The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the absurdity of bureaucratic rules in contrast to personal misfortune.
Christopher Hitchens points out the irony and impracticality of societal norms, suggesting that when faced with a serious crime like being mugged, the bureaucratic requirement of identification can become a significant barrier to personal safety and returning to normal life. The remark critiques the way systems can sometimes fail to support individuals in dire situations.
In practice
In a discussion about travel inconveniences, this quote can illustrate the complexities of modern society.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
When you become completely loving and kind without fear and without thought of harming others, you graudate from the Earth school. That is when reincarnation ends.
He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive . . .
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it ... Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly droughts to dry up. Peace is the gift not of volitional struggle but of spiritual hospitality.
If you have indeed been so highly distinguished, should you not ‘live no longer to yourselves, but altogether unto Him who died for you and rose again?’ Should any thing short of absolute perfection satisfy you? Should you not labour to ‘stand perfect and complete in all the will of God?’
When you say 'Black is beautiful' you are saying, 'Man you are okay as you are, begin to look upon yourself as a human being'.
O Lord! You are the guide of those who are passing through the Valley of Bewilderment. If I am a heretic, enlarge my heresy.
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