In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

He wasn__ sure why he felt so compelled to follow the singing, or why he needed to bring the foot with him, but he knew the two phenomena were connected. And in the midst of the mystery lay his father. His father__ sanity. Nicholas was sure of this.

Arms still crossed, Lindsay's clogs tapped on the sidewalk. __o Sam didn__ tell you I was a desperate orphan child with no life outside of work? This isn__ some kind of intervention, some kind of lame attempt to cheer me up?_ He grinned.__hy would she do that?_ __ecause that__ how it sounded._ Nudging her shoulder, he grinning down at her. __ou don__ look desperate, Dr. Lindsay, not by a long shot." __hat__ because you don__ know me._ Lindsay bit her lower lip, arms still crossed, clogs still tap-tap-tapping. Her chest heaved. __y parent__ died in a car accident almost two years ago. It__ a difficult thing to get over. I__ still not exactly right. I guess she worries about me._ Ty sucked in his breath, thinking fast. ____ really sorry about your parents, Linds._ As he put an arm around her shoulder, she broke into a self-conscious smile and shook her head. __pend any time with me at all and you__l find that Sam__ right. I__ a desperate orphan child, completely paranoid and irrepressibly horny._ __hoa!_ She looked so cute, but vulnerable, too. He closed the arm around her shoulder, squeezing her sideways to his chest. Embarrassed, she smiled as she elbowed his rib. Then she dropped her arms and stayed put, tucked close against him. It felt right, having her there.

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.

But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man__ lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt__s portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name__he Nazi war criminal__ actions stemmed from her well-known phrase __anality of evil,_ not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss__ case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler. To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, __ormal,_ sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.