Khaled Hosseini is the author of "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns", and he has some strong opinions about the use of "Hussein" as a dirty word and a call to violence against Barack Obama : more this way»
Imagine your son coming from school and telling you that he had to ask permission to the school principal to sit during recess under the "white's only" tree, which happens to be the only tree in the schoolyard. Then imagine your son coming back from school telling you that he could sit under that tree but now there were lynching nooses covering it.
Then imagine that word spreads. People of all ages and races talk about the incident. Some white and black kids get into an altercation and the rumble. One of the white kids draw a gun on 6 of the brawlers, but they're able to rumble harder with one of the white guy's friends.
Now, imagine you are the mother of one of those guys. The white kid that got his ass kick luckily is fine. He even goes to school and to an event the next day.
Now imagine being the mother of one of the 6 brawlers. While the white instigators threatened to kill the black teenagers with a gun, there's a police officer knocking on your door with a warrant for your son's arrest. The crime? Attempted murder. Not disorderly conduct or assault and battery, which would have been possible valid reasons to take your son to the police station. No. Your son is going to jail for attempted murder of a guy who walked away with some cuts and bruises.
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Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it?