The loudest outcry about poverty seemed to come in the wealthiest country by far in the world. According to most calculations, ____A1____ most of the 1945-1970 period the United States had a standard of living well ____A2____ Europe’s and many times above the world ____A3____ . Yet ____A4____ about grinding poverty, hunger, and dreadful need proceed more from the United States than from countries with one-fortieth of their living standard. An annual per capita income of eight dollars is____A5____ of much of Africa and Asia and not a little of South America.
It would seem strange to these people ____A6____ they only aware of the fact that American radicals demand a ____A7____ from an American ____A8____ to the far corners of the globe so that the money thus saved can be spent raising the standard of living of ____A9____ Americans. What this last point suggests is not so much that human ____A10____ are never to be satisfied though this is doubtlessly true, and the American suburbanite ____A11____ of his second car and his color TV suffers just as ____A12____ as an African farmer in need of a second cow and a screen door. Rather, it suggests the ____A13____ of contemporary breach of social ____A14____ —the emancipation of the individual self.
People have learned to consider any ____A15____ to personal fulfillment an ____A16____ insult. They have greatly expanded the circle of self-awareness. They no longer accept sharp limitations on individual desires in the ____A17____ of the group. The amount of potential human discontent has always been ____A18____ — misery, failure, misfitting, bitterness, hatred, envy ____A19____ telling. It has usually failed of ____A20____ , and in the past it was accepted passively as being beyond help.
A2