Did you ever feel so
strongly about an issue that you want your words on paper to scream at those reading them to pay attention? It is what I am
experiencing now a sense of incredulity so strong that I have not
experienced since I watched as a child at age 10 my first newsreel film
about the German concentration camps of WWII shown in my theater at
intermission between the usual, then, two films. In my many opinions I
have spoken of this seminal event which formed my politics and refined
them as an adult. The newsreel of the film about the horror of the
camps was the first time I had witnessed man's inhumanity to man and his
crimes against humanity as heaps of dead bodies outside of gas chambers
were later shown to be the end result of the entire Nazi purpose. I was
sickened. My child's mind kept thinking it could not be so. At age
13 the film "Judgment at Nuremberg" solidified what I would come to know
as the Holocaust and I remain to this day incredulously stunned that
this, indeed, was so.
One
of the poignant narrations of the first documentary I saw about the
Holocaust was its revelation that to con masses of humanity naked into
the death rooms where Zyklon B gas was discharged from shower heads was
to have the captured strip down and in bold mendacity iterate to them
they were merely going to take a shower. That lie calmed the victims so
that they would not wax hysterical when the ugly truth and inhuman
purpose of the gassing would be reveled to them. Masses of humanity could be kept from that truth as they,
unknowingly, walked to their deaths. Nazi guards closed the "shower"
doors, locked the captured inside and in mind numbing inhumane incredulity gassed
millions of them, even women and children, to death.
I
thought as a child how lucky I was to live in a nation whose values of
humanity, kindness and refuge for the powerless acted as a shelter
against international storms. All the oppressed, I thought, had to do was
ask for asylum in America against such inhumanity and this empathetic
country would let them in and act as it says on Lady Liberty “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!”
Again,
in enormous incredulity I see something I never would have thought I
would see in this nation. Another conman in our time orders his "border
security" to tell women who have watched their children shot dead in
front of their eyes, who have made the long torturous journey on foot to
save as many of their children as they can only to be sent for
incarceration in America as the American guards rip their children from them
telling mothers that their children are simply going to the showers.
Going to the showers? They, of course, are not going to the showers but
they are going screaming to places unknown separated from their parents
to conditions that remind me of the deadly German camps so many decades
ago.
My
ears ring to hear words I cannot hear and my eyes see that which
they cannot see. Can day become night, can up become down, can summer
become winter? In the blink of an eye yes, it can. Evil can happen here
and is happening here now. The Trumpian hoards who do these
dastardly deeds and obey a commander who should be deemed certifiably
insane deserve to be tried for not only their infinite number of crimes
against
powerless people but by an international court for crimes against
humanity. We can do nothing less but to hold these unconscionable
humans who commit these ugly acts to a fate which they justly deserve.
Still,
I do not have the words profound enough to reflect my emotion but
Spencer Tracy, playing the American judge in "Judgement at Nuremberg "
does. I ask you, no I implore you to listen as he pronounces his
verdict on the guiltiest of men and proclaims "We stand for justice,
truth, and the value of a single human life." It is a tale for all men
and for all
ages even or most especially now for our own.
