*Because It's Our Only Chance of Progress

Nearly ten years ago I was in my first semester of graduate school in Richmond. It was September, hot as anything, and I sat on a collapsible lawn chair I’d bought the day before. I was still waiting for my furniture to arrive and the voices of some morning news anchors on my portable TV echoed off the bare walls and hardwood floors. I was putting my shoes on. I had the phone cradled between my chin and shoulder and I was putting on my shoes, talking to one of my former military bosses now turned friend. The news was almost over and I was getting ready to turn it off and go mow the lawn.

I’d just read Saints and Villains by Denise Giardinia. It tells the story of theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer and his role in the plot to kill Hitler.  I’d read the book for an undergraduate course, my capstone, called “The Nature of Knowledge” in which we discussed that very thing and whether or not it was important to gain knowledge (it is) and if so, why?* Saints and Villains wasn’t the most well-written of the books we read that semester (and there were many), but it was one that stuck with me mostly because of Bonheoffer’s mental anguish knowing that what was going on in his country was immoral and watching his fellow countrymen fall prey to Hitler’s charms, but feeling powerless to stop it.

 We spent a lot of time discussing the Holocaust that semester in my other courses as well and I remember asking my professor, after we watched a film in which cheering crowds thronged to hear an energetic mustachioed man, how the people of Germany let it happen. How did we? I already knew the answer. We’d been reading about it all semester. We don’t know what we don’t want to know. The fact that we think those in power will not run amok is precisely what allows them to run amok. If it is too difficult for us to process, we as human beings are apt to excuse ourselves for our ignorance. Until it becomes absolutely necessary for us to face the truth.

The brutal extermination of six million people from this earth did not go by unnoticed while it was happening; we simply believed the human race had progressed beyond such barbarity. And we had no skills to cope with the notion that it might not be true.

I thought a lot about the book that morning as I rode the bus across the James River. The buildings downtown popped against a perfectly blue sky and the entire scene was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I remember thinking this as I sat there, numb, staring out the window and thinking how sad it was that the day was so beautiful yet so tragic.

 It wasn’t until I got to school, which had already been cancelled, that I actually felt anything. Watching footage online of Middle Eastern children cheering at the news of the deaths of thousands of people, I wanted to cry. We will end up here again, I thought. Over and again. We will only end up here.

 Two years later I sat with a group of fellow grad students and professors at a local restaurant. It was a somber occasion, one that had only become somber because of our general mood. George Bush had been re-elected the day before, and we couldn’t shake the sense that we as a country were going to a very dark place. I thought again of the book, of Bonheoffer and his search for meaning in a world he could no longer figure out.  All of us in the restaurant being academics, it felt to me like a scene from the book, the lot of us bemoaning the wool being so easily being pulled over Americans eyes and knowing full well the consequences to come.

Tonight (this morning) I am watching footage of cheering crowds. Celebration. History. But I can’t help but think of those children cheering ten years ago. They are men now. Men whose greatest sense of communion came when they were children and watched the destruction of what they were taught to be the symbol of all that is evil and wrong in the world.  I don’t know what to do with the thought. It is a cycle. All of it. The cheering crowds, the assassinated dictators, the bombing and invading and training to overthrow. The perpetuation of hatred in the name of nationalism.