Today as a middle-aged woman I recognize that I have made a conscious decision to have a change of heart to demonstrate courage for myself, my family, my friends, and the people I have an opportunity to interact with.
Even though the Holocaust Museum has been open for a few years and I always intended to go see it, I always made one excuse or another to delay visiting it. After all who relishes going to be confronted by things that are inconceivable to most of our hearts. A few days before I had the opportunity to go inside the Museum I visited an outside visual presentation entitled “Our Walls Bear Witness” documenting the genocide that is currently occurring in Darfur, Sudan. Then on Saturday, November 25, 2006, I offered to take a friend and his mother to visit the museum. We all went in at approximately 10:30 a.m. Daniel and his mom saw me briefly at the entrance to the main exhibit and then they lost me. I did not leave the museum’s main exhibit until about 5:15. I did not feel hunger or even the passage of time.
There were several parts of the exhibit that had me and many around me in tears. But to me the most gripping part was when a survivor described what her mother did—she somehow recognized that they were being divided that one group of the old, the sick and those with small children were being taken to be executed en masse while those that could work still had a chance at life. In a matter of seconds, this woman took her grandson Danny from her 23-year-old daughter’s arms and convinced her that she was doing this so that she would get assigned to inside work whereas her daughter would get outside work, which the grandmother could not do. The woman then told her other daughter to take care of her sister since she knew that her 23-year-old daughter would be devastated when she realized that she had lost her son and her mother. She truly chose the lesser of two evils.
As a grandmother of two, I wonder if I would have had the courage to make the same choice. I also wonder if I would have the courage to stand up to say no to the hatred, the discrimination, and the ignorance that gave birth to the holocaust. Would I be willing to open my eyes to the suffering of others or would I be like the monkeys that are shown in the statue that stands for I “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil”.
There are many ways to fight against the waves of hatred that give birth to genocide—the greatest of these is consciously deciding that one person can make a difference. The biggest lesson that I learned in walking in the museum is that apathy goes part and parcel with genocide. Assuming that you can’t do anything, that your voice won’t be heard, that your vote doesn’t count are what allows hatred, ignorance and scapegoating to flourish. Believing that it can never happen again also allows genocide to take hold.
Many people believe that discrimination whether it is against African Americans, people of Jewish or Arabic faiths, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and many other minorities no longer exists, that we no longer need quotas, that redlining has disappeared, that we no longer need forced busing. It is my belief that this is not the case that even though we have instituted myriad programs to promote diversity it is our hearts that are still infected.
Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and soon to be former Senator George Allen have recently proven that discrimination is alive and well—it has simply gone underground. Consciously acknowledging its existence is the first step in truly excising this disease from our collective heart. Realizing that Mel Gibson’s, Michael Richards’s and George Allen’s beliefs are the result of what our society condones—first by raising these men to positions where they are idolized and can do no wrong and second by turning a blind eye, a deaf ear, and a mute tongue each time we are confronted with a racial or hateful comment, “joke” or action.
The genocide that is occurring in Darfur and that is beginning in Chad are the responsibility of each of us. We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to genocide anywhere—each of us needs to realize that we are truly connected that the fate of a grandmother, a child, and a father in Darfur is tied to our fate.
I wonder if it weren’t for the Holocaust would we already have discovered a cure for cancer, a form of sustainable energy, a real chance for peace in the Mideast and the World. Can we afford another genocide?
Martin Luther King said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that; only love can do that”. It is my hope and prayer that our grandchildren will never have to build another Holocaust Museum or add to the exhibits contained therein. We do not need “political correctness”—we need a change of heart. We need to open our hearts, our eyes, our ears, and our voices to words of understanding, of compassion, of empathy and to the most powerful of all of these emotions to love. In the end I realize that what we need begins with me.
December 2, 2006
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