Today is the seventy-eighth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. which serves as the cornerstone of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As a child when my mother's mother told stories of "The War" her generation had fought, she rarely mentioned the death camps-perhaps because we were of Irish ancestry and Roman Catholic religion, perhaps for reasons she never had the time or the opportunity to explain.
I'm her age now and the cautionary tale the Ha-Shoah should have become does not seem to be a lesson we on the planet have fully learned. There is mindless murder every day in every corner of the globe because of the color of skin, the choice of a God, the shape of an eyelid, and always the fear of The Other.
We are NOT much better here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave as we impersonalize and dehumanize those with whom we are in disagreement philosophically and politically, rendering them abstractions and making them easier to hate and then hating them deeply and completely.
Instead of Slouching towards Bethlehem, we have continued our journey on the road to perdition and that, I fear, means we will persist in writing off one another and the damages we do to ourselves as part of the overhead of being on the planet. As if a lifetime is worth no more than an arched eyebrow or a shrugged shoulder.
Growing faint in the face of evil is to do nothing and doing nothing cannot be allowed especially when each of us, worldwide, knows that silence is consent and the first chapter in the horror story.
About a minute and a half into this trailer, Keri Lynn (spelling?) explains why she became involved in the Paper Clips Project. I imagine all these years on, her place has been taken by other bright and shiny young people who, if we're lucky, will not need to build rafts to save us from the flood of our own hatred but, instead, bridges to allow connections despite our differences.
-bill kenny
No comments:
Post a Comment