Why it’s wrong to focus on differences
I recently read Natalia Zuckerman’s very moving account about attending the 80th anniversary ofthe liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.Some years ago I was part of a week-long, Buddhist-ledretreat at these two camps set three miles apart. The retreat was called Bearing Witness, and still takes place annually.About 200 people of different faiths and nationalities spent the days bearing witness to theatrocities committed, reading the names of the dead, saying Kaddish and other prayers, sitting in silence in areas where unbearable suffering took place. A fewattendees were children of survivors, a few children of Nazi soldiers . Our nights were spent in discussion and communion.
If you have spent any time at these concentration camps, your life view isforever changed. Therefore, It is unimaginable to me that VP Vance would visit Dachau in the morning, only to meet with the leader of the far-right German party in the afternoon. Vance’s belief in some version of white Christian nationalism“trumped’his ability to understand where such ideology, based on the supremacy of one group of people over everyone else, led in the past and could lead in the future.
Making one group of people into “the other”, as Trump has done with the undocumented, with transpeople, and other groups, is therefore right out of the Nazi playbook in which anti-Semitism was used to bind together and blind the German people. The astonishing fact about the Nazis was that after their extermination of the Jews, dissidents, homosexuals, the Romani, the disabled, they planned to double the size of Birkenau, already 10,000 acres!, to kill all the slavs, a vast group of people that numbered hundreds of millions. By this means they would gain world domination.
I am not making any direct analogy to the present, only suggesting that using an Us vs. Them mentality as a political tool, and focusing on the differences in people, be it skin color, origin, status, religion, is a tool that can be used to gain domination and bring suffering. We must recognize it as such in order to stand against it.
Barbara Maltby
Lakeville
Venturing out into snow and ice? How about some thoughts on staying put
Of course the huge majority of car crashes are mishaps, unintentional, inadvertent or inattentive, but then the car can’t crash itself, most often the drivers look for other conditions or circumstances that contributed. “Not my fault’ Unfortunately for them, minor or severe, Isaac Newton, who has been helpful and even fun can be suddenly, ‘All of a Sudden!’, unforgiving, unsympathetic.
Venturing out into snow and ice conditions? Sometimes the better judgment is to stay put, rather than yielding to the pressures of convenience, expediency and promptness. A building storm is worse than a clearing storm! Driving is an individual enterprise and often requires social interaction, often ignoring the increased risk and hazards of your momentum on reduced surface-traction handling; longer braking (if any traction is available) and trajectory maneuvering. The weather is inconsiderate of what your car’s manufacturer proposed as increased capability, all cars (!) and tires (!) are subject to the very nearly the same skidding, maybe at only a slightly different distance and speed. And if you perceive yourself as a superior driver (?)…this can be punctuated by the big damaging, crunching noise at the end of a fearful moment! Predictable phenomena, in this case, is not an accident.
I wrote this paragraph for the AAA magazine many years ago, equally as true today.
Robert Green
Lakeville
