Sometimes the calendar conspires to bring the past, distant and the not-quite-so, into the present so vehemently and violently we cannot look away even if we so choose (and we do often so choose, too often). Around the world this week have been memorials marking Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance) but today for different and also the same reasons, should be the highwater mark as we do instead of say.
Where words fail, pictures have to capture emotions and the Holocaust provokes emotions unlike any other historic occurrence. Having been in Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, but never to the industrial strength murder factories, I may have a better idea than some of the scale and scope of the catastrophe that befell European Jewry eighty (!) years ago, but no one can "understand" what happened because what happened was insanity intersecting with depravity that surpassed understanding.
The Holocaust is six million murdered Jews but so many more, and others, were collateral damage that the mind almost stutters trying to grasp the enormity of the horror. Poles, Gypsies, Communists, Russian POWs, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roman Catholic clergy, political prisoners of all stripes and other 'undesirables' all were tossed into the meat grinder's maw where they were worked to death and dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head, starved or gassed.
Killing those unlike ourselves is something we do as a species on a regular and recurring basis here on the Big Blue Marble. We're the only ones who do-animal, vegetable or mineral-the undisputed heavyweight champions of the world. It's not confined or restricted by geography or ideology. No continent or people are immune to it. The Holocaust might be noteworthy because hatred harnessed the Industrial Age to deliver carnage on a conveyor belt for the first time in our collective history.But it hasn't been the last time.
Biafra, Somalia and the Balkans are just some of the more notable recent genocides and they may well pale in comparison to what we don't yet know about all the dirty little wars fought throughout The Arab Spring and across equatorial Africa. I mention this, because, with any luck at all, today will be an historic day as a CMB, Champion Murderous Bastard, Joseph Kony, will be stopped.
His path has been bloody if largely ignored by those of us we who live in The West and who are most comfortable seeing him as a Third World Problem. The real problem, of course, is there is only One World and we are all in it, and so is Joseph Kony. The Eastern US liberal aged white guy that I believe myself to be says 'apprehend the miscreant and put him on trial' but the Jersey guttersnipe in me says, 'never mind the cost-find him today and put him down as you would a mad dog.'
Our global village makes possible so many miracles on a daily basis that finding and ending (yet another) mass murderer's career should be routine. Every day's the end of days for some, or at last for this one. It's time to cover the night. Every moment we live on this planet, we add to the story of Us. And the story for today is remarkably simple and unadorned: Today is the day to Make Joseph Kony History.
-bill kenny
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