh, yet there was an unavoidable whiff of "I married an old man who thinks he's in One Direction," which is when I stopped laughing.
After 20 years of battling to get government to take the climate seriously, we must wake up to the fact that the very air we breathe is killing us and making us bankrupt, yet governments are deliberately making the situation worse.
