No Single Drop of Rain

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the beginning a half a world away that would plunge nearly the entire globe into war while sentencing millions to the unspeakable and unimaginable horror we know today as Kristallnacht. 

If the Shoah, The Holocaust, was an unfinished symphony of genocidal annihilation for Europe's Jews (and it was only unfinished because the rest of the world finally wrested the controls of the killing factories from the True Believers before they achieved their Endlosung), the first notes of the overture to that murderous symphony, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), were played on November 9, 1938

When you look at the pictures of death and destruction and listen to the softly told tales of survival, often by the purest of coincidences, if you have a heart it is sickened and if you have a conscience it is outraged. But to keep the next exercise of extreme intolerance from ever reaching this point, we need to retain the memories of the events as well as the circumstances that allowed them to happen.

The Nazis did NOT suddenly leap out of bed eighty ago and cause the German nation, the land of Luther, Schiller, Liszt, and Beethoven, to lose its collective mind and forfeit forever its own soul. For decades leading up to this day in 1938, and not just in Germany, but all across Europe, the systemic and systematic marginalization of Jews, apartheid before that word was in fashion, was in practice and a part of everyday life. The Nürnberger Gesetze of 1935 helped dull Germans to the slaughter to come.

The use of language in reducing those who are the object of your animus to something somehow less human than yourself so that the acrimony and injury inflicted upon them has no more consequence than stepping on a bug is a critical tool and integral part of the creation and construction of the crematoria and concentration camps and no less vital to it than the jackboots and the armbands.

We, you and I, must promise one another to take an additional breath before thinking or voicing a racial epithet to characterize someone on the other side of a political spectrum with whom we are disagreeing. Instead of counting to ten, we must promise to count to eleven, and then twelve and to just keep counting until the gorge in our veins recedes just a bit and our blood has gone off its boiling point. 

And, most importantly, when we see someone else in mid-screed, we mitigate and mediate to help assure a more rapid return to civil and civic discourse in our interactions with one another. What happened in Pittsburgh to start this month of November wasn't an American aberration but just the next chapter in the American version of the story of anti-semitism and racial (and racist) hatred.   

In 1938 Germany was not a nation of Nazis on Kristallnacht; they were in the minority even when in power. It isn't so much just the sins committed on this day that should live in infamy forever, but, rather, the sins that could and should have been prevented had two or more people joined and raised their voices in opposition. 

We must never forget what happened next.
-bill kenny