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!
