“Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.”—John Fowles

 I realized, belatedly, the timeline in this is off. The event was in 1938, not 1948. 85 years ago, not 75. Which changes the numbers, but not the rest of my observations.

This is not a comment on Kristallnacht:

75 years ago tonight: Kristallnacht. 

Jewish homes, shops, and schools ransacked; 267 synagogues destroyed. 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to camps. 

This followed shortly after the appeasement at Munich, and after two decades of U.S. isolationism.

Which, when I was a kid, seemed like history as ancient and obscure as the “Middle Ages.” Now I realize it was only 7 years before I was born.

The gap between the world my parents grew up in, and the world they raised me in, is still almost unimaginably vast. Not even personal computers and the internet and cellphones are truly comparable. My daughter’s childhood experiences were only slightly from my own. My parents’ experiences might as well have occurred in the “Middle Ages.”

Of course, when I was 7, 7 years before I was born was twice my lifetime ago, and so practically beyond imagining. What frame of reference did I have for it, especially since the first two years were lost to memory, or were just scraps I couldn’t connect together? 61 years later 75 years doesn’t seem so long a time; more like practically within my lifetime.

The biggest mistake we can make is to think the world was irrevocably changed by the way WWII ended; or how the Vietnam War ended; or putting the first human footsteps on the moon; or the first PC; or when ARPANET became the Internet.

The horror defines us. The cruelty defines us. The barbarism defines us; if we don’t pay careful attention. If we don’t study it, and make it part of who we will not be.

If we don’t take responsibility; fully and repeatedly. We didn’t do it; but we so easily could. In fact, we in America have; and many times within the last century, the one I was born in the middle of, when everyone I knew was convinced our hearts were pure and our hands were clean. Mostly because of the stories of history we told ourselves; and more importantly, the ones we didn’t tell at all. Because we didn’t want to take responsibility.

“Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all.”—Jacques Derrida