On a recent trip to Washington D.C., I stopped by the National Archives where the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution are all housed in a dark rotunda. When you stand in that room and study the documents, you recognize that tough choices and sacrifices had once been made to build our “more perfect union.”

More importantly, as you read the names of the signers and recall the various political philosophies of those that had formed our democracy, you realize that our government was built on the foundations of compromise.

Today, however, that ability to strike a balance has vanished like the words on the now sun-scathed parchment of the Declaration of Independence. Last night, the congressional supercommittee hit an impasse and instead held fast to the ideologies of their party—the Republicans hoping to show that Democrats are incapable leaders, the Democrats wanting to display Republican intransigence. Congress—who love to play the what-would-the-founding-fathers-do game—has become a petty body that has more interest in hindering the opposition than tending to the 9% unemployment rate, mitigating the anger of the 99%, or crafting better economic plans than Cain’s 999.

Not only are they failing the American people, but Congress also seems more like a posse of snake oil salesmen, as two recent 60 Minutes broadcasts illustrated. In one report, Jack Abramoff—the notorious former lobbyist who had served time for corrupting officials, tax evasion, and fraud—demonstrated how lobbyists prey on the weaknesses of Congress. Using our representatives, lobbyists sneak obscure language into bills and hold our lawmakers hostage with sporting tickets and golf outings.

“The system hasn’t been cleaned up at all,” said Abramoff, explaining how those in charge of reform are the same individuals receiving the perks.

In a later episode, Steve Kroft examined how Congress is exempt from insider trading laws and can buy and sell stocks before valuable information reaches the public. And they do this legally. It must be hard to put country first, when you’re constantly receiving information that will grow your personal finances. To avoid such temptation, two representatives proposed the Stock Act, which would call for greater transparency of members’ stock trades and would make stock trades on non-public information illegal for representatives. But the bill had only 6 co-sponsors.

Aside from palling around with lobbyists and building their bottom line, Congress is also obsessed with triviality. Earlier this month, the House spent time bickering over mottos. They held a vote reaffirming our country’s motto, “In God We Trust,” as a way to reproach Barack Obama for suggesting that “E Pluribus Unum” was our nation’s slogan. (Quite frankly, “E Pluribus Unum,” which predates the other and means “Out of many, one,” has a more vital message for our divided house. Plus, it doesn’t violate the 1st Amendment like “In God We Trust” does.)

But it’s not just Congress that is causing our decadence. It’s all politicians and the media, too. They are all like dogs playing fetch. They’re never looking at the stick in hand, but at the horizon for the stick they expect to see fall. Representatives are never worried about the term they are serving in; instead they focus on the next election. The same goes for the media, which is controlled by the whims of tomorrow’s possible Republican candidate. For a year and a half, until November 2012, we will have listened to recurring ejaculations by non-candidates mounting specious presidential campaigns: From Rick Perry who makes our last Texas president sound like a linguist to Herman Cain who wouldn’t know Libya from Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan (his word). These aren’t candidates, but crafty businessmen publicizing their books and job applicants warming up the talk-show seat.

And to think, we were once a country of such inspiration.

Our American Revolution had sent ripples through the globe and led to the toppling of unjust regimes in Central America, South America, and France. We were once leaders in industrialization and egalitarian principles. Today our ingenuity is fading and the divide between the wealthy and the middle class, thanks to the slashing of safeguards and deceitful business tactics like predatory lending, is splitting like our infrastructure. We once had an education system that educated rather than focused on unreliable test scores. We were once a country that attracted the best and brightest before the term became cliché.

A few weeks ago, at a 92 Street Y event, Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author who has changed the way we think about ideas and success, said that his advice to young Americans today would be to “leave America.” The opportunities here have become limited, he argued.

Why wouldn’t young people leave for countries where innovative ideas, like seeking alternative energies, is not feared, is less controversial, and is a recognizable job creator? Sadly, our latest energy explorations centers around hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), which poses a major threat to our groundwater and, subsequently, to our health.

Not only are opportunities depleting, so is faith in our system. Congress’s approval rating has fallen to 9% and New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, showed how confidence in America is on the decline. He writes, “We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism.”

But maybe pessimism is what we need. Pessimists recognize problems. Pessimists founded the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. It’s the active pessimist who alerts the nescient, and informs the corrupt and the inefficient that they are being monitored.

We are at a time when we need to learn from our errors, just as the founders had. They saw that their first attempt at government with the Articles of Confederation, which did not grant Congress certain necessary powers like levying taxes, failed and traded it in for the Constitution. We need our delegates to understand that kowtowing to corporations and lobbyists is not in the job description, and that their personal stock portfolio needs to be shut so they can manage the portfolio of this country. We need our media to report on news and not year-and-a-half-long primaries with candidates that could double as friends of The Situation on the Jersey Shore. We need our lawmakers to meet each other halfway. And maybe that halfway point is on a class trip to the rotunda of the National Archives.

Photo by David Paul Ohmer

The post Let’s Compromise appeared first on The Faster Times.

Here are a few hypothetical terror questions that I’d like you to answer:

If a hijacked plane crashes into a building, who do you believe were the hijackers?

If a bomb explodes in a major city, what kind of people do you think were responsible?

If the words Muslims, Al-Qaeda, or jihadists came to mind, it’s not entirely your fault. Americans have been conditioned by an impulsive, fear-driven press to think that any attack on a democracy is linked to Islam. After Friday’s attack in Norway—before the evidence was gathered, before the dust had even settled—myriad American journalists (and news agencies around the globe) impetuously jumped to report on the bombing and shooting spree that resulted in the death of at least 76 people.

Paul Cruickshank, one of CNN’s terrorism analysts, linked Muslims to the attack by concluding early on that “Norway has been in Al-Qaeda’s crosshairs for quite some time.”

Shortly after the attacks, Reuters didn’t shy away from posting a “Factbox” on their Website, which was titled “Islamist Militant Attacks in Europe.” It listed past incidents when terrorists attacking the continent were Muslim.

Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin also fell in line with the idiocy, claiming that these attacks served as “a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.”

The New York Times recklessly stoked the rancor, too:

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al-Qaeda’s brutality and multiple attacks.

“If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al-Qaeda,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.

And, true to form, the Murdoch machine fueled the animosity from every angle. The Sun’s Saturday headline read “Norway’s 9/11: Al-Qaeda Massacre.” Fox News reporter Laura Ingraham, who guest-hosted the O’Reilly Factor, said that the attack “appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists…” Fox’s terrorism analyst, Neil Livingstone, wrongly stated, “Without all the facts in, the finger of suspicion would suggest that this is probably Middle Eastern in its origin.” The Wall Street Journal, in a Friday op-ed, called the attack “jihadist.”

But guessing Muslim was quickly quashed when police arrested Anders Behring Breivik—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Norwegian nationalist, who confessed to the murders, which he deemed a “necessary” part of his European Christian conservative revolution to combat what he considered the increasing threat of Muslim domination in Europe.

The media’s unsound reporting was fodder for comedians like Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report; though sadly, his humor seems as though it will herald the press’s response to future attacks. In advance of the next terror attack, Colbert has prepared the headline “Bad Things Happened Someplace: Muslims Involved.”

We live in a country where freedom of the press was established to keep governments in check and people informed. But reporters have diverted from that solemn duty. It is irresponsible when news organizations rely on yellow journalism and fear-mongering to compete. It is inimical when a Muslim mass murderer is a “terrorist,” but when the man turns out to be white and Christian, newspapers transform him into a “Christian extremist.” It is malfeasant when, in the back rooms of publications and stations, news is omitted, while trivial matters are emphasized so that words align with the hidden bias or agenda of the organization. And it is pure turpitude when a group of people is made into scapegoats because the press has become imprudent and lazy in their role.

Photo by Irfaan Photography

The post The Terror of Inherited Racism: Blaming Muslims for Norway appeared first on The Faster Times.

This past weekend marked the 96th anniversary of the beginnings of the Armenian Genocide. On April 24th, 1915, Ottoman Turks commenced the annihilation of what historians estimate to be more than 1.5 million Armenians.

The problem is that those who perpetrated the mass murder are those who are vehemently opposed to calling it genocide, the century’s first in a macabre string of ethnic cleansing.

More than a century ago, the Armenians, a Christian people who had mostly settled in the eastern regions of Turkey, had limited rights in the Ottoman Empire: They could not testify on their behalf, nor bear arms, and they were subjected to a higher tax. As Turkey entered the 19th and 20th Centuries, Armenian demands for political reforms and protections from the state only served to create suspicion amid Muslim Turks. Under the rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid (1876-1909) nearly 300,000 Armenians were massacred.

In 1908, a new political group called the Young Turks seized power, promising religious and civil freedoms to all minorities. But this promise did not materialize. Teaming up with Germany and Austria-Hungary, the new Turkish government formed the third arm of the Central Powers alliance. By using the guise of World War I and conspiracy theories that claimed Armenian collusion with the Russians, the Turks set off to eliminate the Armenian people. First, Turks executed able-bodied men. Then, resettlement programs, as they were called, transformed into death marches. Along these routes, Armenians were slaughtered by newly released Turkish convicts, ultra-extremist Muslims, and enlisted Kurds. Armenians were also starved to death or asphyxiated in caves transformed into gas chambers—brush was set aflame at the entrance. And even when the mass killings ended, Turks enslaved survivors, who were forced to adopt the religion and language of their captors.

Although more than 400 officials of the regime were arrested in connection to the atrocities and the ruling triumvirate was condemned to death—though they would escape justice by hiding out in foreign countries—the Turkish Republic to this day denies that genocide was committed, claiming that it was not a deliberate plan to exterminate the Armenian population. Not even a half-hearted mea culpa has been offered up. Turkey also rebukes world leaders who may mention the massacre, but take the politically obsequious route and avoid labeling it genocide. (“President Obama’s statement is a wrongful, distorted and unilateral political description of history,” Turkey’s ambassador said of the president’s respectful address to the American-Armenian lobby on Sunday, despite using euphemisms instead of the word genocide, which he had pledged to do during his campaign.) Turkey further contends that they should not bear the burden since it was Ottoman Turks that were in power, not the republic, which took over in 1923.

To address the latter point first: A year after the Iron Curtain dissolved, a very different Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev expressed “profound regret” for the killing of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest, while the previous regime had obfuscated the truth. Additionally, the Germans today do not represent the Germany of Hitler’s Third Reich, but they have still apologized for the actions of their countrymen and have taken legislative measures restricting Nazi symbols and neo-Nazi propaganda. It was the Holocaust that tarnished their country’s reputation; taking responsibility for past wrongs has only helped Germany reach its level of prominence today and has helped facilitate the healing process. I’ve met many young Germans and nothing has caught me more off guard than when I sat with a young German man who told me that the Holocaust “was very important to me when we learned of this in school.” It was more than sixty years later and still a tear of sympathy for a wrong he did not commit—but clearly understood—came to his eye.

A country that does not recognize and admit to their wrongdoings, whether it is their own or that of their ancestors, is a country that squanders educational opportunities, which are the most important tool in preventing future mass atrocities.

But traversing through that threshold that divides pride and shame is a difficult one to cross. Especially when Turkey’s denial contradicts the observations of the wartime US Consul Leslie Davis and the communiqués of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau.

Davis, as he passed through the Harput Plain in July of 1915, stated:

“Any doubt that may have been expressed in previous reports as to the Government’s intentions in sending away the Armenians have been removed and any hope that may have been expressed as to the possibility of some of them surviving have been destroyed. It has been no secret that the plan was to destroy the Armenian race as a race…”

Morgenthau wrote in a confidential telegram: “Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.” He added that only the use of force would be sufficient to end the mass killings, since, “Protests as well as threats are unavailing and probably incite the Ottoman government to more drastic measures as they are determined to disclaim responsibility for their absolute disregard of capitulations…”

In Morgenthau’s conversations with the Minister of the Interior, Talaat Pasha, about the Armenian people, he writes:

“I argued in all sorts of ways with him but he said that there was no use, that they had already disposed of three quarters of them, that there were none left in Bitlis, Van, Erzeroum, and that the hatred was so intense now that they have to finish it… He said they want to treat the Armenians like we treat the [N]egroes. I think he meant like the Indians. I asked him to make exceptions in some few cases which he promised to do.”

But most incriminating are the words of the triumvirate. Enver Pasha, the War Minister, declared, “The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation.” Talaat Pasha told the German embassy, “Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, [for example], the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention… The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.”

In 2000, 126 Holocaust scholars, holders of academic chairs, and directors of Holocaust research and study centers—among them Nobel Laureate for Peace, Elie Wiesel—signed a statement affirming that what took place in Turkey was a genocide of the Armenian people and it urged governments of Western democracies to recognize it as such.

But most Western democracies play politics and pander to Turkey by refusing to invoke the appropriate word—genocide—leaving an entire peoples marginalized and unserved, while allowing an entire country to be disgraced with a false history and to miss an important opportunity to inculcate in their young people the tragic, yet necessary, lessons that come from truth.

Even Hitler recognized this point. On August 22, 1939, nine days before storming Poland, the first steps toward his Final Solution, he said to Reichmarshal Hermann Goering and his commanding generals:

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Photo by Jasula

The post Still Too Turkey to Call it the Armenian Genocide appeared first on The Faster Times.

When 2011 began, it appeared to be an auspicious year for the Sudanese people. The South had overwhelmingly voted to secede, the expected violent aftershocks of the referendum hadn’t transpired, and the media was actually paying attention.

But then Tunisia happened. And then Egypt. This inspired protests in neighboring countries. And Sudan lost its coverage.

But, it wasn’t the revolutions that pushed Sudan out of the spotlight.

It was Sudan.

As the referendum received attention, the intense focus on the process came at Darfur’s expense—in Sudan’s western region. Beginning in 2003, when rebel groups clashed with the government’s military forces, Darfur and its people fell into despair. There was a genocide, in which experts calculate left 300,000 dead and 3 million displaced. Things have not improved much for Darfuris. In the last year, more than 100,000 additional people have been displaced throughout Darfur, according to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Fighting in December alone had forced 32,000 people from their homes.

Now, malnutrition and disease are taking their toll in the displaced persons camps and violence, rape, and the killing of civilians is on the rise. Just to give an example of the violence, one day in September, in an ethnically Fur village, eighty-six people were injured and fifty-six were murdered—shot at point blank range or dragged to death by automobiles—as the Sudan Human Rights Monitor reported.

Even though peace between the North and South is still tenuous and a number of issues such as wealth sharing and citizenship need to be ironed out, the international community must shift attention back to Darfur.

Enough, a project to end genocide and crimes against humanity, has offered a few first-steps in curtailing the violence and improving conditions for Darfuris. Firstly, high-level political negotiations must begin, but outside of Sudan. Inside the country, there is a lack of neutrality, and many of Darfur’s rebel leaders would not be included, since they are banned from entering the region. There have been guarantees from Khartoum, allowing for temporary entrance, but it’s mere snake oil.

The voices that must be echoed, however, cannot come just from rebel leaders. Darfur’s civil society must also be heard.

Additionally, the international community cannot allow the secession of southern Sudan to overshadow Darfur. It is, instead, as the report, A Roadmap for Peace in Darfur, asserts, “an opportunity for increased transparency and pluralism. Although democratic transformation is in no way a prerequisite for peace in Darfur, it is crucial that the Darfur peace process be incorporated into the broader context of the future of the North.”

But it doesn’t appear as if the international community’s moral authority will be the United States. The House of Representatives’ latest draft for their 2011 spending bill would significantly reduce funding for emergency food aid and refugee assistance to Sudan. The measure is part of a proposed international affairs budget that would be cut by 21 percent, or $11.6 billion, over the President’s request.

Sam Bell, Executive Director of Genocide Intervention Network / Save Darfur Coalition (GIN/SDC), responded:

“These severe cuts in humanitarian aid programs are in direct opposition to the United States’ stated commitment to peace in Darfur and Sudan. The timing could not be worse as violence in Darfur is on the rise and south Sudan stands ready to become the world’s newest independent country in less than five months… The majority of the funding cuts will affect life-saving assistance including food delivery to nearly 3 million Darfuris who are living in displacement camps, unable to return safely to their homes.”

Mark Hanis, the president of GIN/SDC, weighed in during a teleconference on Tuesday. He was “very concerned” about the new budget and said, “this bill is also cutting funding for genocide prevention from the Conflicts Crisis Fund” and will impede upon the government’s ability “to prevent and stop mass atrocities.”

With multiple initiatives that would mitigate violent conflict atop the chopping block, in the end, someone will look back with remorse.

When I attended the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center on April 19, 2009, President Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker. On that rainy afternoon, the former president reiterated to the crowd what he believed was one of his greatest failures while in office: Not doing enough to stop the genocide in Rwanda.

Darfur isn’t on the threshold of revolutions sparked on the Web, and their Tahrir Square is a less glamorous displaced persons camp, where self-determination is leached from the spirit. And even though humanitarian workers and journalists are being detained, in Africa’s largest country the story of Darfur is only runner-up to the news about the imminent secession. But if we continue to ignore Darfur and cut necessary funds, I expect Barack Obama will snip a museum’s ribbon one day and reiterate Clinton’s self-reproach.

Photo by Future Atlas

The post Revolutions in Egypt, But Genocide in Darfur appeared first on The Faster Times.

Did incendiary political rhetoric cause Jared Loughner to murder a half dozen people, among them a 9-year old girl? Or was this tragedy the consequence of a mental illness long ignored? Or had the two coalesced?

I would suspect most would agree that it was when the violent rhetoric intertwined with the mind of a mentally ill man. So then, where do we place the blame?

The often-quoted quasi-journalist/comedian/talk-show host Jon Stewart (who, in the past year, has become one of the voices of reason in a country entrenched with demagoguery) said, “We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine.”

Maybe we can’t hold the political rhetoric of firebrand commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck accountable, even if it sometimes sounds as if they’re issuing fatwas. Robert Wright in a New York Times article points out:

“Six months ago, police in California pulled over a truck that turned out to contain a rifle, a handgun, a shotgun and body armor. Police learned from the driver — sometime after he opened fire on them — that he was heading for San Francisco, where he planned to kill people at the Tides Foundation. You’ve probably never heard of the Tides Foundation — unless you watch Glenn Beck, who had mentioned it more than two dozen times in the preceding six months, depicting it as part of a communist plot to “infiltrate” our society and seize control of big business.”

But we can hold politicians liable. And we should. The difference between Beck, Limbaugh, Marilyn Manson and our politicians is that the first three have had their limelights lit by a large, faithful minority; whereas, politicians are kept in power by a majority. So while the market may favor vitriolic megaphones and morose rock stars, our political system does not have to support politicians who preach in the language of rancor.

When elected officials run venomous campaigns or try to overwhelm legislation with acrimony by adopting the same talking points as someone like Rush Limbaugh, not only is it wrong, but it reinforces the craziness constituents are constantly exposed to if all they follow is FOX News or MSNBC.

So the next time a politician does something like post crosshairs over districts of congressmen and women that they want to see defeated, as Sarah Palin did on Facebook, not only should they be denounced in the news, but also renounced in the voting booth. As voters, we are not just electing a legislator. We are choosing a delegate that will help to set the tone of our country.

John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, has an opportunity to change that tone. After the shooting, Boehner said, “This is the time for the House to lock arms.” It’s a mood that Boehner and the Republicans, along with the Democrats, should aim to manifest for years, not just in the wake of this tragedy. And it can be done without compromising either of their parties’ agendas.

Congress does not have to mimic and kowtow to the media. It does not have to echo the same hatred. If Boehner can lead an arm-locked Congress, then, when we’re grieving an inevitable future tragedy, we’ll at least be able to believe that the impetus for murder was that the gunman was just crazy.

Photo by T Tara Siuk

The post The Jared Loughner Blame Game appeared first on The Faster Times.

Okay, pause. Press on your carotid artery for fifteen seconds and count the little beats pumping in your neck. Good, now if you tallied more than 20 beats per second you probably experienced good old-fashioned fear from the fabrications in the previous paragraph or from the article’s title. (Or you may need to see a doctor, seriously.)

It is true, however, that the government is ending its futile color-coded terror alert system, which was like a thermometer in the ass of America that was always reading too high and making us panic. The news stations added to our apprehension by greeting us each morning with that terror status at the bottom of the screen among the ticker lines. The government and news stations were like two twisted parents with Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, keeping their own kid poisoned with “severe” (red), “high” (orange), and “elevated” (yellow) levels of fear, but never allowing poor little USA to nurse itself back to “guarded” (blue) or better yet a “low” cold sweat (green).

And when I said the government was ending it, what I meant to say is that they will be replacing it with a new system that “communicates precise, actionable information based on the latest intelligence to law enforcement,” according to the statements an anonymous senior Homeland Security official made to the Washington Post. Oh, and we have also brought in another tactic for building up fear:

Hello crotch checks and terminal chemo. It doesn’t matter which way you hang… politically, these new measures are scaring everyone. One side is against it, convinced that they’ll develop cancer from the radiation. The other side is for it, but you can tell they’re stressing themselves out as they stare at every penis pat down for the next underwear bomber (even though most successful copycats don’t copy failures).

We have to face it. Investing in fear is like investing in gold, (which, go figure, is invested in primarily by people scared that the dollar will collapse). If anxiety were a little bit more finite, it would probably trade well on stock exchange. This stuff controls, sells, and galvanizes.

We’ve got Islamophobia and Obamaphobia competing for the headlines. We’re scared of the Tea Party and anxious about missing out on the American Dream. We’re not even sure what’s scarier anymore: swine flu or swine flu vaccines.

And even when there is something to possibly panic about, the message just becomes warped, causing stupid people to do stupid things.

Take for instance this past Friday’s failed plot to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon. It was an attack by one man who was an unknowing puppet for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had prepared and supplied this extremist, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, with a fake bomb. Two days after his arrest, a likely hate crime was committed against Muslims in the area, when a mosque that Mohamud had attended was set on fire. Now Muslims are fearing backlash.

Fear leads to hate leads to crime, which leads to fear to hate to crime. So forth. So on.

Whenever fear in the media gets revved up, I remind myself of when the Beltway Sniper was haunting everyone within fifty miles from the Capitol in 2002. I was attending university just outside of Washington and for weeks, people changed their lives. Folks walked briskly (if they even left their homes) and stopping to chat became taboo. Two different girls who gave me rides to work begged me to pump their gas, fearing that they’d get sniped at the pump. And whenever a white box truck drove by—which was what all of the news stations were reporting to be the killer’s mode of transport—forget about it. People were diving into bushes. In the end, it was discovered that the two killers had been shooting from the trunk of a blue Chevrolet Caprice. Not a white van.

There will always be some version of the groin probe. Twenty-four-hour-news-with-nothing-much-to-say seems like it’s going to stay. A terrorist who happens to be Muslim might pop up every now and again, too. But we need to keep two things in mind:

First let’s remember FDR’s hackneyed (but only because nobody listened the first million times) warning: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

And if that doesn’t work for you, then just remember that sometimes the white box truck is a blue Chevrolet.

Photo by Francois Cuccu

The post New Airport Scanning Procedure Might Cause Testicular Cancer in Both Men and Women appeared first on The Faster Times.

The new documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” has educators talking about school reform. But that should take a backseat to a school year already steeped in tragedy. Last month, bullying forced a number of gay adolescents to commit suicide.

In fact, the high-profile suicide of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers teen who ended his life by jumping from the George Washington Bridge because of bullies who outted him on the Internet, was just the beginning of the New York region’s problem with homosexuality. And the problem, of course, isn’t contained to the classroom.

Last week, a gay man in the Bronx and two teens, who were thought to have had relations with the man, were kidnapped and beaten. One teen was cut with a box-cutter and the man and a teen were sodomized with a plunger and a small baseball bat.

This week, Carl Paladino, a candidate in New York’s gubernatorial race, spoke to a gathering of Orthodox Jews in Williamsburg about gay marriage and raising a family. “I don’t want [children] brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option – it isn’t.” Later on, he criticized his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, of marching in the gay pride parade. “[T]hat’s not the example we should be showing our children.”

Paladino admitted that his hateful pandering to other ardent believers comes from his Roman Catholic faith. But it’s not just Catholicism that preaches such poison. All three monotheistic faiths are replete with a call to arms against homosexuals.

A few examples: Leviticus 20:13 says “If a man lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination and they shall surely be put to death.” Timothy 1:9-10 states “Law is not made for a righteous person but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and fornicators and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching.” And sura 4:16 in the Koran declares “If two men among you commit indecency, punish them both.”

On the Michelangelo Signorile Show, a Sirius Radio program, Signorile, who is gay, told a caller “If religion didn’t condemn homosexuality there would be no gay bashing.” The only way to end the attacks, Signorile continued, is to pressure “your church to stop condemning homosexuality, just as your church stopped condemning black people a long time ago or Jews…”

But words are not enough. Of course the gay rights movement has improved federal hate crimes law, which was signed earlier this year, and they won a reversal on Proposition 8, the California law banning same sex marriage, that is until it goes back to court. Hate crimes based on sexual orientation, however, according to the most recent FBI statistics report, are up 11 percent.

What the gay rights movement needs is something a bit more threatening.

Was it Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent boycotts, powerful orations, and ability to incite millions of others to peacefully demand equality that was paramount to the civil rights movement? Absolutely. But it wasn’t the peaceful protests alone. I don’t think King would have been as effective without the fury of the militant Black Panthers wreaking havoc in the background. The Black Panthers helped strip away that label of victim. After centuries of pogroms and genocides from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the formation of the state of Israel-boasting one of the toughest armies around-did the same for Jews.

Both the Black Panthers and the Israeli army have been labeled goons and thugs. Their tactics have been censured. But one thing is certain, their enemies feared retribution.

If young gay people had the equivalent of Israeli soldiers or Black Panthers, they’d feel less isolated as religious leaders and politicians shame them, (who oddly enough are often closeted homosexuals themselves, like Senator Larry Craig or Bishop Eddie Long). Violence is not the answer, but intimidation could help. United gay vigilantes might even give credence to the peaceful human rights wing of the movement. And maybe, just maybe, youngsters like Tyler Clementi would feel more comfortable in their own skin, believing that a Superman of sorts existed for the gay population.

Where do we find this Superman? Four words: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day. It’s also Bully Prevention Month. Gay American soldiers, who are clearly unwanted in the armed forces, could give new meaning to coming out and bully prevention. United States law, if it doesn’t change after U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’s injunction to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” is practically inviting this.

Photo by Gareth Simpson

The post It’s Time for Gay Vigilantes to Kick Some Ass appeared first on The Faster Times.

Genocide, mass atrocity, and human rights violations are all too common in Central Africa and its surrounding countries. It’s a region of the world that foreign nations tend to deliberate over during campaigns; but afterwards, the talking points evaporate and the tragedies continue to boil on the back burner until the next election.

Countries like Nigeria are overrun with volatile Christian preachers who indiscriminately label children as witches, which often leads to the murder of that child, or at the very least their banishment from the village. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof considers that next year’s possible secession of Southern Sudan from the North could lead to “the world’s bloodiest war in 2011,” which may reignite the country’s recent campaign of genocide. The Holocaust in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues, with more than 6,000,000 dead, while nearly one million have been displaced.

But the voices of these tragedies are often concealed to that continent, and perish unheard.

However, one newly released memoir from Atria, In the Shadow of Freedom, poignantly details the horrors rooted in Africa.

Written by Tchicaya Missamou and Travis Sentell, In the Shadow of Freedom is Tchicaya’s heart-rending story about growing up in the impoverished Congo-Brazzaville in the 80s and 90s, where bloodshed ingrains itself into the culture.

At first, his story paints an innocent Africa, and follows a young, naked Tchicaya to school-a large hollow baobab tree-as he quotes Schwarzenegger’s lines from the Saturday film. The memoir recounts the life of a boy who savors his mother’s monkey stew, who plays soccer with a plastic-wrapped coconut, and who is awed by his white friend’s rich life, where people eat at tables and dogs have their own food bowls.

But like most stories that spawn from the Congo, Tchicaya is forced to trade in his childhood for guns and militia service before his teenage years. He receives his first pistol at age eight, which is replaced by an AK-47, delivered to him by militiamen.

“I was not forced to join the militia,” he told me in an interview. Instead, he called it ‘volunteering.’ “If you don’t volunteer,” he explained, “well, you’ll be killed or your family will be brutalized. They will always find a way to hurt you.”

Propaganda is the militia’s tool and militiamen tell the children that the other ethnic groups in the Congo, like the Niboleks and M’Bochis, “want all the Lari”-Tchicaya’s people-”dead.” The lies are aided by liquor and marijuana. “You will be bulletproof,” they convince these child soldiers.

“I began to realize how powerful a man can be when he is holding a gun,” a young Tchicaya declares in his book. “It felt good.”

“Things changed very quickly,” he writes. Tchicaya and the other boys-aged 13 and 14-spend evenings patrolling the neighborhood. His friends fantasize about killing Niboleks and on the one day Tchicaya is late to his patrol duties, he discovers his friends in the interrogation room, raping a woman, and smiling. Her baby lays beside her, crying.

“I was too weak to stand up for what I knew was right,” he admits. But rape in the Congo is used like a weapon and is rife in this tragic narrative.

Less than a quarter of the way through the book, on one page alone, the horror is almost unreadable:

“I watched her explode into a million pieces, blood, guts, and body parts raining down on the trees, coating them in viscous syrup. It looked to me like the leaves were bleeding,” Tchicaya says of a woman who was handed a grenade by a child soldier. “I saw a young boy,” he continues, “contort as he was blown apart.” And then comes the image that most horrified Travis Sentell while writing Tchicaya’s story-a husband and wife from different ethnic groups split up and argue over who will keep their newborn child, which ends with the father chopping the baby in half.

“I could feel the child spasming, jerking, quietly choking on its own blood,” Tchicaya says of a second baby, this one shot in the face, his jaw obliterated. As they race to the hospital, he writes, “He died in my arms.”

The carnage is ever-present-”[The street] was a cemetery of decomposing bodies,” he notes-and the reader recognizes that the grim reality of Tchicaya’s life belongs to millions of Africans.

But Tchicaya does not remain as some helpless witness, and unlike many of his countrymen who are forced into terror under the strong-armed militias, he avoids corruption. After completing his gendarmerie service, when the second civil war erupts, Tchicaya is hired to ferry white diplomats, as well as their jewelry and cash, from war-torn Congo. Though he could have kept the riches for himself, the honest Tchicaya risks his own safety by stopping his men from looting and by returning the treasures.

His earnings, nevertheless, bring misfortune. Men from the Lari militia, his own people, demand his money and when he refuses, they stab him, rape his mother before his eyes, and leave the family for dead in their burning home.

“My soul had perished in that room,” Tchicaya says, but uses every last ounce of energy to save his family and bring them to the hospital-”a human depot”-twelve miles away, pushing them in a cart “over fallen bodies, over dismembered limbs, over headless corpses.”

Though In the Shadow of Freedom places readers in the scorching heat of tragedy, there are moments where the shade of contentment trickles in. Tchicaya escapes the Congo, dupes the customs agents with a fake passport and his well-plotted wooing, and arrives in America where he eventually serves the United States of America as a marine in the Iraq war.

And as irony would have it, the laughs are uncontrollable when the freshly immigrated Tchicaya attempts to tackle “the moving staircase,” which leaves him ascending the escalator in full split and has him imagining his Tom-and-Jerry-esque demise as he approaches the metal teeth at the end of the ride.

Last month, I attended Tchicaya Missamou and Travis Sentell’s reading at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan. Travis shared Tchicaya’s story to a large audience, while the decorated warrior sat beside him in his dress blue coat and white trousers. Medals gently dangled from his chest as he listened to Travis tell perfect strangers about the rape of his mother and the sacrifice his father had made to smuggle him out of the country, which led to his father’s arrest, torture, and infection with HIV.

Travis explained how after serving in Iraq and receiving American citizenship, Tchicaya had returned to the Congo in 2004 to see his family, but was arrested on dubious charges and shot while attempting to flee. They played for the crowd the original 911 recording that Tchicaya initiated from a clandestine cell phone that he had in the Brazzaville prison cell. As the tape played, Tchicaya’s lips clenched and a solitary tear streaked down his cheek.

“As we speak right now, a woman is being brutalized,” the then thirty-one year old Tchicaya told his audience after the recording finished. “As we speak right now a child is being taken away to be a soldier.”

“I made a promise to the prisoners,”-men who were serving time without any sort of due process, some without having committed a crime-he told me. “To tell their story… I had a chance to tell the story because I was privileged to come to America… In the Congo, if you try to speak, you can be killed.”

So Tchicaya, the ambassador, the voice of the voiceless, speaks.

“I want to make sure this won’t happen anymore.” He reminded the crowd “We are the most privileged people on earth” and that “Freedom is not a privilege; it’s a right.”

Then Tchicaya Missamou, whose name means the flower that heals problems, led the audience in a sing-along about healing. “I want you to say Imam,” he told the people. And with each refrain he sang, they answered-Imam. Yes, we can heal the world, they were saying.

“One finger cannot wash the whole body,” he reminded me, reciting an African proverb.

But until the most privileged people on earth start to act like a hand, until the talking points overreach election time, we will remain most privileged and free, while the Congolese, and many Africans, will remain in a dark, dark shadow.

The post “In the Shadow of Freedom” Casts Light Upon the Africa We Ignore appeared first on The Faster Times.

***Catch up with the story: Read Part I***

After leaving concentration camp Majdanek, with Matisyahu’s hopeful song playing on the iPod, one of our trip leaders surprised us with an announcement.

“Tonight in Krakow, we’ll be going to the Matisyahu concert,” he said.

That evening we funneled through the synagogue’s single door and into a red and gold-painted interior, where the Orthodox reggae star took to the stage. He wore jeans and grey Nikes that had neon green swooshes. His tzitzis dangled from beneath a sweater. Matisyahu’s beat-boxing and melodic verses inside the synagogue were a brief hiatus from our tour of the concentration camps.

While singing “Jerusalem,” Matisyahu stopped and echoed what was on the minds of every member of my group: As a Jew, it’s nice to be able to return to Poland after the Holocaust, and it’s an honor to be here in the presence of a survivor.

“Leo,” some of the members of my group shouted, praising the Holocaust survivor who chose to return to the concentration camps with us.

Matisyahu pressed his graying beard to the microphone and began to sing the Shma, muttering a few garbled words after the prayer. Seemingly beset with emotion, he told the crowd sitting in the pews, standing in the back, hanging from the balcony, that he needed to take a few minutes backstage. It was a day where somberness and pride had found one another.

But by the next morning, some of that triumph dissipated when we visited the Jewish Community Center to hear from Jews who had decided to make Krakow their home.

One of them, a young religious woman, told our group that the word “Jew,” in Poland, is a typical insult. For example, if a professor gave too much work or if a politician cheated the people some Poles would say, “What a Jew,” she explained.

“My friends say, ‘It’s so cool to be a Jew,’” she added, but they’re talking about Jews like Woody Allen. The powerful Jew, like those from Israel, is seen as dangerous and evil.

When we left the JCC building, some people were inspired. “That was the most moving thing I’ve seen so far,” one friend told me. “My family is from Poland and it’s nice to see that there are some Jews left.”

Others from my group vowed, “Never again… Never again will I return to Poland.”

The next morning, on our way to Auschwitz, we stopped in front of the gates of Schindler’s factory. Leo gathered the group together. “We have two reasons for being in Poland,” he reminded us. “We’re here to remember the ashes… and to let [the Polish people] know that we’re still here.” That the Final Solution, in the end, went unresolved. Again, Leo started to remember the lost generations of our people, the millions that could have been, and his gravelly voice rose to a squeal.

When we arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one and a half million Jews were murdered, we walked along the tracks, toward the gas chambers, and stopped before a lone cattle car. Thirty-five young people who could never clearly comprehend the atrocities stood with Leo the survivor, who, as much as he wanted to, could never explain what went on here. We scanned the fields of history’s most frightening site and listened as he told his stories of revolt, comforting himself and us with memories of resistance rather than the other thoughts that loomed in his mind.

When Leo entered Birkenau in 1944, he was forced to toss his tfillin, which are used for prayer, onto a heaping pile. But in order to get them back, he orchestrated a diversion—he convinced the other boys to have a wrestling match in the middle of Auschwitz. As the Nazis moved to break up the scuffle, Leo reclaimed his tfillin. While thousands of people were pumped from the bowels of the crematoriums each day, Leo stood in his barrack, wrapped in his phylacteries, and prayed. Though his holy contraband was eventually taken, and though he was whipped so brutally that he was forced to sleep on his stomach for several months, he saw his punishment as a reward, a reassertion of his faith.

And he continued to test Auschwitz.

“When I was marched to the fields to dig up potatoes from the frozen ground,” he told me as we traveled along the miles of barbed wire, “I hid in a pile of hay, instead.”

Another time, when a guard continuously pushed a fellow Jew into the mud, rather than stand there and bear the common sight of torture, Leo struck the German in the groin. The man doubled over and when he got back up, placed the barrel of his gun against Leo’s head. But he didn’t shoot, even as Leo ordered him to. The German just stood there and listened to the taunting of this reckless fourteen-year-old.

“I did everything to not survive this place,” he declared.

But despite his heroics, he lived a childhood of fear, torture, and imprisonment all because he was Jewish.

We marched through Birkenau, which was also known as Auschwitz II. Beyond the rusted barbs were acres of destroyed barracks that Polish peasants had looted for firewood after the war. Every few steps I’d stop walking and look both left and right. I tried to imagine the land filled with people, with Jews awaiting death or freedom, whichever came first. And though I had studied the Holocaust for years, voraciously reading memoir after tortured memoir, I couldn’t picture what Birkenau would look like filled with people. It was enormous.

We passed ponds that were grey with ashes and stood on fields fertilized with dead Jews.

The night before Auschwitz, I was speaking with a friend from the trip. In Majdanek, he told the cameraman, who had been following us for a documentary, not to film him, not to record his emotions. I told him that I wanted to feel like that. I wanted the camps to tear me open. Yet for some reason, I had felt numb walking through Majdanek.

“Put down the pen,” he told me. “Don’t take so many notes.”

“I don’t want to miss anything,” was my reply. But in Auschwitz I took his advice.

When we arrived at a field sown with ashes, Rabbi Elie told the group that America and the Allies could have bombed the tracks, preventing more than 10,000 murders a day. I walked closer toward the ashes, distancing myself from the others. We could have bombed the tracks, I kept repeating quietly.

My journal was in my bag and I stood there alone, staring at the grass fertilized with genocide.

A friend approached me with a candle that we were to light for the dead. I told her “Thank you,” and I was unable to disguise the sadness choking my throat.

We moved toward the area known as the Canada compound, which the Nazis had used to sort out the Jews’ possessions. We tried to get into one building, but the door was locked. Leo started to kick it down. The noise thundered through Birkenau. It began to drizzle. Leo was set on tearing the whole place down; but someone found another entrance.

A few people broke into tears as photographs on the walls, the first images we had seen that day of the victims, portrayed the innocent, the murdered who had painted the skies of Auschwitz forever dark.

Before we left Birkenau, everyone followed Leo, while I found barrack 18 in the woman’s camp—the place where my grandmother had spent more than a year of the war. At different times during the war, however, there had been two barracks labeled 18. At the time, I couldn’t be sure which one was hers, so I explored both. I stood inside the cement footprint of the vanished wooden one that now sprouted moss and weeds in place of bunks, and I traced my fingers along the brick walls of the second barrack, until I caught my reflection in the window. I smiled somberly as I turned to exit the concentration camp; unlike my grandparents, I was the only member of my family to enter Auschwitz and be free to leave.

At the smaller camp referred to as Auschwitz I, we ate in the dining hall. The food was strangely good. I cringed when I heard someone say, “I’m starving.” I wondered how the lunch ladies felt when they admitted: “I serve food at Auschwitz.”

After lunch, we entered beneath a replica of the infamous archway Arbeit Macht Frei—the original had been stolen at the end of last year, a foreshadowing of how Holocaust denial will become Holocaust deconstruction. The barracks there offered the same museum-feel as Majdanek, though they delivered greater quantities of atrocity. More photographs of the dead lined the walls and there were larger webs of tangled glasses. Prosthetic limbs had been stockpiled and a pool-sized pit contained metal bowls. There were mountains of hair and infinite shoes. Some shoes had been paired off as if to create semblance out of chaos. There was even a separate collection of baby’s shoes, ones that parents would have bronzed.

We entered into another gas chamber. Another crematorium.

After Auschwitz, we escaped to the tranquil Carpathian Mountains in order to comprehend the magnitude of what we had seen over the last week.

Some of us were angry. Some were silent. Some cried.

“Now what? Are we just going to go home?” someone in the group said with tears in her eyes.

“What can we do?” someone else wondered.

“My students don’t even know what the Holocaust is,” I told the group. “The one who came closest called it that ‘Jewish thing.’”

I left the mountains without answers, but also without the feeling of urgency.

When the trip ended, I continued my journey through to Austria and Germany and read the novel Exodus on the trains—the same sort of trains my grandparents had traveled on after the war, when Poppy pummeled a German soldier who called Grandma a ‘Jewish slut.’ I flashed the Star of David printed on the book’s cover at Austrians and Germans who were well into their 80s. At the younger generations, too. A reminder. A testament.

But, it was after the trip had ended that I realized how delicate memories and testaments truly are. I realized how the Holocaust—which had always been a continuous presence in my life, an enduring piece of history—could slip away so quickly.

Within twenty-four hours of posting Part I of this story, I received two pieces of news, one sadder than the next. First I was told that the barracks storing the thousands of shoes at Majdanek, which I had walked through a few weeks earlier, had burnt to the ground, destroying those artifacts that had paid tribute to the departed. Then I received a phone call. Grandma, the last survivor in my family, had passed away.

As we move further away from the Holocaust, as the number of survivors dwindles, stories like Leo’s and my grandparents’ will give way to a torrent of denial. It will only become harder to learn the lessons from the Holocaust. As time passes, the Holocaust itself will become like the Jews in Auschwitz. Sadly, it will lose its identity and become just a number—6 million.

Therefore, it’s important to take these lessons and stories from the Holocaust and use them to take action now, to prevent genocide now.

“Do you wanna know why I tell my story?” Leo said me inside of Birkenau. “When I was on the death march from Auschwitz, a man said to me ‘You’ll probably make it. But when you get out of here, tell the world.’”

Here are some websites that you can visit to learn more about preventing genocide:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Enough Project

Genocide Watch

Genocide Intervention Network

Stop Genocide Now

The post A Return to the Concentration Camps: Part II appeared first on The Faster Times.

When I first met the barrel-chested, eighty-year-old Leo Zisman, I was sitting in the Jewish Enrichment Center’s classroom in New York City, finishing my dinner.

“I don’t know where to begin…” Leo told the class, but like a tsunami that retreats toward the horizon before tearing down the shoreline, he transformed from an uncertain speaker to one that would ruin our appetites with just a few words. Within minutes he described the destruction of his city, Kovno, Lithuania, the murder of his family, and the end of his freedom.

Leo, a self-described wild child, was always testing the limits.

When his family was rounded up in the ghetto, Leo’s father told him to run. He obeyed and the Nazis set two dogs upon him. They tore at the seat of his trousers, but the unfettered youth stopped, picked up a stick, and smashed each dog across the snout, forcing them to retreat back to where the Nazis loaded his family onto cattle cars.

Even in Auschwitz, Leo was obstreperous. When his transport arrived, they were marched toward the gas chambers. Sensing the end, the other boys asked him, “What do we do now?” He found it ironic that they would turn to him for guidance, considering he was the youngest, but he offered his suggestion: “Let’s sing Ani Ma’amin.” I Believe. As they neared the gas chambers, Leo led the chorus. The Germans couldn’t understand what was happening. “Who are these boys?” they asked, but the paperwork for their transport had gone missing. At the last minute the misplaced papers or choral rebellion caused the Nazis to divert Leo’s group to the showers instead.

This past July, the JEC, the organization that had offered the classes back in New York, led thirty-five participants to Europe. The trip was the final exam for our “Holocaust Mini-Masters.” Leo and his wife joined us.

We arrived in Warsaw, Poland, and yawned off the jetlag; Leo, whose hair had gone completely white, except for a triangular patch of orange set like a goatee in his beard, bounded through the city fueled by both vehemence and excitement. With both a prepaid phone and eyeglasses slung about his neck, he shouted, “Come on guys,” ushering us from tragedy to tragedy almost seven decades later.

At every site-from the last remnants of the ghetto wall to the Jewish cemetery–he asked us the same questions over and over again: “Why didn’t we resist? Why didn’t we communicate with the other ghettos?”

Inside the cemetery, as we lined up on the walkway that suspended us over a sunken mass grave, nobody had an answer.

“I don’t have the words to say… Why didn’t they have the opportunity to have names and to have children?” he asked of the myriad bodies below us. His face reddened, his eyes fogged with tears. “We don’t even know who they are.” He recited the Kaddish, something we would say in Majdanek and Auschwitz, too. It seemed, at the time, that it would be the theme song of our trip.

While the group walked ahead, I asked him how he felt being here.

His eyes narrowed. “If I had a machine gun, I could kill all of them, the Germans. But when I see blood I faint. I can’t explain it. I hate all of them. Those sons of bitches.” He stopped to gaze upon the stones, most so withered that the Hebrew writing looked like runny paint, and then turned to me, speaking with a voice desperate to hold back tears. “I saw a German take a baby, maybe a month old, and rip it up like a chicken… Why didn’t we fight back? We’d have more than six million more.”

I couldn’t remove the image of the baby from my head. We went to the old town for lunch. I ate, but like a person disgusted by the contents of their plate, who scatters the unappetizing fare to the edges, I was troubled by the contents of my mind and tried to slide the image of the baby out.

En route toward the bus, I spotted a street vendor selling wooden statues of Orthodox Jews clutching gold coins. There were more off-color Jewish collectibles in Warsaw than actual Jews.

We left for Lublin, a city with a Jewish population that doubles, or even triples, when a group like ours arrives. Within ten minutes I found a swastika in the main square.

That evening we walked to the Yeshiva, a building whose exterior resembled a ransacked tenement, to welcome in Shabbat. Despite its neglected exterior, the temple was full of newly installed wooden pews that were flanked by beautiful jade-colored columns. I listened as Hebrew filled Lublin. On our walk back to the city center, riders in passing cars and patrons at some biker bar shouted things at us. Our security guard told me “Not nice things.”

The next morning, unbothered by Lublin’s hospitality, we returned to the Yeshiva. Rabbi Lawrence, one of the young trip leaders who put passion into every word, asked us: If you woke up one morning and had the opportunity to press a red button to change religions, would you?

Aside from resistance to the metaphor, the general consensus was no.

But the red button did more than confirm our Judaism, it brought out the stories that had reserved everyone’s spot on this trip. There were grandchildren of survivors and Jewish partisans. One girl, a baptized Colombian, discovered that she was Jewish later in life, after her teacher requested that she research her lineage. “I finally understood why my grandmother always said to never use the pot for sancucho”–a pork dish–”to boil milk for the coffee.” Two participants had immigrated to New York from the Ukraine when they were teenagers and faced more anti-Semitism than any of us New York Jews could fathom. Another girl explained how, at a young age, she could never understand why her first cousins were Christians, while she was Jewish. But she eventually learned the consequences of her grandparents’ need to press the red button while living in Nazi-occupied France.

But in the end, even if we wanted to, we could never push the red button because to the world we would always be Jews. Yet, we didn’t want to push a button because we were proud of our identities, proud to carry on what the world almost allowed Hitler to erase.

In the dining room, Mr. Zisman rose and shouted “Helloooo,” unintentionally mimicking his namesake, the Uncle Leo from Seinfeld, though his salutation possessed more accent and humor. (That address would act as a conversation-stopper throughout the trip as if it were the shofar on Rosh Hashanah-Shhh. Listen. Leo has something to share.)

“Let me tell you why I didn’t push the red button,” he said. I wanted to carry on the Jewish people, he told us. Then in his very excited way, Leo singled out the Colombian girl who had recently learned of her Jewish ancestry. “Here’s what she’s gonna do,” he announced to everyone. “She’s gonna marry a Jewish guy and I’m gonna give you my address and you’re gonna invite me and I’m gonna come… This is what it’s all about. By the end of this trip we’ll need half the number of rooms,” he proclaimed, playing an early matchmaker, making our rabbis blush and his wife glare, though she understood his fervor for increasing the Jewish population.

The next morning we drove a few minutes from Lublin, and from the main road we saw concentration camp Majdanek. Everyone fell silent. Barbed wire was stitched through the cement columns that circled the camp and the guard towers looked newly vacated. A mother pushed her baby in a stroller along the camp’s exterior.

Hundreds of apartment buildings painted in the cheery pastels of Miami Beach loomed in the very near background. Their terraces faced the black barracks, the gas chambers, the crematorium of Majdanek. Every morning, I thought, breakfast at Majdanek.

We went inside to watch a film and passed the gift shop where they sold Majdanek posters, coffee mugs praising Lublin, and stickers that warned “Baby in the car.”

As the film played, I searched for images of my grandparents. They had both been imprisoned there. One image displayed two corpses at the bottom of one long pit, which the Nazis would eventually fill with 18,000 Jews during Aktion Erntefest, and then exhume and cremate the bodies a few weeks later. This was the camp that had claimed my grandmother’s father and brother.

I watched the film and thought of the newly hatched bird from P.D. Eastman’s “Are You My Mother?” who leaves the nest in search of his mom, asking dogs, cars, and power shovels if they’re his mother. My book was “Are you my family?” and I questioned every picture, every fleck of dust that blew with the winds. Were those lifeless souls in the film, at the base of the pit, my kin?

But unlike a children’s book, there’d be no resolution.

We entered the camp and marched straight to the gas chamber, which Rabbi Lawrence described as “relatively small,” since it was used to kill only 80,000 people. It could hold about three hundred at once, he said. In the space between the people and the ceiling, the Germans had tossed in infants.

Inside the chamber, the walls were stained blue. I traced my finger along the rough floor where victims who had lost control of their bodies had emptied their bowels and vomited before they perished. When we exited a cold breeze had swept in. Lawrence told us how nothing went to waste–human hair was used for insulation and human skin was stretched into lampshades.

We entered the barn-sized structures–photographs lined the walls, a few possessions scattered about were meant to symbolize the thousands murdered at Majdanek. Brushes, keys, worn suitcases, cracked mirrors, shoehorns, toothbrushes, prayer shawls, shofars, and dolls. A case of dolls. And tangled human hair.

One room housed only shoes. Thousands of shoes in head-high cages. The path between them was like a parted sea and the pressure of the shoes against the metal cages seemed strong enough to snap the welding and suffocate me in footwear. Amidst the endless browned leather sat one of the reddest shoes. It reminded me of the child in the red coat from the film Schindler’s List, whose little body was tossed onto a pile of corpses just like the shoes.

Leo stood outside the barracks. He was angry at how benignly Majdanek presented the Holocaust.

“They are not showing the real picture,” he fumed. “Why not her?” he kept asking, referring to a girl from the film that we had watched a half hour before. “Why did she die? When we go back, what should we do?”

That question stuck.

We walked toward the crematorium. Someone behind me said, “Calling them prisoners, ugh. They didn’t do anything wrong.” The sound of chirping crickets in the high grass flooded the camp. Our guide pointed out bone fragments in the dirt.

Behind the crematorium were the killing fields, where the Nazis machine-gunned my family and 18,000 others into pits on November 3rd, 1943. I touched the earth above the death pits as if that would raise my great-grandfather or my great-uncle. But they were no longer below ground as decomposed bodies. They had been swept across Poland as ashes. Some of the ashes, however, were collected and mixed with earth to sit like a giant anthill beneath a UFO-like mausoleum with a message chiseled into the frieze. Translated it reads “Let our fate be a warning.”

It was another way to say “Never Again.” I thought about some of the genocides since the Holocaust-Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, the Congo. “Let our fate be a warning” and “Never Again” sounded as truthful as the Nazi slogan printed at Auschwitz’s entrance–Arbeit Macht Frei–Work sets you free.

We recited the Kaddish.

As everyone boarded the bus, I stayed with the ashes and stared out at the green fields and wooden camp. Like a director I tried to set the scene of Majdanek with the stories that I knew. That’s the gate that both of my grandparents had walked through every day, where they received their daily lashing. There was the fence that Grandma had tossed bread over to her withered brother, who was unable to reach out for it and received near-death blows as a consequence. Where had Grandma pushed the wobbly wheelbarrow? I thought. Where had the five potatoes fallen to the ground? Where had she been whipped into bloody unconsciousness? Where had Poppy stood when he was selected to go to Auschwitz? After being selected by the Nazi with a clipboard, why had he exchanged coats with his friend who was not picked for transport? How could he have risked his life–to swim through the crowd of emaciated bodies, to find the Nazi who was taking down coat numbers–to get his friend aboard the cattle car? I searched the camp for that moment in time.

When I boarded the bus, an iPod plugged into portable speakers began to play Matisyahu’s “One Day.”

“Sometimes in my tears I drown,” the singer lamented, “but I never let it get me down.”

I tried to digest those words as well as Leo’s question: “When we go back, what should we do?”

Majdanek followed us as we left Lublin for Krakow.

***

Stay tuned for Part II of this story. You can follow me on Facebook or Twitter for the update.

The post A Return to the Concentration Camps: Part I appeared first on The Faster Times.