~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I’ve been reading Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Night for the third time. It is a slim book, around a hundred pages, and old, published in 1972. It is the account of a 16-year-old Jewish boy surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald with his father during Hitler’s reign as the murderer of as many Jews as he could round up, not too long ago – the 1930s, a mere 85 years.
It’s grim. Not exactly the kind of reading one would think might elevate my mood. But it does. For one thing, it makes what many of us feel right now as a tenuous time look like a walk in the park. But the important result in this young boy’s terror, torture and loss of God was not revenge but redemption through the human understanding that “We must take sides,” as Elie wrote.
When we do not take sides as we see or read or hear of intimidation, hate, lies, demeaning actions and words, we contribute to the big mess that in 1930’s Germany started out just like what’s happening in the U.S. right now.
Many commentators deny and ridicule any suggestion of comparing now to then. Readers have told me I’ve been jumping to conclusions since 2016 in an uninformed, rabid, frightened way. I am indeed the latter and am wondering what more I can do but write. They, themselves, are precipitous, uninformed, rabid and afraid, but of the wrong things. Do they have any inkling of the deep chasm between a country run by a dictator and a democracy run by the people? Do they not read history? Do they not think they might have to run and hide if, for example, they have a natural miscarriage? If they work at the polls and count the ballots, and the other side says they cheated? So, they are found, they are harassed, they are threatened, and they lose any sense of the free life they have lived all their lives.
They are either blind or on the other side, the side of the fascists and the neo-Nazis and the bullies. Or do they just think it won’t happen to them, like the millions of Jews in Germany whose families had lived there for centuries who did not run for their lives as soon as the first book-burning took place?
To speak up and call them what they are is not being them; it is taking sides and rebelling against any kind of lackadaisical not-my-problem kind of thinking. I have gay persons in my family and friendships; I know a couple who are afraid to say they are LBGTQ. I also have Right-wing friends who laugh at my fear of a far-right administration. They love to tell me I’m backing the wrong man as I defend my choice amid their recent learned ability to interrupt and never shut up.
In their war book (it is not a mere playbook, as many are calling it), the far Right accuses the Left of what they themselves do. It is so incuriously blatant, it’s difficult to believe anyone buys it.
There is no doubt they have listened to the repetitious bully, and all I have to say is the insipid, “What news do you watch?”
It doesn’t seem like enough when I read the words of Elie Wiesel: “Action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.”
So, here I am again, railing against the Other. But in this case, the Other is not someone who has a different color of skin than I, is of a different gender, a different background; the Other is not what I am not, it is what they need not be – persons drawn to brutality and hate.
A Black friend of mine was hopeful a few years ago when she learned we could all get our DNA, our entire genetic lineage. Her theory was “If we all get our DNA checked, we’ll realize we all came right out of Africa!”
That hasn’t worked so far in making us realize we’re all in this together.
I have friends who have read and believed that it must be so that “The poor shall always be with us.”
This was/is obviously a belief of the selfish, the prideful, the wealthy because they read the wrong book and have learned by these words it does no good to share.
Many, particularly on the Left, say that everyone has a right to say anything except “Fire!” in a theater unless there is a fire. Free speech, you know.
But everything has its limits, like carte blanche free speech and guns for everyone. Should The Bible be banned for all its killing and raping and pillaging? And too late for my children who read all the Dr. Seuss books, half a dozen of them taken out of publication in this decade due to “racist and insensitive imagery.*
What do the crazed book banners think about their children’s mobile phones attached to their left hands and their constant intimacy with adult conversation? Do these parents talk only babytalk around their kids who can dial up porn as easily as turning on their devices.
Once again, do we ignore the loss of even more freedoms? Do we hide, pretend or stand up? It’s so painful behaving as we ought – with the courage of our convictions.
*The following Dr Seuss books have been taken out of publication: “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” “If I Ran the Zoo” “McElligot’s Pool” “On Beyond Zebra!” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer”
