We had a presentation by a woman who had been involved in the holocaust. She was not directly involved, but her parents were in the concentration camps. I suppose it was inaccurate to say then that she wasn't directly involved, but she herself was not in the camp. Anyway...
We heard the entire presentation, and by and large there were no problems so this isn't going to devolve into some longwinded rant on that particular topic. Instead, I wanted to actually talk about the aftermath. Going to take me a bit to get there, though.
I listen to CDs at night as I'm going to sleep, because I struggle with insomnia and it helps. I tend to listen to one of two things - either drumming CDs (I'm not picky about authenticity) or comedy albums. As most people know I'm an anglophile and I really like British culture. It's something I've had and I affect little bits and pieces (you've probably noticed the "u"s in words, etc.) so I tend to download British comics.
Well, a few weeks ago, I downloaded Mark Thomas. The album was called "The Night War Broke Out." I listened to it, off iTunes, and I'll confess the reason I downloaded it first I will say in my purest form of Anglophilia; "British accent; brilliant!" Then obviously I listened to the thing.
It did nothing for my insomnia.
Instead I stayed up for the full duration listening. This was hysterical, and insightful, and politically acute. Admittedly it was United Kingdom politics, but it was as applicable here. So then I downloaded Dambusters. If you have not heard that (and I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you haven't) you need to go to this link and read:
http://www.markthomasinfo.com
If you don't get moved by that CD alone, you're not a human being. And it's a bloody *COMEDY* album! That happened to be the one I was listening to last night before I woke up, and it's topics include the Illsu Dam and the Kurdish discrimination and genocide. It was a very appropriate way to get into the day.
And that brings me up to my classroom, 9:40 (and again at other regular intervals - I have to do the same thing five times over the course of the day - it's part of the job).
"First of all, class, are there any questions? I know we didn't get every question you had for our speaker answered, and I'll do my best."
They asked some questions. "Why didn't she just leave?" "Did she have the tattoo?" "Could she ever go back to Poland?" and many other questions even more astute. Then I decided that I had to ask them a question in return.
"Could this [the holocaust] ever happen again?"
Their answers ran a huge gamut. Of course it couldn't happen again, no one would allow it. People today are more intelligent; they wouldn't hate someone just because of their religion. One of them, which I'm going to paraphrase here, said something to the effect of: "It could happen, but it'd end very quickly because people would step in and stop it."
I listened to it all, and they looked back secure in their answers. I paused, and finally told them to go home and search for words. I told them to search for Burma, Darfur, Colombia, East Timor, the Kurds, Ghana, Bosnia, Herzegovina. Some of them were places where THE SAME THING had happened in recent history. In some places, it was happening as we spoke.
One of the kids, after she had managed to pick her jaw up off the table said, with absolutely heartbreaking earnestness, "Why? Why don't we stop them?"
Frankly I wasn't sure whether I wanted to come out and tell her that in most of those cases it was probably just too profitable for our country to NOT help. I know where they were coming from, thinking that this country should be the "knight in shining armour." It's something that you kind of get drilled into your head pretty early.
I didn't leave it gloomy though. I told them something that I was actually pretty proud of. I'm going to type it from memory in here, as best I can. I'm going to retype it as a quote, but...that's not 100% accurate since I might take a little license here and there.
"What can you do? Well, you need to read. You need to read the news that comes from everywhere. From this country, from other countries. Google is wonderful; it will translate things for you. I'm an English teacher, and I have to believe that words are powerful. Sometimes you'll hear that words are unimportant; it's only actions that matters. And that's true. But actions grow in the mind, and the mind makes decisions and decisions is what makes us act."
I then passed around the chart by Gregory Stanton that I found on wikipedia (I'll put in the link) and told them to pay attention to the first three items. These were items that could be found in our own anti-bullying discussions.
I think, I hope, there were some connections that were made.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide )
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