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.
Seven Billion Stories 