That self-regarding story has a way of bleeding into what we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a toxic exceptionalism that most of us were born with; A curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinces us that as a collective we are good or righteous.
Some of us live our entire lives believing that we are better than we are, that our race is better than that, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we can be villains, terrorists, monsters, collaborators.
We all grew up in this country learning about the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unimaginable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the statues of walking corpses, released from concentration camps on the brink of death. We almost vomited watching the glossy black and white newsreels of naked, impenetrable people stacked up like cordwood. We read of an unceasing barbarity against an entire group of mankind, whose only crime was their skin.
And when faced with this pervasive inhumanity that denied us the ability to hold on to everything, we all thought of the German people and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of people would allow this?”
We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers and children erased from existence, their communities reduced to rubble, their culture erased, their very humanity stripped away.
From the safety of hindsight and the buffer of our own false stories, we interrogate ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, deploring their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; Condemning them as, at best, callous cowards and, at worst, willing accomplices.
With stratospheric arrogance, we told ourselves that we would never have consented to such evil, that we would have pushed back against it, that the hideous terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.
And yet, there is Gaza.
Day after day, he testifies against us, documents our indifference, records our indifference, catalogs our inaction. He lifts up our hands before us to show us that his blood is upon them. He burns us comforting fictions of goodness. He reminds us how easy it is for a nation to lose its humanity, silence by silence, justice by justice, an eye to avert an eye.
Gaza is accusing the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining it (as are the immigrant population in the US). They hold up a mirror to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are — the truth about what we believe, what we will stand for and what we won’t stand for — and we should be ashamed and bow our knees in repentance.
It would be outrageous enough to declare that many Americans are now as reprehensible as many Germans were in the 1940s, but that would not be correct; We are very bad.
We have access to every evil deed of America and Israel in the palm of our hands. The societies of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu flood our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can travel thousands of miles and see the destruction of a man in real time. Unlike the German people in Hitler’s shadow, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through small screens from which we are rarely more than inches away, we are 24-7 near the killing of children, the bombing of hospitals, the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires are funded by terrorism, and the amount of genocide our tax dollars are funding.
And we are responsible for everything we allow or deny.
One day, eighty years from now, generations of children around the world will ask what kind of people allowed genocide to happen in Gaza?
And it must break our hearts and make our blood boil to know that unless we change our ways immediately and drastically, we will be like that.
