The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends at the Elbow of Justice

I choose to believe the farther out in space we go, the more alike all of us back here on earth should look and yet between and among ourselves we can and do create and act upon differences and distinctions which have no basis in fact or any actual meaning creating consequences that too often can last beyond lifetimes.

Already eighteen years into this 21st Century and armed with tools and technologies that should have helped us bridge whatever differences politics, religion, race or ideology separate us, instead we sometimes choose belligerence and tribalism instead of comity and collaboration. 

These days we regularly refer to one another as snowflakes, deplorables, social justice warriors, and white supremacists, and heap scornful invective on those whose politics or perspectives differ from our own, ignoring the dangers inherent in seeing only labels rather than individuals.

When we reduce one another to abstractions and use labels to help us ‘sort out’ and define ‘the other’ we stop seeing the humanity in each person with terrible and horrible consequences.

This month, all month, at the Otis Library our 2016 National Medal for Museum and Library Service Recipient, we have a reminder from our shared past that could and should inform and uplift both our present and our future, a traveling exhibit fittingly entitled Anne Frank: A History for Today.

Somewhere in each of our lives, we’ve learned about The Shoah, or Holocaust, when prejudice and hatred of European Jewry during Germany’s Third Reich intersected with the efficiencies of the assembly line to create murder on a scale and scope never before known in the history of our time on this planet.     

The exhibit, which opened last Wednesday, is self-paced and intended to provoke each of us to think beyond ourselves and teaches without preaching the values we can all gain when we can celebrate our similarities and our differences.

There are programs and workshops associated with the exhibit throughout the month for individuals and small groups, all designed to make sure we never forget the darkest moment of our collective history.

Hunted for the crime of being and murdered before reaching her sixteenth birthday, Frank would write, “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”  

Her words echo in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we commemorate this Monday with a range of activities from a federal holiday to the annual gathering and march starting at a quarter past one in the David Ruggles Freedom Courtyard of Norwich City Hall.

Half a world may separate Bergen-Belsen from Memphis but it takes less than a moment to acknowledge “the time is always right to do what is right.” That time is now.   

-bill kenny