It is closing in around us, this darkness. Every day some new manifestation of hatred. Its progress is encouraged by amoral opportunists as well as the toxically intolerant. The toll today is measured in lives lost, families broken.
Whether it is children caged at the border, hurricane victims ignored by their government because of the color of their skin, refugees denied entry into the US because of their religion, black children gunned down by racists or police, or Jews attending a bris in a synagogue...
this sickness is spreading. We have long suffered with racism and prejudice in America. But we are enduring a particularly ugly phase in which divisions are fostered and inflamed by the very people who have ostensibly been hired to unify and protect us.
I remember when I was a boy, kids coming on mischief night and drawing a swastika on our driveway. I remember how shaken my father, a Holocaust escapee, was. He didn't expect it here. He sat up at night watching for their return.
For most of our childhood he didn't speak of it. Then, gradually, as he grew older he would start to write us small notes each year on the anniversary of Kristalnacht--when his synagogue in Vienna was burned down weeks before his bar mitzvah & his father was arrested.
He would write of his relatives who died--all 33 of them, aunts and uncles, cousins, children, the elderly. On aunt had the particular misfortune of having lived near where they erected the camp at Auschwitz. She died there as did her husband and children.
He wanted us to remember. Now I ask "why?" It all seemed so remote. It all seemed distant. But as I have written before, since the beginning of the Trump campaign I have personally watched as I and other friends and acquaintances have been targeted.
Perhaps a dozen times in my life prior to 2016 I experienced anti-semitism up-close. Since then, it has happened hundreds, no, thousands of times. Threats against me and my family. The worst of slurs.
But is nothing compared to the loss suffered in that synagogue today. Or the losses in that church earlier this week. Or each of the other times that hatred has taken the ultimate human toll in the past few years.
It is easy to spot the leaders who made this renaissance of hatred possible. It is easy to condemn them. It is essential to vote them out of office. But...the hard work is healing. The critical challenge is restoring tolerance and bringing it where it has eluded us in the past.
There is only one way to honor the victims of this horrific behavior and that is to work--each of us, in our own way--to ensure it does not happen again, that we do not lose the battle with the darkness.
