Complacency Kills

"despite everything, I believe people are really good at heart"  --Anne Frank

Anne Frank, the 13 year girl old who put a human face and a voice to six million anonymous victims of the Holocaust through the diary she kept while in hiding from the Nazis, has become the most recent poster child for today’s  insidious  brand of racism.  Genocide, religious persecution, and the precious life of a child,  have apparently now been reduced to a sick joke about corn chips… all for our amusement.

Most of us have read The Diary of Anne Frank.  In fact, it’s been on the recommended reading list in schools here and in Europe for about six decades. The majority of us, (with our clever little daily face book postings, which in themselves read kind of like adolescent diary entries complete with select color photos of our free-wheeling lives), were probably required to read Anne Frank’s pathetic and powerful diary back in grade school. Somewhere between 6th and 8th grade- right around the same age  she was when she wrote her famous diary, is when most of us were introduced to the thin faced, smart little Jewish girl, who so aptly described the details of a harrowing life of  persecution.  A life most of us can only imagine, thank God. When we read her story  way back then, we very likely identified with her adolescent mind, and probably felt at least some of the anxiety she and her family must have felt, as they lived, cramped in silence, so as to go undetected, so as to …live…   I'm sure, most of us mourned the silencing of her  teenaged voice as the pages of her diary abruptly came to an end... and surely, we learned a lesson from her tragedy. That was the point, wasn't it?

   And now,  60 plus years later, the image of her sweet, iconic face has been cut and pasted onto a tasteless meme that reads, " I love Doritos but they are so loud”...

This disturbing “joke” has quickly made the rounds on the Internet, infecting, one way or another, all who see it. Whether people find it funny in a sophomoric and ignorant kind of way, or in some sick anti-Semitic validating way, ( it's on  Neo-Nazi sites now) or whether, like me, they are truly upset by it, the meme is out there doing its insidious damage, tearing another hole in the decency of man. 


Yesterday I saw it posted on a high school friend's face book page.  My heart sank when I saw it.  And it sank again, and…again, when I read the threads of commentaries by other friends. Not ONE person objected to the posting, and in fact, many went along with it, by clicking the  "like" response.  Yeah, it’s a real  Siskel and Ebert thumbs up… for sure...


 At first my own response was weak. I simply wrote the word "oh,"  because…. I felt truly "speechless."  A day later however, I found my "voice" and wrote the following words:  "Okay, I’m going to say it, what the fuck is wrong with people?"  And really, what the fuck IS wrong with people?

 The same day that I saw the Anne Frank meme for the first time, Dateline aired a show about racial discrimination and teen peer pressure.  Dateline set out to demonstrate how teens, all of who had previously been schooled by their parents on the wrongful nature of racial discrimination, still fall victim to peer pressure and their desire to fit in.  Watching the teens on a closed circuit TV, the parents looked on in a mixture of fear, concern, disappointment and surprise, as all but two out of more than a dozen, caved in to group pressure and made racially biased decisions—decisions that were based on unfair stereotypes and decisions, I might add, that in real life, and real time, would drastically alter the quality of an individual's life all because of how they "look."- 

I cried when the two lone teens found the courage to go with their gut and voice  objection to the unfair racial discrimination, despite heavy peer pressure.  The courage and compassion they so clearly demonstrated filled me with a sense of pride and moved me as if they were my own children. I thought to myself, this is how we cultivate great future leaders of the world. These are the kinds of people who should lead the world…

Have you ever been in the presence of, and heard a first hand account of a Holocaust survivor’s experiences?  I have.  I once sat in a college classroom, a week after my younger brother’s funeral, when I was in the deepest part of my grief, and listened to the incredible stories of two old men who had managed to avoid the angel of death, Dr. Mengele and his human torture, and who somehow managed to live to tell, even though their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers were sent to the gas chambers.  I remember thinking that if these two old men could survive the horrors they just described, I could surely survive the grief I felt over my brother’s untimely death.  Those two old men reminded all of us in the room that day, that bearing witness to their stories of the Holocaust came with a huge responsibility- that we were all now charged with the task of sharing their stories with future generations so as to ensure that history could not repeat itself.  

Anne Frank and six million people died in the Holocaust because too few people had the courage to speak out against racial discrimination, religious persecution and genocide. The "harmless" Anne Frank meme, spreading around the Internet without obvious objection, is reminiscent of the kind of complacency that served as the seeds of the Holocaust- yes, it's true, Anne Frank died because many well-meaning people were simply complacent and, silently went along with an ugly ugly status quo, even though they were "decent" people.   And though she knew what kind of fate awaited her in the hands of the Nazi’s, this brave young girl actually managed to put into writing a belief she held onto- ...that “people are basically good at heart.”  If for nothing else but this sentiment alone, she should not be the fodder for a tasteless joke, she believed in your goodness… so show some respect for human life, and please, please don’t prove her wrong.