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Edited on Thu May-05-05 08:09 PM by Darranar
and created a world where there will truly be no more Holocausts.
We must act so that there must never again be a genocide against the Jews - but also so that there will never be another Rwanda, never be another Darfur, never be another Congo. Far too many people have died already.
We are all bystanders. Far too many of us, myself included, sit and talk while people are dying, while grave injustices are being committed, and fail on a very basic human level to empathize enough with the victims to act for their sake. We argue over effectively minor matters, minutiae, and ignore the greater issues and problems facing our world.
For stupid political reasons we ignore truth, coloring our minds so that the world is black and white, good and evil. Genocide becomes the enforcement of law and order. Terrorism becomes a force for liberation. Mass murder becomes justified, or at least we begin to rationalize it, excuse it, and turn our attention to other matters.
And there are other problems, other cases of mass death, that we find it convenient to ignore. How many of us act - seriously - to remedy the ongoing slaughter by starvation in Africa, not merely in Darfur, not merely in the Congo, not merely in war-ravaged regions, but in peaceful areas too, simply because people are too poor to feed themselves?
How many of us seriously consider the levels of infant mortality in much of the world, and understand the thousands of children whose lives are eliminated shortly after birth because our government and our people, and so many others, simply don't care enough? How many of us DO really care, and DO actively try to aid?
We have the technology, we have the ability, to transform this world enough that there will never again be another Holocaust, never be another genocide, never be another war, or another incident of mass murder, period - so that the prophecy of Isaiah will come true and no nation shall lift up a sword - or a gun, or a tank, or a jet fighter - against any other. And we have the power to not only do that, but to eradicate poverty, eradicate starvation, eradicate severe inequality.
But we don't. We fail. We fall short. Or we simply don't care enough.
And we - the collective unit of humanity - have no one to blame but ourselves.
Never again! The cry is shouted every Yom Ha'Shoah ve'Ha'Gevurah, but all too swiftly we forget about it, ignore it, return to our selfish and arrogant outlooks on life and the world.
And so the Shoah - the horrific atrocity against the Jews and others that ended sixty years ago - still continues.
And the Gevurah - we need that courage. We need the courage of those who resisted, outright and blatantly like the participants in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, quietly but determinedly like the thousands of Gentiles who helped Jews escape the Nazis, like the millions of Jews and others who struggled to survive to ensure that the Nazis would not win, that the peoples the Nazis strove to destroy would not be destroyed, and would never be destroyed, that the beauty and diversity they helped bring to the earth would never be extinguished.
We need the courage of those who strove against injustice, against great evil, so that we too may do so, and finally eradicate it from the world.
It is time - past time.
Never again.
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