My words are insufficient

I have been trying to formulate an opinion which directly addresses the poison of racist white nationalism that has infected part of our body politic.  It is understatedly dangerous to ignore as it is advanced by an incompetent, unfit and racist president of the most powerful nation on earth.  The most important historical event which has shaped not only my politics but my being is the WWII Holocaust.  It has done this not only because I am a Jew but because I am an empathetic human being who knows what it feels to be the recipient of the slings and arrows of those who have little to no empathy and a witness to where the path this lack of understanding can lead.  I am able to stand in the shoes of the so called "other."

The question for me becomes how do people do the evil they are commanded to do by their leaders carrying out supreme brutality toward their fellow man and often carrying out heinous orders to abuse not only other men but women and children too.  How can they do it and wake up in the morning, look in the mirror with a satisfaction of who they are?  I stand incredulous that this nation is imprisoning asylum seekers thousands of them -- men, women and children separating innocent children from their parents and enclosing them in crowded cages of filth, disease, with no place to shower or relieve themselves for weeks.  Children are sleeping when they can sleep on cold floors with thin aluminum covers and must often defecate in place.  They are subjected to an endless variety of cruelty, sometimes sexual, certainly humiliating encouraging fear they will never be free.  One young man who had correct documentation of his citizenship rejected as false, was nevertheless detained and finally after more than three weeks was released.  He had lost 26 pounds as the food, if one can call it that, was less than nutritious nor plentiful.  Asylum seekers' sin is leaving a home country of certain death, walking over a thousand miles to the US border to escape that certain death to a better life only to be greeted by a plethora of attitudinal pathology by US guards who locked them up in cages, with little food, facing death again through disease from close confinement and no hygiene not even a toothbrush.  Many who are confined as each day goes by with lights on at all times, find sleep difficult if not impossible so their psychology deteriorates.  They may be scarred for life.

The conditions in these border prisons of brown asylum seekers, of course, remind me of those camps in Germany during WWII. Through their dehumanization of the Jew Germans rounded them up and ultimately slaughtered six million of them gassing them to the ovens.  What does this teach? It teaches us that it can surely happen here; that all human beings have the capacity to stoop to the lowest most hateful denomination of their nature.  It takes a charismatic leader like Hitler then and Trump now to stoke the embers of worry, anger, fear and hate among whites who have felt ignored against the other.  Man's solace is to place the answer to all of his problems in one man, though that man a con, because they think he will keep them safe.  He will not keep them safe.  He will stoke the fires of hate against particular minority groups that has always been there and can lead to violence of violent men against that perceived enemy perhaps even leading to civil war.  It is dangerous.

"Facing History and Ourselves," an organization in Brookline, Massachusetts is dedicated to the understanding of how demeaning and disparaging groups of human beings can lead to a Nazi like totalitarian end and that we must face our own racist historical past as well as our own present being.  In Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners -- Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" he writes that ordinary people not simply the powerful were involved in the perpetration of the Holocaust. 

Perhaps my favorite quote is one from "Gentlemen's Agreement" with Gregory Peck.  He is Protestant and a writer who assumes the identity of a Jew in America after the war and says:  "I've come to see lots of nice people who hate it [anti-Semitism] and deplore it and protest their own innocence, then help it along and wonder why it grows. People who would never beat up a Jew. People who think anti-Semitism is far away in some dark place with low-class morons. That's the biggest discovery I've made. [It's] the good people. The nice people."

We must all of us join hands and together return this nation to what it was and what it says on the Lady Liberty's plaque in New York Harbor which my immigrant grandparents saw welcoming them to a new land and new life where they could be free:  In pertinent part it says: ... “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 

Though my own words are insufficient this is who we are but we must reclaim it, take it back from that ugly incompetent leader in our midst and his henchmen who would keep us from it forever.  RESIST!