ON THIS DAY (Auschwitz)

The name of a small city, in Poland means *holy* in old Polish. Ironically, this ‘holy’ place would be where over 4.1 million people loose their life. I think the idea was that they are going someplace holy, both spiritually and physically.

While most people in the twenty-first century agree that Adolf Hitler was a terrible person and undeserving of the life that he lived, we must look at the way in which he convinced about 250,000 men to kill all of those people.

The man was a rhetorical genius! It’s too bad he did not use his genius for a purpose for good. We could have done some great things in the world, had Hitler not been a certifiable lunatic.

During the first 24 hours of arriving in Auschwitz, up to 80% (1.3 million people) of the train cars full of Jewish peoples were often killed by the SS officers, by order of Adolf Hitler himself.

The reason I am posting about this place of horror about one year (Dec 26, 2013-Jan. 18, 2014) after I visited is because today (January 27th, 2015) marks the 70th anniversary of the Russian Army rescuing 70,000 victims of Hitler’s assault.

As my colleague at my school’s student newspaper just said “How ironic! The Jews are safe, but now we’re after homosexuals.” and I only agree with her to a certain extent.

Only a handful of states un the U.S. still have a ban on homosexual marriage.  Most states are ‘keeping up with the times’ and have legally allowed women to marry women and/or men to marry men. Pennsylvania, even, has had an allowance policy for almost a year.

Personally, I am 100% heterosexual and very much ‘into’ men. But, I do believe that love is love and nobody or power, God aside, has the right to judge another person based on their way of practicing of love. It is not my place to judge. It is no human’s place to judge.

So, I just love.

I just felt the need to spread the word that on THIS day, seventy years ago, in a place far from home in the United States, is when 70,000 people were saved from starvation and working their bodies to death (literally) in Auschwitz Poland.

Selma Rhetorical Reaction

This movie is incredible.

I almost wish that it would be enough to say just that. However, per usual, that would simply devalue the importance of what I am talking about.

This movie is extremely important to show to our youngest generation, ten and under, once they come of age to understand the oppression that people of color once faced.

Personally, I am beyond pleased to learn that my younger brother (fifteen years old) saw a preview for this movie, and decided that he wanted to see it. My little brother is so unbelievably wise and cultured for a fifteen year old kid. But the, isn’t that the condition of younger siblings?

Back to the topic at hand, this movie, detailing the plight of Martin Luther King Jr. is a perfect representation of how challenging the legal struggle to attain voting rights was for any person of color-other-than-Caucasian.

In my family, I have two cousins that are half-African-American. This might be conflict-of-interest because of that, but I have never really thought of skin color as a telltale sign of importance in this world. The older of those two cousins (about 8 months older than me) is a smart, beautiful, accomplished girl named Carissa. Carissa is among my very dearest friends.

Carissa means more to me than mere words could describe. My best-friend-cousin is to be married in the summer of 2016 and I was just asked to be in her wedding. As noted, words cannot describe how joyous I felt when she asked me. She’s my other half. We are ‘ebony and ivory’. Partners in crime. She’s my other half. Tears come to my eyes as I attempt to describe how much she means to me. I am so easily side-tracked by my emotions on this matter. I don’t understand how anyone could  be so AUDACIOUS to think their life more valuable in the eyes of the Lord. Carissa is my equal, if not more than that. She means so much to me.

Carissa’s little brother, Phillip Paul is more of what our culture sees as the ‘typical black youth’ and unfortunately has lost his way with illegal substances and violence. Nonetheless fo I love him, though. He’s my cousin. I wasn’t nothing more than to grab him by the scruff of his shirt and tell him how to act in the face of authority an opposition. Phil is about ne year and as half younger than me,  and his and Carissa’s father was in another marriage when they were both conceived. So, they did not have any particular ‘father figure’ when they were growing up. It all depends on a person’s inner strength how they come out of an ‘unusual’ growing-up experience. This leads me to understand that each person is completely and fully in charge of their own reaction when faced with hardship and opposition.

Phillip’s future has been optimistic at times, but then he did something that caused authority to discipline him. He does not react very well to authority when ‘authority’ is telling him that he has done something wrong. I believe that this poor reaction is due to a pre-conceived notion that it’s “everyone in our modern society against ‘the black man’ in current times”.

The recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri definitely do not help to improve the confidence of non-Caucasian people. That just shattered what our country has worked hundreds of years trying to eradicate from our culture. The aftermath of those riots, people killing policemen in other cities and towns across the United States made our nation look like a bunch of savages in the eyes of other civilized countries around the world.

A ‘sense of unity’ has certainly been lost to our country. It breaks my heart to see a nation that was once so strong start to come apart at the seams of our very own origin, the Constitution.

While this movie does make me question the stability of our ‘authorities’ when I think about Phil, the very existence of this movie reminds me that our democratic society is still working to improve the notion of ‘other’ as lesser in American culture. Reminding me of one of my favorite songs, by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis entitled “Same Love”. The song is about the relatively common thought that human beings of other sexual orientations are ‘lesser’ than heterosexuals. Personally, I believe that God created man and woman to procreate and that homosexuality is not what God intended for our species. But, the song has a point. Love is love. Each person will face their own judgment day.  I am not a worthy judge of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, and I will not pretend to be.

Whoa, talk about a tangent! To get back on track, once again, I have a very small understanding of what God looks at as right or wrong and I strongly feel that it is no mortal-human’s place to attempt claiming Divine understanding or ‘damning’ of any other creed or race of human beings.

I loved this movie, it brought me closer to understanding our nation’s past and the struggle that once was unjustly forced upon people of darker complexion. I could go off on another tangent about how I believe that darker skin means stronger skin, less apt to acne and other terrible skin problems, such as Psoriasis, but I will leave it at the fact that our nation has had a very terrible history of excluding anyone that we see as ‘other’ and we should learn a lesson or two from the literal text of God, in the Bible.

Thank you for assigning this movie to us. It opened my eyes to the plight that MLKJR took for humanity we know it.