To the editor:
Last night I watched “Schindler’s List” for the … ; well let’s just say I watch it a lot. I keep hoping that the little girl in the red coat will somehow escape. I know this is the definition of insanity; expecting a different result from a predetermined outcome, but I prefer to call it being hopeful.
I only mention the movie because events happening around the world today are eerily familiar and are beginning to rival the cinematic. In some cases, even emulating it.
Man has always documented in one form or another his atrocities committed against fellow human beings. I’ve often wondered if this was a way of trying to explain their actions or if they somehow saw the evil as a good. Millions of feet of movie film have brought to life the actions we as a people revile. However, we watch the movies and we study the documentaries and we try to find some mustard seed of sanity in our history. We study the pictures of the dead as they pile up around the world with almost clinical dispassion.
From savages who would behead or burn or blow up another human and tell the world God wanted them to do it, to those who would set the world a blaze for profit, we will someday study their barbarism in minutia. Sadly, we will do even this exercise in futility many years after help could have been rendered and lives could have been saved.
Someone once said those that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This may be the truest statement ever uttered.
So it may fall to another generation to try and find the truth in what is occuring today, not only in Iraq, but in countries around the world where wasted resources and apathy kill enmass. No one people or religion, or sect or tribe or party can claim moral superiority. Like the long dead Roman who could not wash away the blood, we can all, but ask for forgivness.
I only hope that my daughter, or my son, or my granddaughter, or the children of generations to follow do not hold us too accountable for not stopping what needed to be stopped and for not rising up as a people to say “no.” I really hope, no I pray that they forgive us and that we can forgive ourselves. And I sincerely hope there are generations to come.
David Daniel Beckom
Mars Hill
