Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes we even realize as we are doing it that it’s a mistake we’re probably going to regret later. The problem isn’t making the mistakes. I mean, that can be bad, but what is really important is how we handle it once we have erred. We need to own it, accept our part of the blame, apologize, and make sure we take away the lesson. We need to be sure we never do it again.
These are American men (photo above) at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last night. They’re upset that a statue of a Confederate general is to be removed from a city park. They are doing a Nazi salute. In America. In 2017. Upset that a monument to heinous crimes, treason, and slavery is to be removed from a city park, a physical representation of the worst of us.
When asked what one would do if gifted a time machine a common question or idea is to go back in time to kill Hitler or prevent his birth or some variation on that theme. There are arguments and papers on the hows and whys. My point here isn’t that it’s a good idea or a bad one. My point is that hindsight is 20/20, and Hitler was a terrible human who got a lot of people to do terrible things to their own neighbors. They murdered millions of people including Jews, Roma, Poles, LGBTQ, disabled, etc.
We had our lesson. We saw what Adolph Hitler convinced a lot of people to do. We know what lead up to Hitler’s reign. It never has to happen again.
Look around. Look at the news. Look at what’s happening.
“White Nationalist” snowflakes are doing Hitler’s salute at an American university. Because – WAH – they don’t want a monument to hate and greed removed from a city park.
We know better, and yet we see this ignorance, this gleeful, nasty hate, festering all around us.
Will the idea of what to do with our time machines soon become some variation of “go back to late summer of 1945 and convince Mary Anne MacLeod to take a long vacation away from her husband? Maybe meet up with him again around Christmas?”
Link: “March of white supremacists at University of Virginia ends in skirmishes” – by Joe Heim at The Washington Post
Link: “Trump threatens Venezuela with unspecified ‘military option’” – by James Oliphant at Reuters
Link: “Take cover, avoid bomb flash. Guam issues nuclear guidelines” – by Doina Chiacu at Reuters
Link: “Trump Says Military Is ‘Locked and Loaded’ and North Korea Will ‘Regret’ Threats” – by Peter Baker at The New York Times
Link: “Sebastian Gorka, the West Wing’s Phony Foreign-Policy Guru” – by Bob Dreyfuss at Rolling Stone
Link: “Scott Pruitt Is Carrying Out His E.P.A. Agenda in Secret, Critics Say” – by Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton at The New York Times
Link to original tweet from Emily Gorcenski.
Link to photo from Mary (men doing Nazi salute).
#BackInTime