When Kid A and I were out in DC we went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. It wasn’t on his list, and I’d been before, but I felt like he was old enough to handle it and it was too important to skip not knowing when we’d be back.
The museum is intense, and he did remarkably. He read a lot, and we talked a lot, and he asked questions. When we were sitting outside afterwards, I asked him what struck him the most. His observation? That much of it didn’t feel like history.
He’s a smart kid.
I told him that the thing that scared me the most about that time in our history isn’t that people exist who are capable of horrific things – our past is filled with example after example of evil at work in the world. It’s the hundreds of thousands of people – in Germany and abroad – good people, many, who stood by and did nothing. Looked the other way. Their silence wasn’t neutrality, it was complicity.
Evil wins when good people do nothing, I told him, and it’s been there in the back of my mind and it won’t go away, like a loose tooth or an itch you can’t quite reach, no matter how hard you contort yourself.
I don’t believe “Republicans” are evil and “Democrats” are good. I try very hard not to speak in generalities. Parties are no different than the people who make them: there is good, and there is bad, and we have to work together to elevate the one while minimizing the other. To learn from our mistakes and be willing to admit when we’re wrong, when we’ve made a bad choice, working to make it right.
Wiggling at that tooth, thinking about neutrality, and wondering where the line is, for each of us, the point we reach where we can no longer – must no longer – remain silent. Wondering, if we don’t write it down somewhere, and revisit it, how easy it is for that line to move without us realizing it.
I’ve got mine written down. Do you?
but her mama knew better
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