Amnesty Quotes

Kronos couldn't have risen if it hadn't been for a lot of demigods who felt abandoned by their parents," I said. "They felt angry, resentful, and unloved, and they had a good reason." Zeus's royal nostrils flared. "You dare accuse-" "No more undetermined children," I said. "I want you to promise to claim your children-all your demigod children-by the time they turn thirteen. They won't be left out in the world on their own at the mercy of monsters. I want them claimed and brought to camp so they can be trained right, and survive." "Now, wait just a moment," Apollo said, but I was on a roll. "And the minor gods," I said. "Nemesis, Hecate, Morpheus, Janus, Hebe--they all deserve a general amnesty and a place at Camp Half-Blood. Their children shouldn't be ignored. Calypso and the other peaceful Titan-kind should be pardoned too. And Hades-" "Are you calling me a minor god?" Hades bellowed.

AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

Bonnie and her mum are both members of Amnesty International," said Abigail. "Of course they are," murmured Madeline. This must be how Jennifer Aniston feels, thought Madeline, whenever she hears about Angelina and Brad adopting another orphan or two.

To properly do penance one must express contrition for one’s sins and perform acts to repair the damage caused by those transgressions. It is only when those acts are complete that the slate can truly be wiped clean and amnesty gives way to a new beginning.

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.

Christmas Amnesty. You can fall out of contact with a friend, fail to return calls, ignore e-mails, avoid eye contact at the Thrifty-Mart, forget birthdays, anniversaries, and reunions, and if you show up at their house during the holidays (with a gift) they are socially bound to forgive you—act like nothing happened. Decorum dictates that the friendship move forward from that point, without guilt or recrimination. If you started a chess game ten years ago in October, you need only remember whose move it is—or why you sold the chessboard and bought an Xbox in the interim. (Look, Christmas Amnesty is a wonderful thing, but it’s not a dimensional shift. The laws of time and space continue to apply, even if you have been avoiding your friends. But don’t try using the expansion of the universe an as excuse—like you kept meaning to stop by, but their house kept getting farther away. That crap won’t wash. Just say, “Sorry I haven’t called. Merry Christmas” Then show the present. Christmas Amnesty protocol dictates that your friend say, “That’s okay,” and let you in without further comment. This is the way it has always been done.)

You just hear the wind. And you just see the stars above you. They are beautiful. And then . . . they're gone.

How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table.

Your people are spoiled," Loki said. "You can't convince them to do anything." "We're spoiled?" Finn scoffed. "That would mean something if it weren't coming from a brat Prince." "I don't know why you find my comment so offensive." Loki sat up straighter. "I've seen the way these people treat Wendy, and she's their Princess. They're insolent." "They don't know her," Finn said. "It takes time, and it doesn't help that she spends so much of it with Vittra prisoners." "I'm not a prisoner." Loki looked disgusted. "I'm here on my own." "I do not understand that." Finn shook his head in disbelief. "Finn, he asked for amnesty, and I granted it," I said. "But your motivations completely baffle me," Finn said. "We're fighting the Vittra, and you let him stay without consequence." "It really pisses you off that much that she wants me around?" Loki asked, and Finn glared at him.

Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!

Loki started to speak, but his knees gave out. He pitched forward, and I rushed to catch him. He fell into my arms, and I lowered him to the floor. "Loki?" I brushed the hair back from his eyes, and they fluttered open. "Wendy." He smiled up at me, but the smile was weak. "If I'd known that this is what it would take to get you to hold me, I would've collapsed a long time ago." "What is going on, Loki?" I asked gently. If he hadn't been so obviously distressed, I would've swatted him for that comment, but he grimaced in pain when I touched his face. "Amnesty," he said thickly, and his eyes closed. "I need amnesty, Princess." His head tilted to the side, and his body relaxed. He'd passed out.

As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high.

I crumple on my bed. For a second, i believed that what i wanted more than anything in the world had come true. For a second, i believed that my dad was back. but he isn't. He's gone again. he's really truly gone and i know it. i know i'll never see him again no matter how much i want to. The candle in me has blown out and i'm afraid, really, really afraid, because my biggest fear is true. i have to live my life without my dad, my running partner, the guy who taught me amnesty and sang john lennon songs really off key.

Let my silence grow with noise as pregnant mothers grow with life. Let my silence permeate these walls as sunlight permeates a home. Let the silence rise from unwatered graves and craters left by bombs. Let the silence rise from empty bellies and surge from broken hearts. The silence of the hidden and forgotten. The silence of the abused and tortured. The silence of the persecuted and imprisoned. The silence of the hanged and massacred. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so the hungry may eat my words and the poor may wear my words. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so I may resurrect the dead and give voice to the oppressed. My silence speaks.

Turning to his right, Danny saw a great fig tree sparkle in many places inside its dark canopy of leaves, like a thing that knew its own heart.

Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what.

Embracing amnesty and open borders. Sure, other countries have borders (the ones most people are fleeing from), but discussing the possibility of an American border is smeared as racist—the

Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx.

Americans are under no moral obligation to grant amnesty to people who have broken our laws. “The moral thing to do” is usually defined as “following the law.” The fact that Democrats want 30 million new voters is not a good enough reason to ignore the law and screw over American workers, as well as legal immigrants already here.

So, if we're to make any sense of the mess that the pharmaceutical industry - and my profession - has made of the academic literature, then we need an amnesty: we need a full and clear declaration of all the distortions, on missing data, ghostwriting, and all the other activity described in this book, to prevent the ongoing harm that they still cause.

General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free sex and a free lay church in a free lay state.

Or does one accrue a deficit of malaise so large that one learns to find ways to consolidate it in one lump feeling with its own amnesties and grace periods?

Amnesty International, which was opening its yearlong campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia in response to the country’s horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless.

. One of the most idiotic jeers against animal lovers is the one about their preferring critters to people. As a matter of observation, it will be found that people who ‘care’—about rain forests or animals, miscarriages of justice or dictatorships— are, though frequently irritating, very often the same people. Whereas those who love hamburgers and riskless hunting and mink coats are not in the front ranks of Amnesty International.

I touched Loki's chest, running my fingers over the bumps of his scar. I didn't know why exactly, but I felt compelled to, as if the scar connected us somehow. "You just couldn't wait to get me naked, could you, Princess?" Loki asked tiredly. I started to pull my hand back, but he put his own hand over it, keeping it in pace. "No,I-I was checking for wounds," I stumbled. I wouldn't meet his gaze. "I'm sure." He moved his thumb, almost caressing my hand, until it hit my ring. "What's that?" He tried to sit up to see it, so I lifted my hand, showing him the emerald-encrusted oval on my finger. "Is that a wedding ring?" "No, engagement." I lowered my hand, resting it on the bed next to him. "I'm not married yet." "I'm not too late, then." He smiled and settled back in the bed. "Too late for what?" I asked. "To stop you, of course." Still smiling, he closed his eyes. "Is that why you're here?" I asked, failing to point out how near we were to my nuptials. "I told you why I'm here," Loki said. "What happened to you, Loki?" I asked, my voice growing thick when I thought about what he had to have gone through to get all those marks and bruises. "Are you crying?" Loki asked and opened his eyes. "No, I'm not crying." I wasn't, but my eyes were moist. "Don't cry." He tried to sit up, but he winced when he lifted his head, so I put my hand gently on his chest to keep him down. "You need to rest," I said. "I will be fine." He put his hand over mine again, and I let him. "Eventually." "Can you tell me what happened?" I asked. "Why do you need amnesty?" "Remember when we were in the garden?" Loki asked. Of course I remembered. Loki had snuck in over the wall and asked me to run away with him. I had declined, but he'd stolen a kiss before he left, a rather nice kiss. My cheeks reddened slightly at the memory, and that make Loki smile wider. "I see you do." He grinned. "What does that have to do with anything?" I asked. "That doesn't," Loki said, referring to the kiss. "I meant when I told you that the King hates me. He really does, Wendy." His eyes went dark for a minute. "The Vittra King did this to you?" I asked, and my stomach tightened. "You mean Oren? My father?" "Don't worry about it now," he said, trying to calm the anger burning in my eyes. "I'll be fine." "Why?" I asked. "Why does the King hate you? Why did he do this to you?" "Wendy, please." He closed his eyes. "I'm exhausted. I barely made it here. Can we have this conversation when I'm feeling a bit better? Say, in a month or two?" "Loki," I said with a sigh, but he had a point. "Rest. But we will talk tomorrow. All right?" "As you wish, Princess," he conceded, and he was already drifting back to sleep again. I sat beside him for a few minutes longer, my hand still on his chest so I could feel his heartbeat pounding underneath. When I was certain he was asleep, I slid my hand out from under his, and I stood up.

In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory.

He had the funny feeling that doors long bolted within him were being forced, that in the general amnesty of carnival something jailed in him since puberty was being let out— somewhat by mistake— into the open air, to be welcomed by the cheering mob.

The Chinese government was so sick of her shit that they offered her and all her pirates amnesty if she would just stop fucking them all up for a second. (She Caused a Riot: 100 Unknown Women Who Built Cities, Sparked Revolutions, and Massively Crushed It)

There was a family whose daughter had been killed, brutally killed, who came and said they supported the granting of amnesty to those who had killed their daughter so gruesomely. The parents had even opened a nonprofit to help people in the township where their daughter had been murdered, and they had even employed the men who had killed their daughter and whose amnesty they had supported.

Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?” Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. “It was in the time between Christ’s crucifixion and his Resurrection,” he went on. “The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It’s supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known.

The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it. Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.

Then yesterday Hitler dispatched an ultimatum: Either carry out the terms of the Berchtesgaden “agreement,” or the Reichswehr marches. A little after midnight this morning Schuschnigg and Miklas surrendered. The new Cabinet was announced, Seyss-Inquart is in the key post of Minister of the Interior, and there is an amnesty for all Nazis. Douglas Reed when I saw him today so indignant he could hardly talk. He’s given the London Times the complete story of what happened at Berchtesgaden. Perhaps it will do some good. I dropped by the Legation this evening. John Wiley was pacing the floor. “It’s the end of Austria,” he said.

Second, we need to protect our constitutional rights. Our founding charter has served us well for more than two centuries. It protects liberty by separating powers, limiting the authority of the federal government, and guaranteeing every American the freedom to speak your mind, pray to God, and protect yourself and your family by bearing arms in their defense. Every single one of those constitutional protections has come under assault from the Obama administration, which has usurped the power of Congress through executive amnesty, redefined the relationship between the federal government and the governed through Obamacare, and attempted to repeal and undermine the First and Second Amendments through abusive campaign finance regulations, coercions of religious consciences, and repeated attacks on the right to bear arms.

These two poles, the unconditional and the conditional, are absolutely heterogeneous, and must remain irreducible to one another. They are nonetheless indissociable: if one wants, and it is necessary, forgiveness to become effective, concrete, historic; if one wants it to arrive, to happen by changing things, it is necessary that this purity engage itself in a series of conditions of all kinds (psychosociological, political, etc.). It is between these two poles, irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken. Yet despite all the confusions which reduce forgiveness to amnesty or to amnesia, to acquittal or prescription, to the work of mourning or some political therapy of reconciliation, in short to some historical ecology, it must never be forgotten, nevertheless, that all of that refers to a certain idea of pure and unconditional forgiveness, without which this discourse would not have the least meaning. What complicates the question of ‘meaning’ is again what I suggested a moment ago: pure and unconditional forgiveness, in order to have its own meaning, must have no ‘meaning’, no finality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness of the impossible.

My fingers have felt them, and so have my lips. But they aren’t you. I don’t see these scars when you’re naked before me. All I see is the woman I love, and to me, you’re perfect.

There is no amount of bad karma that can compete with a contrite spirit and God's forgiveness.

AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

Amnesty International should list all daughters as prisoners of war.

Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.

Uriel’s giving some of the humans amnesty?” “Just the ones who gave her up.” Josiah nods toward me. The muscles in Raffe’s jaw dance as he clenches his teeth.

Darren's lack of milk shake right now feels like some sort of war crime. Like someone should contact Amnesty International.

Hispanics will never vote for Republicans unless they pass amnesty. First of all, moron Republicans: If they can’t vote, they can’t vote against you.

We’re the only species that institutionalizes reconciliation and that grapples with –truth-, -apology-, -forgiveness-, -reparations-, -amnesty-, and –forgetting-.

Between 1964 and 1985, the military killed about 325 suspected leftists, while more than 1,500 were tortured, according to later estimates by Amnesty International.

Rest assured that no one has a special relationship with Allah (SWT). Whoever denies me is not my (follower). The appearance of the Relief (al-Faraj) depends solely upon Allah (SWT); therefore, those who propose a certain time for it are liars. As to the benefit of my existence in Occultation (Ghaibat), it is like the benefit of the sun behind clouds where the eyes do not see. Indeed, my existence is an amnesty for the people of the earth. Pray much to Allah (SWT) to hasten the Relief, for therein also lays the release from your sufferings.

What happened isn't your fault." "Maybe. But maybe this wouldn't have happened if I'd run away with you." "You still can." "No, I can't." I shook my head. "I have so much I need to do here. I can't just leave it all behind. But you can stay here. I will grant you amnesty." "Mmm, I knew it." He smiled. "You'd miss me too much if I left." I laughed. "Hardly." "Hardly?" Loki smirked. He'd lowered his arm, so his hand was on my waist. Loki was incredibly near, and his muscles pressed against me. I knew that I should move away, that I had no justifiable reason to be this close to him, but I didn't move. "Would you?" Loki asked, his voice low. "Would I what?" "Would you run away with me, if you didn't have all the responsibilities and the palace and all that?" "I don't know," I said. "I think you would." "Of course you do." I looked away from him, but I didn't move away. "Where did you get the pajamas, by the way? You didn't bring anything with you when you came." "I don't want to tell you." "Why not?" I looked sharply at him. "Because. I'll tell you, and it will ruin this whole mood," Loki said. "Can't we just sit here and look longingly into each other's eyes until we fall into each other's arms, kissing passionately?" "No," I said and finally started to pull away from him. "Not if you don't tell me-" "Tove," Loki said quickly, trying to hang on to me. He was much stronger than me, but he let me push him off. "Of course." I stood up. "That's exactly the kind of thing my fiancé would do. He's always thinking of other people." "It's just pajamas!" Loki insisted, like that would mean something. "Sure, he's a terrifically nice guy, but that doesn't matter." "How does that not matter?" I asked. "Because you don't love him." "I care about him," I said, and he shrugged. "And it's not like I love you." "Maybe not," he allowed. "But you will." "You think so?" I asked. "Mark my words, Princess," Loki said. "One day, you'll be madly in love with me." "Okay." I laughed, because I didn't know how else to respond. "But I should go. If I've given you amnesty, that means I have to go about enacting it, and getting everyone to agree that it's not a suicidal decision." "Thank you." "You're welcome," I said and opened the door to go. "It was worth it," Loki said suddenly. "What was?" I turned back to him. "Everything I went through," he said. "For you. It was worth it.

By 2001, United States police violence and brutality had been roundly denounced, decried, and documented by Amnesty International and others as out of compliance with international law. United

race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications.

A murmur ran through the crowd, and I looked around to see what all the fuss was about. Then I saw him, walking past table after table as if everybody weren't stopping to stare at him. Loki had ventured down from where he'd been hiding in the servants' quarters. Since I'd granted him amnesty, he was no longer being guarded and was free to roman as he pleased, but I hadn't exactly invited him to the wedding. As Tove and I danced, I didn't take my eyes off Loki. He walked around the dance floor toward the refreshments, but he kept watching me. He got a glass of champagne from the table, and even as he drank his eyes never left me. Another Markis came over and cut in to dance with me, but I barely noticed when I switched partners. I tried to focus on the person I was dancing with. But there was something about the way Loki looked at me, and I couldn't shake it. The song had switched to something contemporary, probably the sheet music that Willa had slipped the orchestra. She'd insisted the whole thing would be far too dull if they only played classical. The murmur died down, and people returned to dancing and talking. Loki took another swig of his champagne, then set the glass down and walked across the dance floor. Everyone parted around him, and I wasn't sure if it was out of fear or respect. He wore all black, even his shirt. I had no idea where he'd gotten the clothes, but he did look debonair. "May I have this dance?" Loki asked my dance partner, but his eyes were on me. "Um, I don't know if you should," the Markis fumbled, but I was already moving away from him. "No, it's all right," I said. Uncertainly, the Markis stepped back, and Loki took my hand. When he placed his hand on my back, a shiver ran up my spine, but I tried to hide it and put my hand on his shoulder. "You know, you weren't invited to this," I told him, but he merely smirked as we began dancing. "So throw me out." "I might." I raised my head defiantly, and that only made him laugh. "If it's as the Princess wishes," he said, but he made no move to step away, and for some odd reason, I felt relieved.

Our society imposes on us a moral duty to live and, hence, to condemn suicide. However, with her apparent admiration for antiquity, Anna may have found her prop in the Greek philosophers, who thought every person should choose for themselves when they die. Nietzsche also considered that the individual had a full moral right to take his own life. He used the word freitod or voluntary death.’ Aune raised a pointed index finger. ‘But she had to confront another moral dilemma. Revenge. Insofar as she professed to be a Christian, Christian ethics demand that you should not take revenge. The paradox is, naturally, that Christians worship a God who is the greatest avenger of them all. Defy him and you burn in eternal hell, an act of revenge which is completely out of proportion to the crime, almost a case for Amnesty International, if you ask me.

I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful" something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes, and so on, and so on — as though you did not know all about it?

The radical Islamic movement has availed itself of the PC mentality to convince good-hearted people around the world that the Jews, Israel, and the ‘fascist government of the United States of America’ are responsible for the ills of the Muslim people, and that their daily suffering is because of them. The PC crowds label anyone who disagrees with this notion a bigot. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the like have picked up on this phenomenon.

Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration. The Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria. A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been “occupied” by Germany, like

The Republican Congress shelved a civil rights bill, and, in May 1872, it enacted an amnesty law that restored full political rights to the vast majority of ex-Confederates who had been barred from office under a special provision of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Unbelievably, while many non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and America’s Watch have denounced the human rights situation in Cuba, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro.

The left also wants to swamp the country with illegals, seeking to make them dependent on the government, so that if they ever get amnesty and can vote, they will vote for the party that sneaked them through and provided them with a steady, if meager, sustenance.

Because of that final sentence, no Confederate soldier, from Lee on down, could ever be prosecuted for treason; in effect, this was a general amnesty. There could never be a proscription list to poison the peace with the spirit of vengeance and hatred. Grant had ruled it out.

Obama is not alone in his support of amnesty for illegal immigrants. But releasing convicted violent criminals who entered the United States illegally is not in the best interest of American citizens—this should not be a controversial position. Yet Obama, in his quest for amnesty, did just that.

Priests create a smoke screen around our anxiety, our despair, our terror and our demons. They paint mind-blowing pictures that make us jittery, unhappy and afraid. Priests are nothing but alarmists, pessimists and doom merchants. Calamity Jane personified. But at this stage, they’ve got us. We’ve been knocking off our neighbour’s wife or robbing post offices and we’re just about ready to turn our faces to the wall and abandon hope. We want someone with the power to grant us amnesty from our immorality, and to us the priests appear as Sir Galahad, Boadicea, Rambo or Joan of Arc. Stout fellows, all of them. “I have the fucking answer,” they cry, “Sign here, you plebs.” And we do! 2.2 billion of us! Why? I’ll tell you why. Because we’ve been sold. We feel plagued by conscience and answerable to God only. And the only way we can get to God is through Her second in command ….. the priest.

Willing to take heat on the issue, Grant showed courage and fairness in endorsing merciful treatment for Lee. “Although it would meet with opposition in the North to allow Lee the benefit of Amnesty,” Grant told Halleck, “I think it would have the best possible effect towards restoring good feeling and peace in the South to have him come in.” Any chance for such a harmonious outcome was shattered in late May when federal judge John C. Underwood, a northern abolitionist, convened a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia, for the express purpose of indicting Lee and other Confederate leaders for treason.

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.

First, within weeks after taking office, Johnson pardoned scores of former Confederates, ignoring Congress’s 1862 Ironclad Test Oath that expressly forbade him to do so, and handed out full amnesty to thousands whom, just the year before, he had called “guerrillas and cut-throats” and “traitors … [who] ought to be hung.

I am a strong supporter of the recent extradition proceedings against General Pinochet. It would be quite intolerable that the perpetrator should decide not only whether he should get amnesty but that no one else should have the right to question the grounds on which he had so granted himself amnesty and for what offense.

Amnesty will be fantastic for the economy. Unless we’re talking about the Mexican economy, this is patently ridiculous. Adding another 30 million poor, unskilled, non-taxpaying, welfare-receiving people to America is good only for government workers and employers who refuse to mechanize their operations or pay Americans one dollar more.

Secondly, instead of competing with Muskie and Humphrey, I was then competing with Nixon, the author of the Southern strategy and the guy who hammered hard against those who were dissenters on the war and hammered on amnesty and busing and those things, so that it was a different type of competition than I had with Muskie and Humphrey in Wisconsin.

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute in his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Misérables.

Aristide did not like grand gestures if they were also useless. A boycott that accomplished nothing wasn’t a statement; it was pathetic.

have not even started to live in this city, and you are asking me to leave.

Amnesty International reported that since the start of the second intifada Israel had destroyed 3,000 Palestinian houses in Gaza, throwing over 18,000 Palestinians onto the street. It damaged a further 15,000 houses, in addition to destroying hundreds of factories, workshops, greenhouses, wells, pumps, irrigation canals, and orchards. It uprooted 226,000 trees and

Shukhov had been told that this old man'd been in camps and prisons more years than you could count and had never come under any amnesty. When one ten-year stretch was over they slapped on another. Shukhov took a good look at him close up. In the camp you could pick him out among all the men with their bent backs because he was straight as a ramrod. When he sat at the table it looked like he was sitting on something to raise himself up higher. There hadn't been anything to shave off his head for a long time-he'd lost all his hair because of the good life. His eyes didn't shift around the mess hall all the time to see what was going on, and he was staring over Shukhov's head and looking at something nobody else could see. He ate his thin gruel with a worn old wooden spoon, and he took his time. He didn't bend down low over the bowl like all the others did, but brought the spoon up to his mouth. He didn't have a single tooth either top or bottom-he chewed the bread with his hard gums like they were teeth. His face was all worn-out but not like a goner's-it was dark and looked like it had been hewed out of stone. And you could tell from his big rough hands with the dirt worked in them he hadn't spent many of his long years doing any of the soft jobs. You could see his mind was set on one thing-never to give in. He didn't put his eight ounces of bread in all the filth on the table like everybody else but laid it on a clean little piece of rag that'd been washed over and over again.

This sweetness scooped like some bright fruit plum peach apricot watermelon perhaps from myself this sweetness It is a whimsical touch, which surprises and troubles me. That this stony and prosaic woman should in her secret moments harbor such thoughts. For she was sealed from us- from everyone- with such fierceness that I had thought her incapable of yielding. I never saw her cry. She rarely smiled, and then only in the kitchen with her palette of flavors at her fingertips, talking to herself (so I thought) in the same toneless mutter, enunciating the names of herbs and spices- cinnamon, thyme, peppermint, coriander, saffron, basil, lovage- running a monotonous commentary. See the tile. Has to be the right heat. Too low, the pancake is soggy. Too high, the butter fries black, smokes, the pancake crisps. I understood because I saw in our kitchen seminars the one way in which I might win a little of her approval, and because every good war needs the occasional amnesty. Country recipes from her native Brittany were her favorites; the buckwheat pancakes we ate with everything, the far breton and kouign amann and galette bretonne that we sold in downriver Angers with our goat's cheeses and our sausage and fruit.

In government, effectiveness is measured not by results, but by how much money is spent. How effective is it? Why, we’ve tripled the budget! That’s what Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee actually said about Rubio’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill, formally titled “The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013”—which was way better than its original title: “We Surrender.

However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications.

Now he explained to her the essential fraudulence of all sporting glory. “Average twenty-one-year-old male, given basic training for one month, can run a hundred meters in about fourteen seconds. Okay? Fastest man runs same distance in nine point nine seconds. Not much of a difference. One to one point four is the range. Now, what is the difference between an average man’s intelligence and Einstein’s? Cannot measure it.

You’ve been wandering about Juarez like a zombie in a though experiment, an experiment in collective guilt, where the zombie is shown the morgue-slab photos, and responds by saying “I’m truly sorry”, and making out a check to Amnesty International, or Nuestra Hijas de Regreso a Casa, or maybe Save the Children or Habitat for Humanity, and then sealing the whole deal by forging his own signature. What’s that you say? You didn’t know it was forged? No wonder the authorities are beginning to get suspicious. We’re sorry to be the ones to break this to you, but the violence that man is doing to his home is not some sort of thought experiment, and the last thing on earth the world needs now is yet another anonymous onlooker, trying to get the picture; our drawing isn’t a drawing exactly, it’s more of a kind of framing device, and you, mon frère, so slow to get the picture, are not only under suspicion, but about to be framed. We didn’t exactly select you at random, and you’re not precisely The Viewer in the abstract sense, and we’re not about to give you a bird’s eye view of anything, or a view of Juarez from high atop a smelting stack; we’re about to put you back exactly where you belong, wearing Douchebag’s shoes, in the middle of the picture, because while Douchebag isn’t you in any literal sense, you appear to be standing in Douchebag shoes, and Douchebag, unfortunately, is now your problem.

President Reagan had said, in a presidential debate against Walter Mondale, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Imagine: The patron saint of the modern conservative movement made the case for a concept that today would have him pilloried by the right-wing press and those cynical politicians who have learned to exploit division for their own electoral success.

I get mailings from Amnesty International, and as I look at their photos of men and women who have been beaten and cattle-prodded and jabbed and spit on and electrocuted, I ask myself, "What kind of human being could do that to another human being?" Then, I read the book of Acts and meet the kind of person who could do such a thing, now an apostle of grace, a servant of Jesus Christ, the greatest missionary history has ever known. If God can love that kind of person, maybe, just maybe, He can love the likes of me.

It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters—a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau melted quickly away.

THE PRE-TRIAL CONFINEMENT OF PRIVATE BRADLEY MANNING To drive a man to suicide you put Him on suicide watch, you take away His sheet and pillow, all his clothes except His underwear, you shine a light in day And night, you confiscate his eyeglasses, Then you deny that he’s in solitary. You say he lives in his own cell. Sightless. Each day he gets to walk around an empty Room for an hour. No pushups, no jogging in place. He’s not the first one held as an example. Amnesty reports it seeks redress As month by month both mind and body crumple. The Marines treat every detainee Firmly, fairly, and with dignity.

By the most basic definition of the law, Mohammed was not eligible, but he was allowed to stay in the United States and obtain a work visa—while the INS processed his petition. Moving with the lightning speed of a government agency, the INS rejected his petition for amnesty as a farmworker three years later. Then, Mohammed applied for a general amnesty, claiming he had been living continuously in the United States from 1982 to 1986. Actually, he was a teenager in Jordan then, but again, Mohammed was allowed to stay while the INS considered his request. As it was considering, Mohammed bombed the World Trade Center.15

The two parts cannot be done simultaneously. A border fence must be started first—and completed first. Only after all the ACLU lawsuits and INS rulings have run their course, and the border is still secure, do we move to Step Two. I happen to think we don’t do the amnesty part ever, but it’s tendentious even to discuss what to do with illegal aliens already here until we can prevent more from coming. We’ll talk about legalization as soon as it’s as hard to get into the United States as it used to be to get out of East Germany. To review: Step One: Secure the border. Step Two: Discuss what to do with illegals already here.

On June 20, at Johnson’s behest, Attorney General James Speed ordered the U.S. attorney in Norfolk to abandon Lee’s prosecution. On the same day, Grant informed Lee that no further actions would be taken to place him behind bars. Lee predicted that the government would procrastinate in granting his pardon, though he couldn’t have predicted that his civil liberties and right to vote would not be restored until Johnson’s broad amnesty in December 1868. His citizenship wasn’t fully restored in his lifetime and more than a hundred years passed before it was posthumously accomplished through a joint congressional resolution in 1975.

Contrary to everything you’ve heard, the only options are not: Amnesty or deporting 11 million people. There’s also the option of letting them stay in the shadows—or the same thing we’ve been doing for the last thirty years. Americans are under no moral obligation to grant amnesty to people who have broken our laws. “The moral thing to do” is usually defined as “following the law.” The fact that Democrats want 30 million new voters is not a good enough reason to ignore the law and screw over American workers, as well as legal immigrants already here. How about Republicans try this: We’re not giving you anything—not even half—because there’s no reason to do so.

As when some carcass, hidden in sequestered nook, draws from every near and distant point myriads of discordant vultures, so drew these little flakes of gold the voracious sons of men. …This little scratch upon the earth to make a backwoods mill-race touched the cerebral nerve that quickened humanity, and sent a thrill throughout the system. It tingled in the ear and at the finger-ends; it buzzed about the brain and tickled in the stomach; it warmed the blood and swelled the heart; new fires were kindled on hearth-stones, new castles builded in the air. If Satan from Diablo’s peak had sounded the knell of time; if a heavenly angel from the Sierra’s height had heralded the millennial day; if the blessed Christ himself had risen from that ditch and proclaimed to all mankind amnesty — their greedy hearts had never half so thrilled. (Hubert Howe Bancroft)

I was forbidden to go to the theater on Friday, but I spent all day Saturday there, and on Saturday the picture ended its run. The picture was about the substitution of automobiles for horse-drawn fire engines. Four fire companies were involved. Three of the teams by replaced by engines and the miserable horses had been sold to brutes. One team remained, but its days were numbered. The men and the horses were sad. Then suddenly there was a great fire. One saw the first engine, the second, and the third race off to the conflagration. Back at the horse-drawn company, things were very gloomy. Then the fourth alarm rang-it was their summons- and they sprang into action, harnessed the team and galloped across the city. They put out the fire, saved the city, and were given amnesty by the Mayor. Now on the stage Ozamanides was writing something obscene on my wife’s buttocks.

Our nation sought to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of those who for so long had been silenced, had been turned into anonymous, marginalized ones. Now they would be able to tell their stories, they would remember, and in remembering would be acknowledged to be persons with an inalienable personhood. Our country’s negotiators rejected the two extremes and opted for a “third way,” a compromise between the extreme of Nuremberg trials and blanket amnesty or national amnesia. And that third way was granting amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full disclosure relating to the crime for which amnesty was being sought. It was the carrot of possible freedom in exchange for truth and the stick was, for those already in jail, the prospect of lengthy prison sentences and, for those still free, the probability of arrest and prosecution and imprisonment. The option South Africa chose raises

Slovik was arrested in October after living for weeks with a Canadian unit. Offered amnesty if he went to the front, he refused, vowing, “I’ll run away again if I have to.” He was convicted following a two-hour court-martial in the Hürtgen Forest on November 11. From a jail cell in Paris he appealed his death sentence to Eisenhower in a six-paragraph clemency plea. “How can I tell you how humbley sorry I am for the sins I’ve comitted.… I beg of you deeply and sincerely for the sake of my dear wife and mother back home to have mercy on me,” he wrote, according to the author William Bradford Huie. “I Remain Yours for Victory, Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik.” Unfortunately for the condemned, the supreme commander reviewed the petition at the nadir of the Bulge, on December 23, during a session in his Versailles office known as “the Hanging Hour.” Eisenhower not only affirmed the sentence, but decreed that as a lesson to shirkers it be carried out by Slovik’s putative unit, the 109th Infantry Regiment, in General Dutch Cota’s 28th Division.

Then I realized I loved you. That was awful." "Awful!" "Loving you and knowing I couldn't have you was tearing me apart. Though I knew nothing would pardon me in your eyes, I had to do what I could to make sure you'd always have your family to take care of you. That's why I sent the telegram to Washington, asking for the authority to grant amnesty to your brothers and your pa. "I saved your family because I loved you, darlin', not because of what they could do to help me. True, they made the job easier, but I would have managed one way or another. "As for the wedding, your pa just provded me with the excuse to ignore the consequences and take what I wanted most in the world-you. I should have told you everything then. But I was selfish, Willow,and I feared I'd lose you once you knew the truth. "I guess I was hoping that once you were legally mine you'd give the two of us a chance.I even began telling myself that the amnesty deal would soften your opinion of me. When a man loves a woman as much as I love you, he reaches for almost any excuse to make himself believe he can win her over.

The Poet" The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry His power is his left hand It is idle weak and precious His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him like Midas Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience And this he may be destroyed by the gold of the light which never was On land or sea. He may be drunken to death, draining the casks of excess That extreme form of success. He may suffer Narcissus' destiny Unable to live except with the image which is infatuation Love, blind, adoring, overflowing Unable to respond to anything which does not bring love quickly or immediately. ...The poet must be innocent and ignorant But he cannot be innocent since stupidity is not his strong point Therefore Cocteau said, "What would I not give To have the poems of my youth withdrawn from existence? I would give to Satan my immortal soul." This metaphor is wrong, for it is his immortal soul which he wished to redeem, Lifting it and sifting it, free and white, from the actuality of youth's banality, vulgarity, pomp and affectation of his early works of poetry. So too in the same way a Famous American Poet When fame at last had come to him sought out the fifty copies of his first book of poems which had been privately printed by himself at his own expense. He succeeded in securing 48 of the 50 copies, burned them And learned then how the last copies were extant, As the law of the land required, stashed away in the national capital, at the Library of Congress. Therefore he went to Washington, therefore he took out the last two copies Placed them in his pocket, planned to depart Only to be halted and apprehended. Since he was the author, Since they were his books and his property he was reproached But forgiven. But the two copies were taken away from him Thus setting a national precedent. For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems, For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard spoke the terrifying truth: "Your friends may forget, God may forgive you, But the brain cells record your acts for the rest of eternity." What a terrifying thing to say! This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry. This is also the joy everlasting of poetry. Delmore Schwartz

Among the fraudulent farmworker amnesties approved by the INS was one from Egyptian Mahmud Abouhalima,7 or—as he was known in the terrorist community—“Mahmud the Red.” Mahmud had come to the United States as a “tourist” from Germany—where he had been denied political asylum, but got around that by marrying an emotionally disturbed alcoholic, and then married another German woman after divorcing the first when she objected to his taking a second wife.8 At the end of 1985, Mahmud and his second wife took a “three-week” trip to the United States on tourist visas and promptly settled into an apartment in Brooklyn.9 Luckily for Mahmud, just as his tourist visa was expiring six months later, Schumer’s farmworker amnesty became law. So Mahmud submitted an application, claiming to have worked on a farm in South Carolina, despite having never left New York, except one short visit to the Michigan Islamic community.10 Mahmud was approved. Otherwise, crops would rot in the fields! And what a wonderful agricultural worker Mahmud was. He became a limo driver in New York, where he repeatedly had his license suspended for ripping off customers and speeding through red lights because he was busy reading the Koran.

The fictional exploits of buccaneering men had lost their magic for him. Besides, there were other pirates on view in Tilbury that spring. One, unredeemed by any amnesty, hung from the gibbet at Tilbury Point, tugged at by a brisk breeze off the river. His body had been bound in chains, daubed with tar and encased in a cage, denied Christian burial as a warning to the living of the hideousness of death. It did not have quite that effect on Nathan. "It's Easter," he said to Hardcastle. "A week since," said Hardcastle. "When they went to the tomb to rewrap Christ's body . . ." Harcastle threw Toby in the air and caught him repeatedly, making the child laugh and laugh. ". . . except that it had gone . . ." said Nathan. "Raised to glory," agreed Harcastle, rubbing noses with the baby. ". . . out into the garden." Suddenly it seemed to him that the tarry skull of the pirate on the gibbet might not be shouting a warning after all -- that his decaying corpse might no longer be suffering the torments of the gibbet as his executioners like to suggest with cage and chain and padlock. There were amnesties other than the King's. The man might simply be singing: singing and dancing in the bright, brittle Easter sunshine, held up in midair not by chains but by invisible hands or on invisible shoulders.

We shall never know now whether Nazism, the concentration camps or Hiroshima were intelligible or not: we are no longer part of the same mental universe. Victim and executioner are interchangeable, responsibility is diffrangible, dissoluble - such are the virtues of our marvellous interface. We no longer have the strength that forgetting gives: our amnesia is an amnesia of the image. Since everyone is guilty, who will declare an amnesty? As for autopsy, no one believes any longer in the anatomical accuracy of the facts: we have only models to work on. Even supposing the facts lay shining bright before our eyes, they would still not have the power to prove or convince. Consider how continual scrutiny of Nazism, of the gas chambers and so on, has merely rendered them less and less comprehensible, so that it has eventually become logical to ask an incredible question: 'But, in the last reckoning, did all those things really exist?' The question is perhaps an intolerable one, but the interesting thing here is what it is that makes it logically possible. And in fact what makes it possible is the media's way of replacing any event, any idea, any history, with any other, with the result that the more we scrutinize the facts, the more carefully we study details with a view to identifying causes, the greater is the tendency for them to cease to exist, and to cease to have existed.

Now that Mexicans can retain their nationality, activist groups encourage them to naturalize and become active in Hispanic causes. There was a huge push in 2007 to naturalize in time for the 2008 elections. Newspapers and television joined church groups and Hispanic activists in a campaign called Ya Es Hora. ¡Ciudadanía! (It’s time. Citizenship!). La Opinión, a Los Angeles newspaper, published full-page advertisements explaining how to apply for citizenship, and the Spanish-language network Univision’s KMEX television station in Los Angeles promoted citizenship workshops on the air. A popular radio personality named Eddie Sotelo ran a call-in contest called “Who Wants to be a Citizen?” in which listeners could win prizes by answering questions from the citizenship exam. In 2008, Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, was frank about why she was part of a widespread effort to register Hispanics to vote: She wanted them to “help shape the political landscape.” In California, where 300,000 people—overwhelmingly Hispanic—were naturalized in 2008, whites were expected to be a minority of the electorate in 2026. Joanuen Llamas, who immigrated legally in 1998, naturalized in 2008 after attending the massive 2006 demonstrations in support of illegal aliens. She said she was inspired by one of the pro-amnesty slogans she had heard: “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.” Hispanics like her are not naturalizing because they love America but because they want to change it.

José Martí, born on January 28, 1853, is known as the George Washington of Cuba, or is perhaps better identified with Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America. Although he admired and visited the United States, José Martí realized that not only would he have to free his country from Spain, he would also have to prevent the United States from interfering in Cuba’s internal affairs. By his admirers, he was considered a great Latin American intellectual, and his newspaper Patria became the voice of “Cuban Independence.” After years of suppression, the Cuban struggle for independence began in 1868. At the age of 17, José Martí was jailed in Cuba and then exiled to Spain because of his revolutionary activities. It was during this time in his life that he published a pamphlet describing the atrocities he had experienced while being imprisoned in Cuba. He strongly believed in racial equality and denounced the horrors of people having to live under a dictatorship. In 1878, Martí was allowed to return to Cuba under a general amnesty, but was once again banished from Cuba after being accused of conspiracy against the Spanish authorities. From 1881 to 1895, he lived and worked in New York City. Moving to Florida, he organized forces for a three-pronged attack supporting the smoldering Cuban War of Independence. It was during one of the first battles that he was killed at the Battle of Dos Ríos in Cuba, and thus became a national hero and martyr when he was only 42 years old.

Another reason for our passivity is the fact that Hispanics are now 16 percent of the population, and their numbers are growing. Politicians from both parties say they cannot afford to alienate Hispanics because of their increasing power at the ballot box. But what do Hispanics want? Amnesty for illegal immigrants and yet more Hispanic immigration. It is folly for white politicians to think they will win the loyalty of Hispanic voters by endorsing policies that increase Hispanic power. As Hispanics gain in numbers and influence, they will replace non-Hispanic politicians with Hispanics. Foolish whites will be shoved out just as blacks shoved out Chris Bell, the white Democratic congressman from Texas [...] who was left sputtering that blacks forgot all about his career of “fighting for diversity” once they had a chance to vote for a black. It is already nearly impossible to discuss immigration rationally, or even enforce laws that are on the books. If we are afraid to take measures that might upset 16 percent of the population, what are our chances of defending larger interests if Hispanics are 20, 30, or even 40 percent of the country? We already have tens of millions of citizens whose primary loyalty is not to the United States but to Mexico. If there were a crisis with Mexico is there any doubt which side they would take? The United States already finds it difficult to advance its own interests against Mexican opposition. As the Mexican-American population grows, it could become impossible.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order,

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do. You say you're not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn't looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you do that makes you who you are. I'm sorry to be blunt. I've had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I'm not here to save anybody or any thing. It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?" I didn't look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me. The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they'll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don't know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They'll probably get amnesty in five. There's hardly ever a repeat offender. That kid from San Manuel died. Your sister, Hallie "What's new with Hallie?" Loyd asked. "Nothing." I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand. Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King... So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it. The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help? There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow. The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals.... Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale. That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt: “Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots! “We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans! “How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...