Flipped back and forth last evening between election
coverage and a documentary about Nazi invasion of Poland. The latter had some
footage I’ve never seen before, and was more than terrifying. What a sore on
the soul of humanity is racial hatred. What was particularly unsettling, and I’ve
read about his many times before, was the cavalier attitude of the non-Jewish
residents of the occupied cities as their neighbors and former friends were
dragged from their homes.
I think it was Elie Wiesel who wrote so eloquently about the
sin of indifference. It was well-evident in Polish city after Polish city as
the Nazis began systematically going about their reign of terror with no
protests from the non-victims.
Many stood and watched and others applauded as men, women,
and children were beaten down the streets and crowded into ghettos. Some
standers-by then took the opportunity to take belongings left behind. As I
watched, dots began to connect themselves in my mind.
What kind of species are we? I flipped the channel. There
was the smirking image of a man who, just this week, had said that the last time
America was great was during slavery. My strongest image from what I have
learned of that era, is an account (by Fredrick Law Olmstead I think, in Travels Through the South). The author, whoever it was anyway,
recounted watching a slave owner punish a female slave for some infraction or other.
She was pregnant, “bigly” pregnant, so her “master” had her dig an indention in
the ground to accommodate her swollen belly before he made her lie down to be
beaten.
Great? If so, then let’s not make America great like that again.
Racism and hatred are no ways to make a country great. The Nazis proved that.
To borrow wording from a much greater American, “It is left
for us, the living …” to rise above what may be evolutionary tendencies toward
tribalism (now called “nationalism”) and embrace the "better angels of our nature" by embracing our sisters and brothers of
all colors and places of origin. We could, I think, achieve greatness by
letting love and peace replace bigotry and war.
Why the optimism?
Well, after all, America did become a little greater as
recently as yesterday.
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| Auctioning off what conservative textbooks call "Guest Workers." |
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