Word: instrument
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This is what the Holocaust seems to have come to--an exchange of dollars for unspeakable suffering and loss, and a shared pretense that money is an instrument of justice. In cases where restitution is at issue--the return of artworks, homes and property to their rightful owners, for instance--financial repayment may come close to settling the score; but even there, no compensation would take account of what it cost to be dragged away from one's home or to have had one's beloved possessions seized by the state...
...Anti-Defamation League, himself a Holocaust survivor, said those "who have claims deserve to bring them forward, but it's at a heavy price. The next generation will believe it's all about money." Yet the plain, if unsatisfactory, truth is that money is the most tangible instrument of compensation that society has at its disposal. Verbal apologies have been proffered in recent years by institutions, and by such nations as France and Poland, but sincere as they may be, they leave no evidence of penalty. Dollars, at least, may pay for a child's education, a mortgage, an operation...
...Goreed. Though our paths didn't cross till later, each of us knew what the other was doing. After the war he started sitting in with the Count Basie septet, and Basie hired him as a vocalist. Every Day made Joe an instant star. His voice was a magnificent instrument. It had everything--range, tone, vibrancy, sweetness--it was just mind boggling. He turned up the steam, made you want to get as much out of your voice as he did out of his. So when Dave Lambert, Annie Ross and I were experimenting with my lyricized versions of Basie...
...Serbian hosts led us to the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade to see a photo exhibit designed to justify their ethnic cleansing and brutal destruction at Vukovar. In a glass case was a steel instrument that looked like a tuning fork, but with the prongs spaced 3 1/2 in. apart. The Croat Ustache used to use the handy device to gouge out Serb prisoners' eyes, both at once. Applied art, indeed...
Forgiveness has even wider social applications. An unusual coalition of liberal lawyers and religious thinkers has pioneered something called the restorative justice movement, whose favored instrument is conferences between crime victims and jailed perpetrators. There are now more than 300 such programs in prisons country-wide, including a $1 million religion-based juvenile-justice initiative in Florida...