Keeping the Past for the Present and the Future

Some days I try to write with my tongue in my cheek. Maybe you've noticed and maybe it's your fault if you haven't, though probably not. My apologies if that's what you are looking for today, because today I'm not writing like that.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School. The most surprising aspect of the observances for me, and perhaps only for me, was how quickly a decade had gone by and how muted the response seemed to be. There was, on some of the television coverage I saw, an undertone of 'wow-that long ago already' jarringly at odds with the urgent intensity so many had reacted with ten years ago. "Now there's so much that time, time and memory fade away." Every ache and pain reminds I am not a high school student anymore--but every aspect of how we now live makes me grateful I don't have to be that age ever again.

We have learned to move so fast as a society and as a culture that it seems nothing sticks with us or to us anymore. I've shaken my head in dismay as I've ranted and raved about our politics of angry disappointment more times than I can recall (perversely underscoring my point about memory) but we seem so often to have elevated Attention Deficit Disorder to an art form. Some I know have suggested we may use it as an attempt to cope with the uncontrollable rate and pace of our societal changes. The effective range of excuse is less than a meter I learned long ago, and that excuse, at any and all distances, is completely ineffective.

You've undoubtedly heard George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are fated to repeat it." That brings me to today, Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. We're Odd Species Out on this planet, which helps explain why we don't get invited to a lot of mixers and picnics. We take life for no reason, unlike any of the animals with whom we share this orb. We kill because we want to and we can.

The Holocaust was, I suppose,the first moment in time when ignorant, superstitious hatred was wed to the assembly line perfection of the Industrial Age. As we wandered this earth from the earliest of times, we exerted dominance and claimed domain over all manner of others whom we encountered and I leave it to those better versed in archeology and history and sociology to calculate how many tribes of 'others' we, in our brief stay on this planet, have destroyed and exterminated.

When I lived in Western Europe while in the US Armed Forces stationed in (West) Germany, I had occasion to visit Dachau and Bergen-Belsen--the latter well-known to some of my generation as the final destination for Anne Frank and her family. As a simple (minded) GI, I never understood how a nation of Goethe, Kant, that cherished the music of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, could lose its collective mind and destroy its soul through genocide, staining like the mark of Cain, all Germans for all time.

Something else I've never understood: the oppressive and desolate silence at those camps. Decades after the murderous carnage and there were still no birds singing, very sparse vegetation and no color I can remember. It was as if God, Himself, ashamed of what we, formed in His image and likeness, had done had turned His countenance from us.

And yet, I think the intent of Yom Hashoah, especially in the cold light of the days of our lives of the last sixty-five years, the mark is, and must be, on all of us. As Columbine passed by, seemingly unremarked upon by so many yesterday, in places none of us can imagine and whose names we cannot pronounce, the very same type of inhumanity that we vowed could never again happen is visited upon some of us. Kampuchea, Ethiopia, Bosnia, Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda are just some of the places, and in no especial order, all of us can recall without recoiling in horror because we've momentarily lost our way and allowed the unspeakable to become the inevitable and the unspoken.
Never Again, Always and Forever must include all of us. Each one must teach one. "I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I should do and, with the help of God, I will do."
-bill kenny