Thursday, February 16, 2006

Hate

I added a link about hate today.

It's a website created to remember the survivors of the Holocaust, the Nazi campaign to eliminate the Jews of Europe and Russia. They also killed Gypsies, the handicapped, homosexuals and others they deemed undesirable and unfit to breathe.

Since I first learned about the Holocaust in high school, I still can't believe that this happened in plain sight, out in the open for the world to see.


And I used to think that this kind of thing could never happen again, but, really, when you look at world history, it is a repeating cycle of one group killing another.

The culprit: the delusion that we are different...because of religion...or skin color...or nationality...or sexuality. Suffering from this delusion, we then create a superior...and an inferior.
The antidote: love, and if you can't love, awareness...that everyone is an individual - not a race or a group.

I have seen tons of holocaust pictures. I've seen movies of bulldozers moving bodies into mass graves. I've seen pictures of frightened, dazed people...torn from their beds at night...and herded into cattle rail cars for a trip to the death camps. I even visited a concentration camp, Dachau, in Germany.


And at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I saw an exhibit of thousands of shoes stripped from people, as they arrived in those camps and were methodically turned from individuals to numbers.

This stuff is never easy to look at. But at some point, maybe because of the sheer scale of the horror, the brain shuts off. To protect yourself, you become numb, steeled.

But then there's this photo -- above. It makes me shudder every time I look at it.


This woman tries to cover her child as a German SS officer aims his gun at them. There is no logic in her action. In the photo, off to the left, other rifles have just felled more victims. She can't think that her child will escape death.


No, at work here is just the pure instinct of a mother trying to protect her baby.

This picture is the best argument for love not hate.



3 comments:

Yesterdays_ashes said...

Very well written from the heart. Yes a mother will do anything to protect her child even in a hopeless situation. That is a true act of love.

Take care & thank you for sharing this. It is something important to remember in our daily lives.

Tina

lagal[og] said...

thanks for the reminder. when the news is filled with stories of hate, it's easy to just go with the flow and contribute to the collective hatred - hating someone who's not like us, hating people who don't agree with our views, hating individuals who are different from how we perceive we should be, hating people whose ways are strange to us.

Just a human said...

thank you, tina. from your observations, it sounds like you have plenty of that "true" love in your heart. May you feel God inside you today - Bud

Oggie - Bless you for your comments and stopping by. Let's make a deal: you spread some love around today...and so will I. That way, we'll have both sides of the world covered. Peace.