Time To Apologize To Germans

 I'm part of the first wave of baby boomers. As such, I was raised on a heavy dose of information on how WWII started and continued, how the horrible German people cooperated with Hitler to support everything from invasions to the Holocaust.  As we were the winning side of that war, and proud of it, underlying all this was the message that all that was then, not now, and it was the horrible Germans, not anybody else. Somehow those people were less human than all the rest of us.

Particularly US.  We, Americans, would never ever fall for the lies, participate in the horrors, attack and try to eliminate any race, any other religion, do any of those awful deeds. By some miracle, we were holier than thou, innately better humans than those terrible Germans. Perhaps it was genetics, though that wasn't a common term back then. Perhaps it was our invincible constitution. Somehow God favored us above all others. We were assured of our own moral superiority even as we were taught how economics, power, fear, and state-encouraged hate had brought the whole disaster about. But still....

Black and white. Them, not us. Never us. The lesson had been learned and everything was forever OK.

A familiar pattern has been resurfacing. There is a "them" we are taught to fear and hate. More than one, actually. Pretty much everybody who's not really white. One might even say Aryan. Folks who arrive any time after the rest of us got here, threatening to take away "our" jobs. Folks who worship the "wrong way". Economics are skewing away from the ordinary people and towards the few,  the powerful.  One could call it fascism. Those on the bottom end on the economic spectrum are also on the neglected end of the educational spectrum, less encouraged to look for real answers, more easily led. Can't pull yourselves up by your bootstraps when you've never had boots. That rising tide only lifts the boats without holes in their hulls. But if you weren't born with all the right benefits, it's your own moral failing. Bad information is being pounded into our heads, state-sponsored media is taking over one side of a story, their side.

Remember that old term called the "big lie"? It's being used but not named, and this time aided by the technological advantages of the internet, and the increasingly mindless offerings of movies and TV, the endless repetition of the term "fake news" to discredit any real disquiet. Bad as things are getting, we are refusing to believe the real causes and are increasingly diverted by - here's another real oldie - bread and circuses. And we are still being fed assurances of our moral superiority among a ceaseless pounding of patriotism, along with asserting we follow only the right kind of religion.

I think it's time to acknowledge that good and evil are shadings of human. Nobody holds a monopoly. Nobody is immune. The "them" of former decades and centuries are all too easily slipping into the "us" of now. If we stay lazy and comfortable, take the power we still have at the ballot box so much for granted that we don't bother to even show up, we're going to head down the same path. We can't claim the Germans are so much more terrible than we are: just earlier. It can happen here because it's already starting.

We just have to decide whether we're going to sit back on our asses and let it.

Oh yeah, and acknowledge that the Germans at the moment are way more progressive and humane than we are.