This week, I was thinking about a classroom in Central New York in the early 80s.
I was sitting in the front row of a World History class, learning about Hitler’s ascension to power and the gruesome events it birthed. At the time, it had all only been fifty years in the rearview mirror of our shared story, but to me, it may as well have been an eternity away.
We’d spent the previous weeks reading and talking about the conditions that brought about the slow erosion of a country’s collective morality: targeted propaganda intended to generate panic in the citizenry, a steady stream of fake news meant to distort reality, relentless rhetoric designed to dehumanize a vulnerable population, and the perverting of religion to clothe mass murder in righteousness.
But on that day, the reading and the talking were over.
As we all wedged ourselves into our nondescript desks and the early morning cacophony of two dozen middle schoolers slowly began to still and silence, our teacher said nothing. She simply clicked off the lights, walked deliberately to the industrial-grade projector parked in the middle of the room, and pressed a button.
I can still hear the hum of the cooling fan and the steady clacking of the celluloid film as it cast upon the thin stand-up screen, the jittery, grainy, black-and-white footage of horrors that decades later are still burned into my brain.
And as my young mind tried to process images of violence that defied all credulity, I still remember wondering, “How could they let this happen?”
How could millions of otherwise decent human beings have allowed such carnage? What kind of people would abandon their better angels and consent to genocide?How does a nation abandon its collective soul like this?
And sitting there in the darkness that morning, as furious as I remember being toward Hitler, his amoral advisors, his sycophantic army, and his ghoulish Gestapo foot soldiers, my greatest outrage was saved for the ordinary people who could have stopped it all but chose not to.
Decades later, I fiercely interrogated them all from my desk:
Were they ignorant of the brutality in their midst, either actually or willfully? Were they overwhelmed by scalding fear and slowly rendered silent?Were they trying to convince themselves they were safe, even as others suffered?Were they simply unable to imagine it could get as bad as it had gotten?Were they exposed as racists or cowards?
Back then, the answers were elusive to my still-developing brain, but today, some clarity is coming.
I’m now beginning to understand just how good people can devolve into inhumanity, how they can allow the slow erosion of their elemental freedoms, how easily they can become desensitized to violence against whomever they consider the other, how prejudice can be weaponized, and how apathy can overtake people oversaturated with bad news.
And yet, none of the hows or the whys of Germany’s collective failure can erase the what. History has recorded the ways humanity died on its watch.
And as I look around at America outside my window, here’s what I know:
Fifty years from now, all around the world, children will gather to view these days and this nation.
They will not be met with jittery, grainy, black-and-white footage but with pristine, high-definition, digital evidence of unthinkable viciousness: of terrified mothers being driven into the pavement by heavily armed thugs, of inconsolable children being zip-tied by men in masks, of husbands and students and grandfathers dragged into vans, never to be seen again.
Fifty years from now, young people will watch our authoritarian leader and his vile cadre of enablers and collaborators stoke division, eradicate truth, traffic in stereotypes, incite nationalistic fervor, feed racism, silence dissension, vilify already vulnerable communities, and commit unfathomable atrocities—and they will be rightly horrified.
But they will save their greatest fury for you and me, for the tens of millions of us who are standing here right now with the responsibility and the agency to push this filth all the way back to the hell it came from.
And they will have no tolerance for excuses or rationalizations as to why we did what we did or what we failed to do.
They will not let us off the hook for falling asleep, for giving up, for shutting up.
They will evaluate our shouts and our silences, our courage and our cowardice, and they will render judgment on our character accordingly.
With the absolute worst of history repeating here in our homeland, we can either allow it or rewrite it.
Friends, fifty years from now, what you and I do today will be a lesson for the world we leave behind.What will we choose to teach them?
The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
