Barbed Wire Fence Quotes

A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

How could I remain unyielding? His words penetrated the flimsy barriers I’d set up around my heart. I’d meant to set up a barbed wire fence, but the barbs ended up being covered with marshmallows. He slipped through my defenses easily. He touched his forehead to my hand, and my marshmallow heart melted.

I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes “happy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “sad” and on some people’s hearts he writes “crazy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “genius” and on some people’s hearts he writes “angry” and on some people’s hearts he writes “winner” and on some people’s hearts he writes “loser.” I keep seeing a newspaper being tossed around in the wind. And then a strong gust comes along and the newspaper is thrown against a barbed wire fence and it gets ripped to shreds in an instant. That’s how I feel. I think God is the wind. It’s all like a game to him. Him. God. And it’s all pretty much random. He takes out his pen and starts writing on our blank hearts. When it came to my turn, he wrote “sad.” I don’t like God very much. Apparently, he doesn’t like me very much either.

One minute she acts like she wants to be with me and I'm the one rejecting her. The next, she's got this barbed wire fence and barking dogs around her, like I can't even ask her the simplest questions." "And here I was assuming you didn't care about her." Stabbing his fingers through his hair, he groaned, "I don't!" "And you make it perfectly clear." Men. Idiots.

This is how your heart gets snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away.

The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

Line of control must be renamed as garden of love and the barbed wire fencing should be replaced by the garden of flowers.

I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.

Neil is softer than I realized, and I’m a barbed-wire fence. Every time he gets too close, I make myself sharper.

I ran straight into the wooden fence at the foot of the field. I was lucky that it had been a rail fence, rather than a barbed wire, or I would have shredded myself into vampire linguine.

But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at the centre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of 'treaty with reality' could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one's soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, 'This is my business and mine only.

There’s no clearer definition of war than the sight of barbed wired fences surrounding dark fields muddied by the sky’s tears.

I feel as though I can chew up nails and spit out a barbed wire fence.

She is a soldier trapped inside a barbed-wire fence, but she is still at war and the battlefield is her own body, and perhaps, she has come to realize as a prisoner, that is where it has always been.

Unfortunately, his pants had not survived the fall. They hung from the sharp teeth of the barbed-wire fence, leaving the sheriff in just a pair of droopy long johns. Defeated,

We built a barbed wire fence between ourselves and turned away from the suffering of others, but we forgot the immunity to pain was delusional.

WELCOME. YOU ARE MOST WANTED. Come in. I'm R.L. Stine. Welcome to the Goosebumps office. Glad you made it through the barbed wire fence. Don't worry. Those cuts will stop bleeding in an hour or two. Why do we have a barbed wire fence? To keep the Abominable Snowman from escaping. I'm surprised you didn't see him. He's creeping up right behind you. Hurry. Step inside and shut the door. You don't want to find out why everyone calls him Abominable. Hey, don't be scared of Eddie over there. Eddie woke up dead tired one morning. Guess what? He actually was dead. Yes, Eddie is a zombie. But he doesn't like that word. He likes to be called "life-challenged." He's not much trouble. He only needs to eat human flesh once a day. Don't be nervous. He just finished his breakfast. Whom did he have for breakfast? I'm not sure. But I haven't seen my brother all morning... Eddie - what did I tell you about eating the family? Oh, well. Let me ask you a question before Eddie has to have his next meal. What do you think is the Most Wanted holiday?

Glory looks at the two small scars on her hands, one in the center of each palm, the body doing its work. [...] The girl who stood up and fell back down, who grabbed onto a barbed wire fence and stopped herself from falling again. The girl who walked barefoot across the desert and saved her own life. She can't imagine any other way to tell the story.

Almost sixty years ago, just after midnight, a few feet from the river where they danced, a wonder of modern engineering occurred: overnight, the Berlin Wall arose. It was the night of August 15, 1961. Berliners awoke on the sixteenth to this marvel, more of a fence at first, concrete posts driven into the streets and festooned with barbed wire. They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

I received a letter from a prisoner requesting a book because stories are his only way of traveling beyond a barbed wire fence and armed guards. Reading is a vacation for many people and an escape for others. Whether someone likes to read my stories or needs to read them, I am happy and grateful to help.

There are six camps, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency and human rights groups. The biggest is thirty-one miles long and twenty-five miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Electrified barbed-wire fences—punctuated by guard towers and patrolled by armed men—encircle most of the camps.

...he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind.

There is a tree. At the downhill edge of a long, narrow field in the western foothills of the La Sal Mountains -- southeastern Utah. A particular tree. A juniper. Large for its species -- maybe twenty feet tall and two feet in diameter. For perhaps three hundred years this tree has stood its ground. Flourishing in good seasons, and holding on in bad times. "Beautiful" is not a word that comes to mind when one first sees it. No naturalist would photograph it as exemplary of its kind. Twisted by wind, split and charred by lightning, scarred by brushfires, chewed on by insects, and pecked by birds. Human beings have stripped long strings of bark from its trunk, stapled barbed wire to it in using it as a corner post for a fence line, and nailed signs on it on three sides: NO HUNTING; NO TRESPASSING; PLEASE CLOSE THE GATE. In commandeering this tree as a corner stake for claims of rights and property, miners and ranchers have hacked signs and symbols in its bark, and left Day-Glo orange survey tape tied to its branches. Now it serves as one side of a gate between an alfalfa field and open range. No matter what, in drought, flood heat and cold, it has continued. There is rot and death in it near the ground. But at the greening tips of its upper branches and in its berrylike seed cones, there is yet the outreach of life. I respect this old juniper tree. For its age, yes. And for its steadfastness in taking whatever is thrown at it. That it has been useful in a practical way beyond itself counts for much, as well. Most of all, I admire its capacity for self-healing beyond all accidents and assaults. There is a will in it -- toward continuing to be, come what may.

I’m a barbed-wire fence. Every time he gets too close, I make myself sharper.

He grinned, like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence.

We fucked hard and rough, leaving behind the rainbows for barbed wire fences and bullet wounds.

Then he grinned, like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence.

Her mother was trying to force herself to sound sweet and concerned, but the image it evoked in Kate was of honey being poured on a barbed wire fence.

It is hard to cry when my eyes are closed shut by the barbed wire fence of my eyelashes as they prohibit tears from falling.

I’d play you at the five. If you were mine, you’d be at the center of my life. August’s words filter through tiny gaps in the barbed-wire fence surrounding my heart. That could be my place. Instinctively, I know August would put me at the center, but one could argue I was Caleb’s center, too. A dark, twisted center with the sides closing in and choking, but the center nonetheless.

There was a huge wire fence that ran along the length of the house and turned in at the top, extending further along in either direction, further than she could possibly see. The fence was very high, higher even than the house they were standing in, and there were huge wooden posts, like telegraph poles, dotted along it, holding it up. At the top of the fence enormous bales of barbed wire were tangled in spirals, and Gretel felt an unexpected pain inside her as she looked at the sharp spikes sticking out all the way round it.

Through the barbed-wire fences surrounding the camp, I could look out and sometimes see the children of the German officers strutting back and forth, wearing their Hitler Youth uniforms and singing songs praising the Führer, Adolf Hitler. They were so exuberant, so full of life, while just a few yards away from them I was exhausted

Do you know what a free mind is? Have you ever observed your own mind? It is not free, is it? You are always watching to see what your friends say about you. Your mind is like a house enclosed by a fence or by barbed wire. In that state no new thing can take place. A new thing can happen only when there is no fear. And it is extremely difficult for the mind to be free of fear, because that implies being really free of the desire to imitate, to follow, free of the desire to amass wealth or to conform to a tradition—which does not mean that you do something outrageous.

Regret to inform you that your son, Private Such-and-Such, is reported killed in action during heavy bombardment" or "has died of wounds at a casualty clearing station." Followed by a letter from a CO reporting, in every instance, that they passed bravely, swiftly, without much pain, They never said, "Hung for hours on a barbed wire fence with his bowels hanging out, pleading for rescue, but nobody dared go for fear of hostile fire." The first casualty of war is the truth.

We fucked hard and rough, leaving behind the rainbows for barbed wire fences and bullet wounds. For shattered glass and serrated blades. We left the niceness behind and came together like we were meant to—in rage, need, and fucking violence

Four cables, attached to tracks on the buildings, break through the stones, dragging up the net that encases Mitchell. It makes no sense — how instantly bloodied he is — until we see the barbs sticking from the wire that encases him. I know it immediately. It decorated the top of the fence around 12.

Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it. I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become. She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long. The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.

basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence.

I didn't know then that the sweet life could be like honeysuckle smothering a barbed-wire fence.

When you weigh-in at 3300 pounds, a barbed-wire fence is more of a suggestion than a deterrent.

The fence is as strong now as it was the day we met. Barbed wire strewn between white picket fences and roughhewn poles.

The wind whistles over the bare steppe — hot and dry in the summer, freezing in winter. Nothing has ever been known to grow on that steppe, least of all between four barbed-wire fences.

It's a queer thing is a man's soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we've all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia ! The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white- skinned hordes of the next civilization. Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off! Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they. ... Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I'm going to remain such. I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. 'This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,' saith Benjamin, and all America with him. 'But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.' I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don't work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity - justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I'm really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me. Here's my creed, against Benjamin's. This is what I believe: 'That I am I.' ' That my soul is a dark forest.' 'That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.' 'Thatgods, strange gods, come forth f rom the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.' ' That I must have the courage to let them come and go.' ' That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.' There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.

Later bad things will be said about Stalin; he’ll be called a tyrant and his reign of terror will be denounced. But for the people of Eduard’s generation he will remain the supreme leader of the people of the Union at the most tragic moment in their history; the man who defeated the Nazis and proved himself capable of a sacrifice worthy of the ancient Romans: the Germans had captured his son, Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, while the Russians had captured Field Marshal Paulus, one of the top military leaders of the Reich, at Stalingrad. When the German High Command proposed an exchange, Stalin responded with disdain that he didn’t exchange field marshals for simple lieutenants. Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself on the electrified barbed wire fence of his prison camp. *

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high in weeds and young trees. The trees have entirely encased a speed limit sign, strange sight, nothing so pointless as a speed limit sign in the midst of dense woods, pointless and beautifully so.

An English friend says Australia seems so messy to her: 'Because of all the overhead wires - we don't have them like you do. Your country towns seem so untidy. The barbed wire for fences, all of that'.

By temperament I am content with the doctrine that good fences make good neighbors; but good fences shouldn’t evolve into barbed-wire barricades, though much of this is happening: the atomistic pull of high-tech living, in a high-tech age.

The Los Angeles River is small, but mean. People who don't know the truth of it make fun of our river; all they see is a tortured trickle that snakes along a concrete gutter like some junkie's vein. They don't know that we put the river in concrete to save ourselves; they don't know that the river is small because it's sleeping, and that every year and sometimes more it wakes. Before we put the river in that silly trough centered on a concrete plain at the bottom of those concrete walls, it flashed to life with the rain to wash away trees and houses and bridges, and cut its banks to breed new channels almost as if it was looking for people to kill. It found what it looked for too many times. Now, when it wakes, the river climbs those concrete walls so high that wet claws rake the freeways and bridges as it tries to pull down a passing car or someone caught out in the storm. Chain-link fences and barbed wire spine along the top of the walls to keep out people, but the walls keep in the river. The concrete is a prison. The prison works, most of the time.

No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference. But Christianity placed at the centre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of “treaty with reality” could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one’s soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, “This is my business and mine only.

Kit Carson, more than any figure on the Western stage, filled the role. Honest, unassuming, wry around a campfire, tongue-tied around the ladies, clear in his intentions, swift in action, a bit of a loner: He was the prototype of the Western hero. Before there were Stetson hats and barbed-wire fences, before there were Wild West shows or Colt six-shooters to be slung at the OK Corral, there was Nature’s Gentleman, the original purple cliché of the purple sage. Carson hated it all. Without his consent, and without receiving a single dollar, he was becoming a caricature. In

Since the late 1840s settlers used close-planted Osage orange trees along the borders of their farms, creating, as the thorny wood filled in over some years of trimming, a living fence “horse-high, bull-strong and hog-tight.” It was barbed wire in the days before barbed wire was invented.

The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others. From personal convictions which will be mentioned later, I made myself a firm promise, on my first evening in camp, that I would not “run into the wire.” This was a phrase used in camp to describe the most popular method of suicide—touching the electrically charged barbed-wire fence. It was not entirely difficult for me to make this decision. There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectation, calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor. He could not with any assurance expect to be among the small percentage of men who survived all the selections. The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days—after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.

ref·u·gee noun: a person who flees for refuge or safety We are, each of us, refugees when we flee from burning buildings into the arms of loving families. When we flee from floods and earthquakes to sleep on blue mats in community centres. We are, each of us, refugees when we flee from abusive relationships, and shooters in cinemas and shopping centres. Sometimes it takes only a day for our countries to persecute us because of our creed, race, or sexual orientation. Sometimes it takes only a minute for the missiles to rain down and leave our towns in ruin and destitution. We are, each of us, refugees longing for that amniotic tranquillity dreaming of freedom and safety when fences and barbed wires spring into walled gardens. Lebanese, Sudanese, Libyan and Syrian, Yemeni, Somali, Palestinian, and Ethiopian, like our brothers and sisters, we are, each of us, refugees. The bombs fell in their cafés and squares where once poetry, dancing, and laughter prevailed. Only their olive trees remember music and merriment now as their cities wail for departed children without a funeral. We are, each of us, refugees. Don’t let stamped paper tell you differently. We’ve been fleeing for centuries because to stay means getting bullets in our heads because to stay means being hanged by our necks because to stay means being jailed, raped and left for dead. But we can, each of us, serve as one another’s refuge so we don't board dinghies when we can’t swim so we don’t climb walls with snipers aimed at our chest so we don’t choose to remain and die instead. When home turns into hell, you, too, will run with tears in your eyes screaming rescue me! and then you’ll know for certain: you've always been a refugee.

Let us consider some of the most important Anarchist acts within the last two decades. Strange as it may seem, one of the most significant deeds of political violence occurred here in America, in connection with the Homestead strike of 1892. During that memorable time the Carnegie Steel Company organized a conspiracy to crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Henry Clay Frick, then Chairman of the Company, was intrusted with that democratic task. He lost no time in carrying out the policy of breaking the Union, the policy which he had so successfully practiced during his reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage of the steel workers. Not content with the death of eleven victims, killed in the Pinkerton skirmish, Henry Clay Frick, good Christian and free American, straightway began the hounding down of the helpless wives and orphans, by ordering them out of the wretched Company houses.

Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.

This is not the real cave, is it?" asked Rachel. "Can't be," said Jerry. "Must be," said Dick. "Sign says so." What a cave! Iron fencing all around it, a sign saying to keep out, even barbed wire along the top of the fence. They couldn't see the entrance to the cave. They couldn't tell how deep into the earth and rock it went. They couldn't tell whether this cave was like the cave in Tom Sawyer or what it was like... "In old times, it was better," said Rachel. "They did not have cages around things.

But when Dorry reached the top of the fence, she didn’t hop over. Instead, she perched herself up there, in a crouch, like a gargoyle at the top of a building. Despite the nightdress the barbed wire was digging into her soles, but her face showed no pain. No exhaustion. No worry. Dorry had balanced herself in that crouched position and then, even more remarkable, she stood. Because it was night, the dull silver fence was practically invisible, so the old woman seemed to be floating eight feet above the concrete court. Dorry levitated.

But underneath all this reasonable talk, this scientific speculating, no white Afrikaner could quite put down the way it felt…Something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide…Puzzling. Perhaps we weren’t as fair as we might have been, perhaps we did take their cattle and their lands away…and then the work-camps of course, the barbed wire, and the stockades…Perhaps they feel it is a world they no longer want to live in. Typical of them, though, giving up, crawling away to die…why won’t they even negotiate? We could work out a solution, some solution… It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all. It seemed an exercise they did not need. But to the Europeans, conned by their own Baby Jesus Con Game, what they were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent as that of the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea.

In 1939, the Germans invaded the town of Lodz, Poland. They forced all of the Jewish people to live in a small part of the city called a ghetto. They built a barbed-wire fence around it and posted Nazi guards to keep everyone inside it. Two hundred and seventy thousand people lived in the Lodz ghetto. “In 1945, the war ended. The Germans surrendered, and the ghetto was liberated. Out of more than a quarter of a million people, only about 800 walked out of the ghetto. Of those who survived, only twelve were children. “I was one of the twelve.” —Excerpt from interview with Sylvia Perlmutter, March 2003

No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns. Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels. The guards weren’t allowed inside the building except when called, and we weren’t allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field, which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The Angels stood outside it with their backs to us. They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well. If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy. We

But Hans Beimler survived Dachau, escaping certain death just hours before the SS ultimatum expired. With the help of two rogue SS men, apparently, he squeezed through the small window high up in his cell, passed the barbed wire and electric fence around the camp, and disappeared into the night.7 After Private Steinbrenner unlocked Beimler’s cell early the next morning, on May 9, 1933, and found it empty, the SS went wild. Sirens sounded across the grounds as all available SS men turned the camp upside down. Steinbrenner battered two Communist inmates who had spent the night in the cells adjacent to Beimler, shouting: “Just you wait, you wretched dogs, you’ll tell me [where Beimler is].” One of them was executed soon after.8 Outside, a huge manhunt got under way. Planes circled near the camp, “Wanted” posters went up at railway stations, police raids hit Munich, and the newspapers, which had earlier crowed about Beimler’s arrest, announced a reward for recapturing the “famous Communist leader,” who was described as clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and unusually large jug ears.9 Despite all their efforts, Beimler evaded his hunters. After recuperating in a safe house in Munich, he was spirited away in June 1933 by the Communist underground to Berlin and then, in the following month, escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia, from where he sent a postcard to Dachau telling the SS men to “kiss my ass.

To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orban's barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on "the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context. In Europe, the secular had for so long been secularised that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just that bit more Christian. Merkel, welcoming Muslims co Germany, was inviting them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam

whenever two people kiss the world is born, a drop of light with guts of transparency the room like a fruit splits and begins to open or burst like a star among the silences and all laws now rat-gnawed and eaten away, barred windows of banks and penitentiaries, the bars of paper, and the barbed-wire fences, the stamps and the seals, the sharp prongs and the spurs, the one-note sermon of the bombs and wars, the gentle scorpion in his cap and gown, the tiger who is the president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty and the Red Cross, the pedagogical ass, and the crocodile set up as saviour, father of his country, the founder, the leader, the shark, the architect of the future of us all, the hog in uniform, and then that one, the favourite son of the Church who can be seen brushing his black teeth in holy water and taking evening courses in English and democracy, the invisible barriers, the mad and decaying masks that are used to separate us, man from man, and man from his own self they are thrown down for an enormous instant and we see darkly our own lost unity, how vulnerable it is to be women and men, the glory it is to be man and share our bread and share our sun and our death, the dark forgotten marvel of being alive;

I loved driving with Marlboro Man. I saw things I’d never seen before, things I’d never even considered in my two and a half decades of city life. For the first time ever, I began to grasp the concept of north, south, east, and west, though I imagine it would take another twenty-five years before I got them straight. I saw fence lines and gates made of welded iron pipe, and miles upon miles of barbed wire. I saw creeks--rocky, woodsy creeks that made the silly water hazard in my backyard seem like a little mud puddle. And I saw wide open land as far as the eye could see. I’d never known such beauty. Marlboro Man loved showing me everything, pointing at pastures and signs and draws and lakes and giving me the story behind everything we saw. The land, both on his family’s ranch and on the ranches surrounding it, made sense to him: he saw it not as one wide open, never-ending space, but as neatly organized parcels, each with its own purpose and history. “Betty Smith used to own this part of our ranch with her husband,” he’d say. “They never had kids and were best friends with my grandparents.” Then he’d tell some legend of Betty Smith’s husband’s grandfather, remembering such vivid details, you’d think he’d been there himself. I absorbed it all, every word of it. The land around him pulsated with the heartbeats of all who’d lived there before…and as if it were his duty to pay honor to each and every one of them, he told me their names, their stories, their relationship, their histories. I loved that he knew all those things.

A committed escaper! One who never for a minute doubts that a man cannot live behind bars—not even as the most comfortable of trusties, in the accounts office, in the Culture and Education Section, or in charge of the bread ration. One who once he lands in prison spends every waking hour thinking about escape and dreams of escape at night. One who has vowed never to resign himself, and subordinates every action to his need to escape. One for whom a day in prison can never be just another day; there are only days of preparation for escape, days on the run, and days in the punishment cells after recapture and a beating. A committed escaper! This means one who knows what he is undertaking. One who has seen the bullet-riddled bodies of other escapers on display along the central tract. He has also seen those brought back alive—like the man who was taken from hut to hut, black and blue and coughing blood, and made o shout: "Prisoners! Look at what happened to me! It can happen to you, too!" He knows that a runaway's body is usually too heavy to be delivered to camp. And that therefore the head alone is brought back in a duffel bag, sometimes (this is more reliable proof, according to the rulebook) together with the right arm, chopped off at the elbow, so that the Special Section can check the fingerprints and write the man off. A committed escaper! It is for his benefit that window bars are set in cement, that the camp area is encircled with dozens of strands of barbed wire, towers, fences, reinforced barriers, that ambushes and booby traps are set, that red meat is fed to gray dogs.

Dear, What’s the Point of it All? What is the point of being nice? When you do not know what you are going to get from it? Knowing eventually sooner rather than later someone and maybe that person you are being nice to will turn their back on you. I always have to stay grounded and focused. When I am there for people, I feel like I am always punished for it. I am always treated as if I committed a crime. I was there for my mom; however, she was killing me slowly but surely. Like my mom, I noticed that when people get themselves in some shit, they get stuck in their own mess. They are confident that they do not have to deal with the consequences—because they know the ‘kind’ person will bail them out. What’s the point of being kind? Like my mom and the officer, there are so many people in the world who are judgmental and tainted because of their selfish needs. What’s the point of my life? Here I am in a library filled with many books. I can read them and go anywhere I want to in my mind, but after I close the book, I will have to snap out of my fantasy world and welcome the cruel cold world, which is reality. If I was a book, I would be better off left on the shelf. There is no excitement in my life—only struggles. What’s the point of living and loving life when the only thing I do is read between the lines and tread carefully? Come to think about it, I am a book that nobody can understand or read. They think they know what is best for me, but if they only take the time to listen, I would be so happy to tell them about me and my needs and wants. My actions scream for attention, but time after time, I am ignored. Sadly, without a care, they were quick to rip out the pages. Yet, once again, nobody noticed me. What’s the point of it all when I never had an opportunity to make a mistake? If I did one thing wrong, they would give up on me and send me to one home after another. I’ve always been fully exposed and had to walk in a line filled with sharp curves from disappointment to disappointment. Sorrow is my aura, and sadness hugs me tightly. It is hard to cry when my eyes are closed shut by the barbed wire fence of my eyelashes as they prohibit tears from falling. What’s the point of complicating my life? I am always back to where I started, and then ... I relive the same patterns, but on a more difficult journey. I believe when you put yourself in your own mess that you should clean it up and start over. What’s wrong with that? Nothing. However, when someone else puts you in their mess, you do not know how to clean up the mess they’ve made. You do not know how to start over because you do not know where to begin. I look at it this way; it is like telling a dead person he/she can start over. How so, when that person’s life no longer exists? I know my life isn’t over. However, I am lost in a maze my mom set up for herself—and she too is lost in her own maze. When a person gets lost in their own maze, they are really fucked up. However, this maze shouldn’t be left for me to figure out. Unfortunately, I am in it, and I have to find my way out one way or another. What’s the point of taking Kace from me? He was safe and in good hands. Now he is worse off with people who are abusing him. He didn’t ask for this—I didn’t either. He deserves so much better. Again, what is the point of it all? What’s the point of making me suffer? Do you get a kick out of it? What are you trying to accomplish? I am trying to understand; what is the point of it all? What is the point? I don’t know why I am here.

a single small corrugated-steel warehouse situated in the rear corner of a lot with two unmarked, dirty green shipping containers and room for half a dozen more, all surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with rusted barbed wire. There was a black Mercedes SUV parked near an open rolling door on the front side of the building.

each other. No words were needed, they both felt the same. What a load of bollocks. They’d known each other two minutes. How could they be in love? Joan was just going over the top. The four glasses clinked together. “Tuck in guys. This is one of my better dishes. My mam helped with it too so I know it’s going to be top notch.” Trevor rubbed his hands together and grabbed his fork. There were no flies on him he was tucking in. Food was his comfort and now Joan was off the market he needed it more than ever. Mabel picked at the food on her plate, nibbling, watching everyone else around her. Patrick sat next to Joan and every chance he got he kissed her, held her hand. He knew he was on show here tonight and he was making sure he ticked all the boxes. * Cath and Katrina were chatting in the yard. The winds were blowing with force. They both looked freezing as they marched around the concrete yard. There were high steel fences with barbed wire on the top of it. There was no way out. Katrina needed a friendly ear, some advice, someone to ease her heavy heart. Once she’d filled Cath in on everything that had happened they both sat on a bench not far from the fence.  The screws watched them with caution and never took their eyes from them. They were high-risk prisoners. Cath let out a laboured breath and bit down hard on her bottom lip. “For crying out loud didn’t I tell you to keep away from that prick. Look what’s happened now. You’ve fucking blown it. You were getting out of this shit-hole in a few more months and you’ve gone and fucked it all. Where is your head at woman, you should of steered well clear of any trouble?” Katrina snivelled, her eyes flooding with tears. “I know, I just wanted to hurt him like he’s hurt me. I loved that man with all my heart and he just fucked off and left me. I’ve lost it all Cath. My kids, my home, everything I ever loved. How can I tell my kids I’m not coming home? It will break their hearts. I’ve made promises to them. A better life, no more trouble. Their mother home for good.” “They’ve not charged you yet. Wait until it’s set in stone and then you know what you’re dealing with.” Cath held her in her arms and squeezed her tight. She knew as much as the other person that she wasn’t getting out of jail anytime soon. The crime she’d committed would be all over the news soon and the public would know who she was. She’d seen it so many times before. Once an offender was named, the nation would be all over it. No doubt Norman would be made out to be the hero too. There would be no story about the way he treated this woman, no mention of all the women he’d abused in the past. Maybe someone should have grassed him up. Katrina had warned him if he she got her collar felt there would be repercussions. Why hadn’t she put his name in the picture yet? Now was the time to put her cards on the table and look after number one. Maybe if she turned Queen’s evidence she could get a deal with the prosecution. A lesser sentence, a few years knocked off. Cath was aware of this but to be a Judas was another matter. Katrina would have to

into his jeans and button-down shirt. He dropped off the RAF overalls in the trunk of the car, and then looked around him. The car park was empty. He walked to the side of the parking lot. The fence was low there and he vaulted across it to the low ground that led to the pebble beach. He cut straight across, heading to the port, walking quickly across the shrub and grassland. A line of low trees near the port fence gave him cover. He studied the wire fence. It was about ten feet tall, with regularly spaced posts, and he couldn’t see any signs of electricity. There wasn’t any barbed wire at the top, which made his life a lot easier. He grabbed the wire mesh and shook it. It was firm and would take his weight. He wrapped his legs around a post and pulled himself up with both hands, using it like a fast rope. He crouched over the top and jumped down. The brick wall of a building lay in front of him. He could hear an engine wheezing and what sounded like train railway

barns on fifteen acres close to the wealthy enclave of Salcombe. On a clear day the video cameras mounted around its corrugated metal fence could peer over the barbed wire at millionaires’ yachts moored in the marina below. Dante Scott was eight years old, son of Scotty,

Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.

It took nearly half an hour for the bus to creep forward until it approached the heavy, fortress-like building of the border check-point. When Bryce saw the high barbed-wire fence with it's V-shaped barrier on the top stretching off in both directions, he shook his head in disbelief. Two days ago, he had driven across this border between New York and Connecticut at about sixty-five mils an hour with hardly a second thought.

Afterlife It takes both hands to unfix the spike he drove into the fence post, worrying dirt loose from around its base. A spider spins the ache in my throat. If he were here, what would he be doing? I torch a phonebook, watching the names and numbers burn. I feel the fallen phone line, the horned lark crushed in the mailbox's rusty throat. Weevils become the dream work of fields, the old shack set back in the tree line. I'm tired of the corn, their fibrous heads. I'm tired of the white cocoon in the old jam jar, the fruit bat brimming with darkness. Barbed wire, concrete slab, slag in the rusty water. I walk the yard of Holsteins, dewlaps quivering, nerves pulsing in the udders. Two miles away the Wal-Mart is going in, barns giving way to Pizza Hut, Penguin Point. I look across the silent field. The plow is hard. My heart is hard. Dirt. Distance. It does not end.

My boundaries mirror beautiful picket fences, not barbed wire,

Well, forgive me for trying to introduce you to a nice, handsome man who owns his own business and once rescued a sheep from a barbed wire fence.’ I glared at her across the wrought iron table. ‘It’s on Instagram,’ she sniffed. ‘I’ll send you the link. It’s got over a million views.

So, you want us to stop saying gay. Want to remove the right to acknowledge the truth of our bodies and hearts and eradicate the language that names us As if this will somehow keep you safe from our existence As if you can see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil us into oblivion. It was you who birthed us into a legacy of code makers and breakers. Humans who took their language underground. Cast spells and had wordless conversations with our ancestors Who gifted us new ways to speak in the open air. We painted pink triangles on the walls of The underground bomb shelters you built to bury us alive Left a trail of glitter pointing to the inborn light in our chests So the ones who came looking for us would know how we lived. We stole back the vernacular you created to hide us back from the tips of your forked tongues Alchemized the sounds that twisted your mouth into symbols of reclamation Used your vilification to dig ourselves out of the closets you constructed around us Made our way blazing and victorious into the sun. When AIDS devastated an entire glittering generation We crafted a whispered language of the isolated hospital room and empty funeral That can only be heard by bodies That have been asked to hold a loss too deep to name. When Matthew Shephard's bloody and broken body Was found tied to that barbed wire fence, the only clean part of his skin the trails of his desperate tears We twisted from the ethers an entirely new way to name collective grief and fear, one far too infinite to hold alone It has always been our tenacious together than holds us. Drive us underground We will always surface Singing words you can never own Because don’t have the range to hear them. Go ahead, take away our words, We will birth a whole new language You’ve been sending your armies for us since the beginning of time But we were born for battle. You wonder why we are still here? You made us this strong. You think getting rid of a word will silence us? You’d have to ban them all.

There was no region even in the innermost depth of one’s soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, ‘This is my business and mine only.

We’ve decided to build walls around our towns, with defensive fortifications in key locations, and our main food supply stored in an old nuclear bunker under city hall, which is refrigerated and is backed-up by large generators that can be fueled by corn alcohol. As for defenses, since most of us are quite well armed, all I ask is for men, or women, to keep guard over the entrances to the town and make sure we stay on alert for possible desperate people who would have no problem killing all of us for just a bite to eat. “Now, for you farmers and ranchers, I suggest surrounding most of your property with electrified barbed wire. If you have ranch hands, have them armed while they’re patrolling the fence-line. We want to protect our food as much as we can. As of now, this is the plan. Since I know there’ll be questions, please approach the microphone that’s been set-up, and ask your questions. Thank you.

prickly pears from behind a barbed-wire fence. Faded lettering on the sign, designed as a lasso that had at one

Is there anything else we should do?" said Poppy. Scarlett clapped her hands. "I know! We could set some booby traps." Sam looked at her as if she was mad, but Poppy's mind was whirring. "You're right. You know that roll of electric fence wire in the hay barn?" The other two nodded. "Why don't we lay it along the front gate so when he goes to open it he gets an electric shock?" Scarlett grinned evilly. "Oh yes, I'm loving that idea. And we could arrange those bits of barbed wire he so kindly left on the driveway so he gets a puncture." "Neat," Poppy said. "What about tying together baler twine to make a trip wire? We could fix it just inside the gate." Scarlett nodded vigorously. "And I could do the old Tom and Jerry classic and leave a couple of rakes on the ground. With any luck he'll stand on one and whack himself on the head." Sam's eyebrows were raised as he looked from one girl to the other. "Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you two. You're reprobates." "He won't be getting anything more than he deserves," said Poppy grimly.   Half

Little by litter life returned to normal. The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic...We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department - a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers.

Kilometa mbili na ushei kidogo kutoka katika sanamu la Yesu Mtoto liitwalo Niñopa, katika Kanisa la Parokia ya Manispaa ya Xochimilco ('Sochimiliko') la Iglesia de San Bernardino de Siena, Mexico City, kulikuwa na nyumba ndogo ya siri ('safe house') ya Kolonia Santita iliyojengwa bila uzio wa ukuta au seng’enge isipokuwa miti iliyopandwa kuizunguka bila mpangilio wowote. Ndani ya nyumba hiyo Mpelelezi Maarufu Duniani John Murphy alikuwa akiteswa na magaidi kumi na mbili; waliokuwa wakiendelea kushangaa jinsi alivyookoka katika ajali ya ndege iliyoua watu zaidi ya mia tatu huko Uholanzi, na jinsi alivyoweza kuingia katika ofisi ya siri ya Panthera Tigrisi, kitu kilichomchanganya akili Tigrisi na makompade wote wa Kolonia Santita duniani kote. Bila Mtoto wa Rais wa Meksiko Debbie Patrocinio Abrego, na mwanasesere wa nyoka wa Mtoto wa Mwanasheria Mkuu wa Serikali Lisa Madrazo Graciano, John Murphy angeanguka.

A bikini is like a barbed-wire fence. It protects the property without obstructing the view.

When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.

Chinese authorities built green chain-link fences around the perimeter of the U.S. embassy compound in Beijing to prevent defections. Barbed wire was strewn across the tops of the fences and the fences were set a few yards outside the main walls in order to ensure that North Koreans would fall between the newly built fence and the old wall if they tried to jump it.

I think that this almost made up to Chubb for the time about the nighthawk, and I think it was good for grandfather, too, that it reminded him to never forget again that the heart of it all is mystery, and that science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery—a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

A hymn for freedom; without border barriers and barbed wire fences. A hymn for freedom; without astute words. A hymn for freedom; without wars of every man against every man. A hymn to freedom; at any time and any place, because only freedom will set us free.

That missleproof glass might as well have been electrified fence and barbed wire. No one could fashion a prison so perfect, so complete, as the one the masters of humanity had created for themselves.

nub. Tori nearly came unglued and started rocking and trembling so hard, the bed shook beneath her. The fleeting caress of Sam's tongue stretched her body taut, stringing her nerve endings tighter than a barbed-wire fence. "Sam . . . please . . . I need . . . " "I know, babe. I know what you need." "I need it now . . . Please!" Tori thought she'd die if Sam didn't touch her again. She lifted her butt and felt his hands clamp around her hips, and then that wonderful magic feeling of his tongue on her flesh sent her soaring into a maelstrom of sensations too powerful to resist. Sam held on to Tori as he laved her with his tongue, milking her orgasm for several moments before finally moving

The secret Canadian Central Emergency Government Headquarters, known colloquially as the “Diefenbunker,” after Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, had been built beginning in 1959, buried seventy-five feet underground about thirty-five minutes west of Ottawa. Known as CFS (Canadian Forces Station) Carp, the $22 million facility operated under the cover of an innocuous communications base. Next to a small parking lot in Carp, behind barbed wire fences, a small tin shed and a series of antennas were all that appeared aboveground. One of the only hints of its special function was the unit’s crest, dominated by the three-headed dog Cerberus, who according to legend guarded the entrance to the underworld.

destination. They sought relief from violence, murder. They’d been accepted into France, only to be shoved behind the barbed-wire fences of an internment camp for “their” safety. Nearly two hundred thousand souls were at Perpignan. The conditions there claimed four hundred lives a day. People who survived the treacherous journey only to die of typhoid, cholera, starvation and exhaustion.

Once, a preacher joined a postal carrier making his rounds in No Man’s Land. The sky turned black and lightning flashed. Bolts struck the ground and electrified barbed-wire fences. The preacher cowered for cover. The carrier told him to relax. “God isn’t that awful,” he said. “Lightning will never strike a mailman or a preacher.” Within ten years, God would change moods.

It doesn’t take long to get to Tanforan, but it feels like hours. I spend the ride unfolding and refolding the last piece of origami, following the creases Dad made years ago, a rabbit appearing and disappearing in my hands like a magic trick. There and gone. There and gone. We see the barbed wire first. The chatter in the bus quiets. The fence seems ten feet tall, with guard towers at regular intervals, like it’s a prison. Like we’re criminals. Then the grandstand, the muddy racetrack, the tarpaper

In my life I've done more suffering than thinking— though I believe one understands better that way. You see, dogs aren't enough any more. People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all. Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants. . . It seems that the elephants Morel was trying to save were purely imaginary and symbolic, a parable, as they say, and that the poor bastard was really defending the old human rights, the rights of man, those noble, clumsy, gigantic, anachronistic survivals of another age - another geological epoch. . . you announce this salvation as coming *soon’— though I suppose that in the language of paleontology, which is not exactly that of human suffering, the word soon’ means a few trifling hun- dred thousands of years. Earth was his kingdom, his place, his field— he belonged. . The lorry was literally stuffed with ‘trophies’: tusks, tails, heads, skins— an orgy of butch- ery. De Vries, was certainly not collecting for museums, because most of them had been so riddled with shot as to be unrecognizable and in any case unsuitable for the pleasure of the eye. I suppose there are things that nothing can kill and that remain forever intact. It’s as if nothing could ever j^ppen to human beings. They’re a species over which it’s not easy to triumph. They’ve a way of rising from the ashes, smiling and holding hands. "Well, I finally got an idea. When he fails, do like me: think about free elephant ride through Africa for hundreds and hundreds of wonderful animals that nothing could be built—either a wall or a fence of barbed wire—passing large open spaces and crush everything in its path, and destroying everything—while they live, nothing is able to stop them—what freedom! And even when they are no longer alive, who knows, perhaps continue to race elsewhere still free. So you begin to torment your claustrophobia, barbed wire, reinforced concrete, complete materialism imagine herds of elephants of freedom, follow them with his eyes never left them on their run and will see you soon feel better ... " years of isolation in the depths of the jungle have no power against a tenacious hope, and that a hundred acres of land at the height of the rainy season are easier to clear than are certain little intimate nooks of our soul. she understood perfectly well how unconvincing this sounded, but she couldn’t help it: it was the truth. He felt that, at his age, patience was ceasing to be a virtue and was becoming a luxury he could less and less afford. He strove for one last time to look at the affair with all the detachment and all the serenity suitable to a man of science. the immense sky, filled with absence. with the impassive face of a man who feels perfectly sure of having the last word. Of course to the pure all things are pure.

BAASS investigators photographed some anomalous tracks, including two sets of barefoot human tracks merging into one, and a second set of barefoot tracks in the snow that approached a five-foot-tall, barbed wire fence and continued in the snow after the fence with no evidence of a broken stride and no evidence of either climbing the barbed wire fence or jumping over the wire. BAASS also obtained a variety of hair samples in the vicinity of these tracks. These hair samples were subjected to DNA analysis with inconclusive results.

After dinner one night, me and the boys are on the edge of camp, tossing rocks over the barbed wire. There’s plenty to throw. Rocks are maybe the only thing that’s plentiful here besides dust and anger. For maybe the hundredth time, I think about leaping that fence. It’s only about three feet high, and kids like Yum-yum’s brother, Fred, sneak through all the time to catch scorpions in the desert. I could go running out there, out with the wild horses they say roam this part of Utah, free as the goddamn wind. But I’d never abandon Mas and the boys, or my uncle Yas, who took me in when my parents shipped me out to California. The whole camp’s buzzing with the news today. Everyone seventeen and up has gotta do this questionnaire to see who’s loyal and who’s not. If you’re loyal, you can volunteer for Roosevelt’s combat unit. It’s Nisei-only, which is a shit idea, if you ask me. If Uncle Sam sends ’em to the Pacific, the other battalions are gonna mistake them for the enemy. “They won’t get sent to the Pacific,” Mas says, pitching a stone so far into the desert, it disappears from sight.

Another checkpoint—this one looked haphazardly thrown together with metal drums and coils of barbed wire and a tall chain-link fence.

We are going to see the rabbit. We are going to see the rabbit. Which rabbit, people say? Which rabbit , ask the children? Which rabbit? The only rabbit, The only rabbit in England, Sitting behind a barbed-wire fence Under the floodlights, neon lights, Sodium lights, Nibbling grass On the only patch of grass In England, in England (except the grass by the hoardings Which doesn’t count.) We are going to see the rabbit And we must be there on time. First we shall go by escalator, Then we shall go by underground, And then we shall go by motorway, And then by helicopterway, And the last 10 yards we shall have to go On foot.And now we are going All the way to see the rabbit, We are nearly there, We are longing to see it, And so is the crowd Which is here in thousands With mounted policemen And big loudspeakers And bands and banners, And everyone has come a long way. But soon we shall see it Sitting and nibbling The blades of grass In – but something has gone wrong! Why is everyone so angry, Why is everyone jostling And slanging and complaining? The rabbit has gone, Yes, the rabbit has gone. He has actually burrowed down into the earth And made himself a warren, under the earth, Despite all these people, And what shall we do? What can we do? It is all a pity, you must be disappointed, Go home and do something for today, Go home again, go home for today. For you cannot hear the rabbit, under the earth, Remarking rather sadly to himself, by himself, As he rests in his warren, under the earth: ‘It won’t be long, they are bound to come, They are bound to come and find me, even here.

Scores of Mexicans gathered in the shadow of the US—Mexican border wall, weighing up the risk of scaling the barbed wire, while trucks laden with car parts, computers and beer passed freely into US soil. Africans drowned in their thousands in the Mediterranean as they attempted to follow the vegetables their continent exported to Europe. In the name of refashioning the world as a borderless global village, globalization was building new fences and reinforcing older ones everywhere.

That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it's for you don't know, and why it's there, there's no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn't belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn't want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, ``Get out.'' You know there's an explanation for all this somewhere and what it's doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn't what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a17 stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that's ultimately what's involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don't want to get into it. If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone. But many others are also following their natural feelings and not trying to imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do, you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass movement, an entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up from apparently nowhere, saying, ``Stop the technology. Have it somewhere else. Don't have it here.'' It is still restrained by a thin web of logic that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that web can break.