Changing the subject...

Hello Steve,

How are you today? We're getting more freezing rain and snow tonight, oh joy. I know you're jealous!! ADMIT IT!!  If I could, I would Fed Ex some to you personally, just because I LOVE YA, you big lug.

As you know, I am a fan of www.Fark.com, but sometimes the subjects people start freaking on really get to me.  Each of the "regulars" (aka: Farkers) try to out-do each other by being more and more vulgar, shocking, ignorant, or just plain douche-baggy.

So tonight, when people started going off about an 88 year old man who was a Nazi during WWII and killed a Jew, and how "they should leave him alone, let him go free, he's old, he'll die soon, just let him go," I sat there, reading this shit, completely dumbfounded and outraged, hating that these total strangers could so easily push my biggest most passionate "buttons" like that.  Should I respond, should I try to talk SENSE to people who really don't HAVE any? Would I simply be wasting my time, energy and only be made fun of for voicing my feelings about it? My final decision:

Fuck it, I'm going to GO OFF on it anyway.  If I don't, I'll only be stewing and simmering about it for days, maybe weeks.  I'm STILL suffering from this chronic "Save the World Syndrome," dammit.
--------------------------------------
So here's the post I wrote. Keep in mind, I'm one of those "Highly Sensitive People," (those DAMNED ANNOYING Highly Sensitive People who drive others crazy), who tend to take things MUCH more seriously than others.  Especially this subject.  So here goes....this is what I told to the Farker community tonight.....(and now I wait for the "damned if I do, damned if I don't" moment, which, unfortunately is inevitable with people like that.....as you well know yourself).

And once I copy and paste this diatribe that I wrote, I'm going to say goodbye to you for tonight, then I'm going to go upstairs to my quiet bedroom, take the photo of Miep Gies off my dresser, hug her close to me, turn off the lights, pray to her and Anne Frank, and cry myself to sleep.

Love, Rebecca
---------------------------------------

As a personal friend of mine for 15 years, Miep Gies, (the woman who hid Anne Frank's family & who found her diary), once told me, "The Holocaust is the hardest and most horrific life lesson that everyone must suffer through learning, no matter how disturbing it is, or it will just continue to be denied, rejected, and will happen again in the future."

Not a day went by when I worked at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (6years) that I didn't encounter someone who was unbelievably ignorant who knew virtually nothing at all about this history. I even had an 8th grade boy in a school group raise his hands once, and ask, "The war's over, everybody's dead, who cares?" That kid, and those many other ignorant people, are exactly why the Museum exists. Go there, learn about it, and if you would like to have a personal tour guide, let me know and I'll be happy to take you through it anytime.

In fact, I was often called a "Nazi" myself, at the end of the day when we had to ask people to leave because we were simply closing for the day. The reality: if I had truly BEEN a real Nazi, and if those people had actually READ the information they were looking blankly at all day long, they would have known I probably wouldn't have verbalized anything to them at all. I probably would have simply shot them through the head while their family members watched me do it.

One thing I did, whenever I encountered them, was to invite skinheads back the next day, with a free ticket, even if it was on my day OFF, to spend time with me as I took them on a personalized tour---but not one of them returned. Why is that? If they are SO SURE about their beliefs, why not rise to that challenge? I recently invited another well-known Holocaust denier who recently wrote about her tour through Auschwitz and how it "MUST" have been a "LUXURIOUS RESORT," to tour the Museum with a historian, but she never returned my email.

Unless you have the ability to muster up enough courage to really and truly (and seriously) try to learn about this history, there can be no real progress away from such a thing happening again---and it is happening right now in the Sudan and Darfur---but unfortunately for most Americans who don't care, (unless it actually happens HERE, to US), very few, if any, will overcome their own ignorance or ability to seriously learn these important facts and lessons of that time in our world's history. That is the reason I worked there for 6 years, and I'd STILL be there if 9/11 hadn't happened and threw me into a world of chaos.

Sorry Farkers, I love you all dearly, but this is one topic I take very seriously. I've MET Elie Wiesel, and I want you all to know that the man is brilliant, intelligent, absolutely amazing, and above all, humble. He is very real, very serious, and is someone who should be honored and revered, not ridiculed even on Fark to simply make other ignorant Farkers wallow in their ignorance longer than they should.

The 88 year old man in this news story is NO DIFFERENT than the 88 year old white supremacist who marched into my Museum last June and shot one of my coworkers point-blank, killing him instantly, just because he was black--and all my coworker did was open the door for him. It does not matter if that 88 year old former Nazi killed one, or hundreds of people--Jews or others--even if he claims he did it "because he was following orders." The fact remains, if a former Nazi killed anyone who was innocent, even if he claims he was just young and stupid, he still deserves to be punished in a court of law for that killing.

Would you have allowed that 88 year old man who killed my coworker to go free, just because he "only" killed ONE security guard at the Holocaust Museum? Does it NOT matter to any of you that the 80+ year old Survivors who volunteered to be there that day had to be traumatized by RELIVING the horrors of their own life during the Holocaust that morning, by screaming, and diving underneath furniture to avoid the killer's bullets? Does it NOT matter that all of the innocent men, women and children tourists who visited the Museum that day MIGHT have been killed also, if my coworker hadn't been in the line of fire? The other security guards shot that 88 year old man without stopping to think, "Well he IS old after all, maybe he's just senile, we'll let him go." They did their JOB, and saved everyone else in the building, by shooting that man in self-defense, regardless of his AGE.

The only way to learn and truly UNDERSTAND the Holocaust is if you PERSONALIZE IT. If your wife, daughter, sister, etc. were shot and killed for no reason other than they were blonde/brunette/black/white/religious/not religious, etc., would you let THAT killer go free, even if he was 88 years old?

I highly doubt it.

Justice, even later in life, is still justice. A life is a life, no matter what religion or ethnicity the murdered person was. Do not EVER minimize or forget the lessons of the Holocaust, or we'll all be doomed to repeat and relive it.

/stepping off soap-box now.
//truly and sincerely, I have only good intentions by writing all this.
///Never Forget.
////No, I am not Jewish.

My theory: (based on this experience): Some people cannot even begin to fathom or wrap their heads around something as horrible as the Holocaust, and as a defense mechanism, immediately deny it happened, or make jokes about it because they cannot risk actually sitting and thinking about the factual evidence presented to them, without crying hysterically. The biggest lesson that most people have a very hard time accepting: there really ARE no "evil ogres," in this world, and Hitler was NOT an intelligent man--he was just a stupid man who liked to hear himself talk, and made a lot of mistakes. The fact remains, we ALL have this same capacity within each of us, to either do something evil, or do something good.