Two events profoundly affected me this week. First, I spent
Thursday in a diversity training exercise for UALR faculty. The experience reinforced
the reality of how hurtful words and actions can be when aimed at what nature
has provided someone—quite arbitrarily—in terms of sexual identify/preference,
skin color, facial features, physical capabilities, and gender.
Then last evening our family watched, together, Steven
Spielberg’s production “The Last Days,” a documentary featuring interviews with
five survivors of The Holocaust. Highly recommended.
As I am prone to do, I spent part of the night connecting
dots instead of sleeping. To wit:
Maybe the roots of The Holocaust lie in the decision by good
people to allow the proliferation of hurtful words. That would have made
hurtful actions more palatable, particularly when the good people watched them
occur without protest. Perhaps the silence of a good person was as complicit in
this atrocity as the actions of any SS officer.
If one were to watch Fox “News” all day today, one would
experience an unbroken continuum of hurtful words and lies aimed at what Jesus
of Nazareth is recorded as calling “the least of those among us.” A simple
reading of history will reveal where that is taking us. Are we to be among
those who one day will say “… we wept for Zion?”
It is time for good people to quit being silent, don’t you
think?
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