asylum
the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left his or her country as a political refugee. what a slough of technical terms! given that, I suppose only international lawyers and international courts "know" what asylum means. you and I can know it's an ancient practice, at least two and a half millennia old. I have long thought it an amazing act of generosity that one country grants citizens of another country in defiance of that second country's government. that is, the idea is generous. (by the way, I admire generosity in human beings; I think it's one of our better qualities.) the practice almost never is. I suppose refugee camps are better than concentration camps or slave labor camps, but in practice they are often not much better. part of the reason for that is that it costs a lot to keep a human alive, especially if keeping him or her alive includes health care. most countries balk at providing even their own citizens health care, even some "first world" countries do, like the United States of America, for instance. but that's a different "appreciation". for this one, I am amazed that at least as long ago as in the Greek times, maybe longer ago than that, nations took on the obligation of protecting foreigners who fled their own countries. (yes, I know that sentence is anachronistic; 2500 years ago we didn't have countries, we had city-states and empires. it was still an uncharacteristic-of-humans thing that humans did. yea for them! yea for us for continuing the practice!)
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