National Holocaust Remembrance Day. I just teared up at the sight of a half-dozen older men and women waving flags on the bridge near our house and then received one of those random emails from someone comparing the United States of Today to Germany of 80+ years ago, slowly crystallizing under Hitler’s vision. It’s true, the world’s a nightmare and I know people who are comparing Obama to Hitler, using comparisons to Nazi Germany to justify their paranoias. I’ve got to admit, I didn’t Live through World War II, but I’ve known people who did – people fought in it, whose friends died in it. I won’t claim they died to stop the Holocaust – I think many didn’t understand fully what was going on at the time and beyond that, many were just fighting because it was their job. They were heroes as police officers and firefighters are heroes – placing their Lives on the line because it’s what they signed on to do and because they trusted that their blood and sweat and sacrifice would go to the greater good.
And there are those that say “the greater good” is fascist and evil. That it’s controlling and wrong – but sometimes, really, the greater good is important. Public schools and trash collection and public radio and highway systems and clean drinking water and industrial safety standards… these all exist because someone was forward-thinking enough to believe in the greater good. The world that exists around us is NOT built out of 300 million people each watching out for themselves, delineating the world into “mine” and “yours” – it was built by people cooperating with one another, competing and grappling for what they believe to be best. There’s a system in place that… doesn’t work… but usually evens out the excesses. At the moment, it’s ground to a halt and I think it might need some pretty vicious shoes in the gears to get it back into shape, but I really think there’s very little Great Evil in the world. Lots of little evils, lots of small-minded selfishness, but I don’t see the concentration camps around me… and the only group of people threatening to kill another group of people over arbitrary values seems to be the same group that’s calling Obama the next Hitler.
Sorry, seems a little more KKK than SS.
And so I urge people to take advantage of National Holocaust Remembrance Day (today) and to go talk to someone who might have some perspective. Hell, talk to Sharif about Living in Communist China… just please, talk to someone who doesn’t agree with you. The internet, far from being this beautiful blind Brownian motion of society that I thought it would be, slowly evening out people’s viewpoints, is far more searchable and definable and dividable that we thought it was going to be. Now people can look for only those who agree with them, and not meet in a compound or a church, but just in a chatroom and online, and only read THEIR news, and only watch THEIR programs, and slowly people’s minds are falling further and further and further inside themselves… so have a conversation – perhaps one that makes you angry, but damn – try to listen through the red anger clogging your ears – try to remember the person at the other end is a Living, breathing and thinking human being.
I hear Greenspan has been admitting some things here and there and is somehow personally responsible for the rules and regulations that allowed these things to happen, the moral structure of the corporate heads that took advantage of it, and of the stupidity of people uneducated enough to fall for it. We’re forgetting that people exist again. We want to believe that there’s some horrible head to the beast, and don’t WANT to believe that the pettiness and greed of millions and millions and millions of individuals and their individual decisions mounts in to a horrible hydra – that when we trim Greenspan from the neck, 10 more will sprout in his place thinking they can get away with it and be one of the thousands that will get bailed out and not take the fall.
And all because right now we’re willing to crucify a couple of individuals and ignore the problem that’s “too big” – the system itself – we’ll have another opportunity for change that goes by the wayside while we bicker and battle amongst ourselves.
I guess I’m just having a bit of a ranty kind of day. I continue to think of things I’ll fight against, and still haven’t decided what to fight FOR.
