So, I had a couple of stop-and-think-about-it moments today.
The first was with someone who works in a different group from me. I really don’t know him, but I was carrying my new cell phone back from the post office (yay new cell phone, yay lower phone bills), and we got on the subject of accidental dialing, (new phone is a flip up, old phone was not). And he said something about accidentally dialing my mother while making out with my girlfriend. I found it amusing on two levels, and I was laughing, and I thought that not so long ago, I would have felt compelled to inform him that girlfriends weren’t likely for me, but this time it didn’t really matter to me. As a point of ettiquette, not sure quite what “the right thing” to do there is, but I don’t regard it as terribly important.
Shortly after this, as I was walking to grab lunch, I heard the annual “X person died, at age Y in year Z, at concentration camp A” litany. I did some quick math, and figured that by now, the people she listed while I was walking past would be 70-odd years old, those that didn’t die in some other way. I’m not saying that this wasn’t important, and hasn’t had important consequences down the line, but will we continue to mourn untimely deaths when the individuals would have died years ago anyway? What about centuries?
When we harbor the memory of a wrong done to us personally, it’s called keeping a grudge. In light of the recent events in the middle east, well, collective keeping of grudges doesn’t strike me as a solution to our ills.
Holocaust Museum experience
Not too long ago a friend of mine invited me to a performace by the Lithuanian Boys Choir at the Holocaust Museum here in DC.
I didn’t realize that the first 30 minutes would be taken by speakers, including a very old woman who was a concentration camp survivor … currently I have no memory of what they talked about … except that it drove me to the extreme of whispering to my friend, “When are they going to get over this?” He reminded me that we were at the HOLOCAUST MUSEUM, after all.
I suppose one point of the Holocaust Museum — which I consider a MUST VISIT for anybody who comes to DC — is to make sure that we never forget that human beings and their governments are capable of genocide. On the other hand, I only have to surf the web’s news sites for a few minutes each day to see that human beings and their governments are involved in all kinds of nasty wars and occupations and dictatorships even today. What exactly are we accomplishing when we Never Forget?
Plus, the area inside the Holocaust Museum devoted to the memory of homosexual victims had been defaced when I last visited it.
As a point of ettiquette, not sure quite what “the right thing” to do there is, but I don’t regard it as terribly important.
I think that when heterosexual people talk about their partners of opposite gender, I take it as a universal, rather than feeling compelled to remind them of which gender would apply to me.
I mean, I’m out, but I sometimes I don’t feel like knocking people over the head with it. 😉
Remembering
While I understand the desire to put things behind us, isn’t there more than mourning the death of X individual going on here. Aren’t we recognizing a life of possibilities that was denied? How different would the world be today without the Holocaust? I thinkits ironic that you chose the middle east as evidentiary of grudge keeping. The “problems” in the middle east probably wouldn’t be what they are today had millions of Jews not been executed.
And as virtualexile eludes to, Germany, especially Berlin, prior to WWII was on the cutting edge of awakening sexuality and openness. How much further along would the gay movement be throughout the world had the art, culture and people exploring their sexuality in the 1930s been allowed to see it through.
The thing that bugs me about Holocaust memorials sometimes is that it almost feels like we’re remembering the Holocaust at the expense of other horrible tragedies. Sort of like we’re treating it as a deeply singular event and therefore neglecting other tragedies on the same scale — the millions of victims of Stalin and Pol Pot, for example. I don’t know what the right way to address that is, but it does bother me that we hear a lot about the Holocaust but not a lot about the Khmer Rouge slaughtering 20% of the Cambodian population.
Part of my objection is that I’m not comfortable saying that any one tragedy of that scale is objectively the worst, or the most important. When you’re dealing with the systematic slaughter of millions, how do you even rank things? Is it useful at all to try in the first place?