Day 12

Germany.
We spent most of the day at Dachau, the very first of the WWII era concentration camps and the one on which all the others were modeled. It was a thoroughly depressing experience and even as I sit here, I feel almost despair at what the human race is capable of. If it had been 'just' that, it would be one thing, but we as humans never learned from Dachua. I understand the need to honour those that died. I get that and heartily support monuments that do this, but the slogan all around Dachua: 'Never again', seems to naiively indicate that the creators were / are hoping that it will somehow prevent it from happening again. That it has and continues to happen, makes these monuments ironic testaments to the persistent propensity for evil that besets fallen human nature. The wilful destructive inhumanity for their own selfish ends,repeats itself in the same endless cycle: dehumanise the victim, desensitise the sheeple of society at large and wipe them out: Apartheid South Africa, Rwanda, Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, the unborn - it all happened and happens again and again and again. What struck me even more, was the absolute disregard and disrespect that the German teenagers had for the site. You know, I can be critical of the brash Americans, but those that we encountered were awed along with us into silence. The German youth carried on like they were at a fun park. One could see the older Germans who knew what Dachua means shaking their heads at the stupidity of their youth - perhaps born of ignorance and contemporary self absorbed materialistic indulgence. But it is frightening, because unless one has suffered, empathy is not easily learned. I understand the instinct to protect one's child from suffering, but the consequnces for the society that is emerging not ever having known suffering, because parents raised them in the cotton wool cocoon of pseudo psycho-rational ready-made excuses to explain away their evil actions, is almost too frightening to contemplate and is already becoming apparent with the disregard for any life that happens to find itself at their mercy.

I know that this is perhaps a bit dark for a holiday diary, but I think holidays are not just escapes from 'real' life, but can be opportunities to step back and put our 'real' lives into perspective and reassess what is of ultimate consequence.
If the lives and deaths of those that suffered that much, do not change us, then they died in vain. We are the stewards of their legacies. For us to squander that, means that not only was their suffering futile. It also means that by virtue of our incapacity to learn from the mistakes of humanity and transcend our own predisposition to evil, our very lives as moral beings are futile because we are unchanged and unchangeable and morally mummified caricatures of what man is called to be.
After a depressing day, Happy Birthday, Carmen!
Goodnite.