Hilfe die Amis kommen!!! (Switzerland)

Translation from German: Help, the Yankees are coming! Used as the title of the 1985 movie National Lampoon’s European Vacation. If you know my family, it’s a fitting title for our European adventures. 
When I got to the airport in Paris, there were two customs lines and I got in the line most of the people from my flight were getting in. I don’t know how they figured out my nationality but a French guy pointed to the other customs line – “USA over there.” But I was halfway through the EU line and I had to cross several dividers to get out of the line. So, naturally, I did the most adult thing possible. I crawled across the floor of the French airport underneath the dividers to the other side of the room, the non-EU line. I looked up to see a bunch of Frenchies looking at me. I was the stereotypical materialization of the dumb American tourist. I was crawling across the floor and it was the epitome of sophistication. 

Afterwards, I walked out to meet Clark Griswold, er, my dad, in the main area of the airport. We got in a cab and drove to the Eiffel Tower, because why not? We then were at the Eiffel Tower for the appropriate amount of time to snap some pics for Facebook. Literally. We ran out of the cab, grabbed a selfie, and ran back to the cab, the epitome of the “check-it-off-the-box” style of tourism of the postmodern Instagramming era. It made me recall the part in European Vacation where the Griswolds go to the Louvre and Clark enthusiastically proclaims “Thousands of works of art to see! In the fifteen minutes before they close! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Afterwards, we darted off to the Gare de Lyon (picture me saying that with the most stereotypical Southern accent possible) and hopped on the first of several trains that would take us to Zermatt, Switzerland. 

The train from Paris to Lausanne, Switzerland went fairly smoothly, but the train from Lausanne to Visp was a classic Griswold mess. The Amis got off at the wrong station, but the one nice Swiss guy helped helped us figure out how to get to Visp, and which restaurant to go to while we waited for the next train. Eventually we made it to our hotel in Zermatt, and settled in for the night, ready for a full day of skiing tomorrow. 
Important note: ski runs in the Swiss Alps are way harder and steeper than New Mexico and Colorado skiing, and some of the higher runs that don’t have any trees mess up your depth perception and make it difficult to ski, and result in you falling down the mountain. Boom. Crash. Pow. I also sucked at skiing after not having done so in over five years with the exception of skiing/snowboarding in the Dubai mall, which doesn’t really count. So I came back with many bruises, to say the least. The Swiss should really invest in an Achtung, or warning sign to warn us overconfident American skiers. But written in English. That would be sehr gut.

After Zermatt, we headed off to go to Saint Moritz, Switzerland, where the Griswolds stayed at the strangest B&B ever. When we arrived, no one was there to check us in. Was this the right place? Our names were written on a piece of paper with the key attached so apparently so. Then it just got weirder, and some Swiss guy who thought we had left was walking into our room at six in the morning. He quickly realized we were still in there, and quickly left without another word. The next morning, I was showering, when some woman came banging on the door mid-shower, and then approached my dad. “Too long! She is taking too long! This is not normal! Too long!” I got out of the shower, we packed our bags, and said tschüss to that bizarre place. 
“It felt like that scene in Vacation when the Griswolds spend the night at the wrong German family’s house,” my dad commented. It was an über Griswold situation indeed.  

And then in typical Griswold fashion, the handle of my suitcase broke, retiring it from the many adventures it had taken me on. I was strangely and nostalgically attached to the thing. But getting a new suitcase would have to be postponed. Die Amis had a train to Rome to catch. 

Auf Wiedersehen!

Arbeit macht frei, Trump

In mid-March, I traveled to Berlin and toured the Sachenhausen Concentration Camp. I’ve wanted to go there for over twelve years. If you know my age and do the math, it’s a disturbing age to be interested in such things, but I was always fascinated by it because I couldn’t understand how something so horrible could happen and wanted to know how it could be prevented from happening again. Six million people murdered, and many more starved and tortured and experimented on and subjected to horrible conditions, and the people who orchestrated the whole thing were democratically and fairly elected by the plurality of the vote in Germany. How could people do such a horrible thing? How could politicians be elected on such a rhetoric of open animosity towards other human beings? 

Then I remembered. A plurality of voters in most of the Republican primaries have voted for Donald Trump. We’ve dehumanized Mexican immigrants and Arab Americans. We refuse to let children and orphans fleeing death in Syria into our nation because we’d rather let a child die than risk the “security threat.” 

Repeated instances of prejudice throughout history tell us that it’s easier to be angry at a person than it is at an abstract concept or a thing, like the economy, feeling unsafe, sheer bad luck, and so on. We’re prejudiced against Arab Americans, but do we really resent them, or are misattributing our generalized fear for our overall safety and security post-9/11? Or look at racism in the post-Civil War era. Racist white people, who were often poor and uneducated, were actually upset about a broader concept, the idea of losing their social status and being among the most inferior members of society. This fear and insecurity ended up being interpreted as enmity towards African-Americans and led to pervasive and disturbing racism. The Nazis were angry about the post-war economy of Germany, being screwed over by the Treaty of Versailles, and losing WWI. The Jews weren’t responsible for that, but the Nazis misattributed that anger, blamed their problems on the Jews, and the Holocaust began. 

Sachsenhausen stands today as a brutal reminder of what happens when we misattribute our anger about an issue or abstract concept to and blame a person or group of people. It reminds us what happens when we let hateful people like Donald Trump run our country. Sachsenhausen reminds us that this isn’t a Republican issue or a Democrat issue, this is a human issue. These attitudes are how genocide begins, and it doesn’t solve our problems. There are other solutions out there to fix our nation. We’re just not thinking hard enough, and need to stop settling for antipathy and dehumanization as the strategy to fix our nation, because we can do better than that. 

On the gate to the entrance to Sachsenhausen the following words are written: Arbeit macht frei. Work sets you free. Today, these words have taken on a new meaning. Work, at developing real solutions to the challenges facing today and fostering bipartisan cooperation and consensus, sets us free from the same ignorant mistakes made in the past by the Nazis and the KKK, and this work sets all Americans free from persecution and injustice. 

So I say to you Mr. Trump: Arbeit macht frei.