Sixty Years

Today is a day for total reflection into the past.  I think of what happened in our world sixty years ago, I could cry...I have cried.  Watching old news clips on today's news shows brought back the latent "shake your soul" feelings that I knew growing up.

I was born in 1944 so I grew up with the aftermath of a terrible war, a war that was fought to end all wars...Again.  This time though there was an undercurrent of evil that pervaded Europe even before the war years.  That evil would come to have a name that is spit upon even today..Nazi..and rightly so.  The horrors brought forth by this evil knew no parallel in our recent history. Six million dead by unnatural means...tortured, starved, raped, beaten, shot, gassed, buried or burnt in ovens.  It is unbelievable that it happened, that we let it happen, that we stood by and looked the other way.

We are looking the other way right now.  There are places in Africa where this is happening on a very large scale....it's pure genocide.  What will it take for man to take a stand and say "No more..it's ENOUGH!"  People that do this evil always believe that they will get away with whatever they want...we need to find a way to stop them, to make them pay.

I think of the little ones who never had a chance, the future generations that were never to be. To kill a small baby, a child,how evil do you have to be?  Fall back on following orders? No order on earth would make me kill a child....rather turn the gun on the evil itself. 

I look at how beautiful our planet Earth looks from the heavens... if only man would treat his neighbor as he would want to be treated.....we would have peace at last.

It's so very true the saying "If you don't remember the past, you are doomed to repeat it."  It scares me that the younger people in our society do not seem to know history at all.  What are the schools teaching?  I actually had a seventeen year old girl tell me that the holocaust never happened.  Wrong thing to say to me.  I'm not Jewish, but I have close friends who lost almost everything and everyone in their family...and I mourn with them.  Also, I have Greek relatives that suffered much during the German occupation which was very harsh.

Well, I sat the little missy down and proceeded to tell her the stories that I had been told, also I have books that show what occurred...you can't dispute those awful photographs.  She told me that as far as she could remember her history teachers never really made reference to it.  Maybe she was a really bad student and didn't pay attention?  I don't know but it shocked the hell out of me.

So we not only have to be on the watch for evil, we also have to watch that people are taught to " remember" that evil has happened in the past and can resurface at any time. Rearing it's ugly head once again under a new banner or slogan.

I now believe that we should be showing "Schindler's List" in  all our schools.....just to cover bases.

I want to believe in man's kindness.  I want to believe in man's goodness.....today is just painful.