Never again?
10-Jul-02
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”
Martin Niemoeller, Protestant pastor (1892-1984)
In 1999, my husband and I visited Washington, D.C. and went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum (an experience I wrote about here). As the World War II vets and the Holocaust survivors die off of old age, we are forgetting the extent to which prejudice and hatred and racial profiling can ruin a world. Every day, Arabs and Arab-Americans are being feared and hated, and even our own citizens are being treated as war criminals and stripped of their most fundamental rights.
My ancestors fought for the freedom of this country in the American Revolution, and they fought for the freedom of the world in World War II. How dare we presume to ignore those lessons, those sacrifices, those messages from the past, warning us against treating other human beings– no matter how wrong we think they are– as anything less than human.
We are facing a terrible future in America.