In any event, it is the Constitution's sometimes deliberately general text, and not the unenacted thoughts of those who drafted or approved it, that binds future generations.

It has become the physical expression of a living tradition which binds generations of students.

That chain of succulent sliced tomatoes that binds generations and knits summers of picnics into the sturdy tapestry of family is threatened.

In an assessing the importance of historic preservation, Miss Vanatko wrote that it created "a feeling of belonging, being a part of the monumental endeavor which will bind present and future generations."

Second, news about the gathering evoked the tangled confluence of guilt, indifference and denial that binds younger generations of Austrians to forebears who grew to maturity before and after Hitler's annexation of their country in 1938.

However, the price of that protection should not be to bind future generations to the mistakes of the past.

"The social contract that's supposed to bind generations is coming under tremendous strains," said Professor Newman of Columbia.

But to Aggies, as students and alumni are known, the bonfire is a 90-year tradition that binds generations to one another and to the university.

It is a family jewel and a process that binds generations with the land from which it sprang.

The hip-hop generation's aggressive examination of death, often turning to religious language and symbols, is, he added, "becoming the rhetorical cord that binds generations divided by differences of belief and cultural expression."