In seventh grade they showed us a documentary about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. I fricking fell out of my chair and fainted in a heap on the floor and had to be carried to the nurse’s office.
And my parents were not at all pissed about me being exposed to this violent and horrifying imagery. They were like, “Yep, that shit sucked, we had to live through it, and now you know. Nazis bad.” They might have used other, more eloquent, words, but that was the gist of it.
I have never forgotten it. There was no humiliation, and honestly nobody ever said a word to me, other than, “Glad you’re okay.” Because it was rough, and nobody in that room was having a good time. It shaped us, it made us aware of just how awful humans can be to other humans when they decide to dehumanize an entire group of people for whatever reason. The Nazi Holocaust is far from the first instance of genocide, and gods help us it won’t be the last. It should be the last, because haven’t we figured out yet that we need all of us?
No?
Godsdammit.
I watched a fascinating PBS documentary series recently called First Peoples, which documented the findings of several anthropologists and DNA experts, regarding some of the human races that are considered extinct – and a couple we didn’t even know about. What emerged was, the mutations that allowed each part of the race to branch off to be its own thing were necessary adaptations that enhanced the survival of that species of humans, and once each subgroup met up with Homo Sapiens Sapiens (otherwise known as “us”), they were basically absorbed, and the mutations they carried became part of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, thus ensuring our long-term survival. In other words, the more we mixed with the other “races,” the stronger we got.
Is the bell dinging yet? Has the penny dropped? Hello? Is this thing on?
The Neanderthals didn’t just disappear – approximately 75% of all humans alive now have 1-3% Neanderthal DNA, because they had mutations that were helpful to ensure their survival. I’ll repeat it: We need each other to be our strongest. You have skills and knowledge I don’t have, and I have skills and knowledge you don’t have. Together, we make a stronger resource. Then another person shows up with yet other skills and knowledge, and we get stronger yet. We need each other’s ideas, perspectives, yes, even each others genetic heritage. If there is such a thing as a “Master Race,” it’s all of us – like a master key opens all the locks in a building, the master race surely has to include all of the people. Otherwise it’s just evil and leads to somebody getting up their own ass about purity and other bullshit, and then they start trying to kill people they have decided are impure.
Not again.
Seeing those Holocaust images, being sickened enough to actually faint from the shock and the pain of them, set my violence filters to ultra-sensitive. I have to be extremely selective about the books or other media I consume, because violent cruelty, senseless killing, sexual violence and cruelty, child abuse, any time where some psycho is trying to make some other people feel really really helpless and hopeless and eternally doomed and then does whatever he wants to them because there’s noting to stop him, makes me exceedingly uncomfortable, sometimes for days. Can’t sleep. Can’t get it out of my mind. Can’t focus on anything else. Even over fictional characters. That’s pretty much what Hitler did. We should study that, from the perspective of the people he did it to. Listen to those stories, feel their pain. Feel that hopelessness like it’s our own, because dammit, folks, it fucking could be if the bloody right wing of this fragile experiment gets enough of the wrong people in power and decides to make it happen.
Okay, is this thing on yet?
If we aren’t teaching our kids about the worst we can be, they won’t know how bad it can get until it’s too late. Is that what we want to do? Is that how vulnerable we want to leave them? This is essential education. The German government hasn’t shied away from reminders of their awful past atrocities. We shouldn’t shy away from ours, either.