today is holocaust memorial day. i think most of us struggle with the holocaust. it’s not something that can, or should, be easily understood. that something so horrific could happen so close to our lifetimes is close to incomprehensible. and not just that it happened, but that it was since been denied, and that genocides have happened since, in rwanda, darfur and bosnia, that we, as a species haven’t yet learnt is close to baffling. i’m not jewish, but that doesn’t matter. my father is, and his father before him, and he was lucky, he fled poland before the german invasion, but his sister perished in the concentration camps. it doesn’t matter though, what i am, the holocaust isn’t a jewish issue. the holocaust, and subsequent genocides are human issues and as such they should matter to each and every single one of us. 

i’m sitting here thinking what do i want my daughter to learn from this, how do i help her take something good other than a weight of sadness. i know it sounds glib to say how can we get something good out of something so terrible, so incomprehensible, but there are lessons to learn. lessons that need to be learnt to stop the same mistakes repeating. 

and the answer is it has to be tolerance. and most of us claim to be tolerant, but in practise it’s far harder not to judge. just because we’ve chosen to live a certain way doesn’t mean it’s better than the choices of others. it’s just the life that is right for us. or one that suits us at this point. but to extol one way of living, one set of thinking, whether it be religion, or anything, large or small, as right or in some way superior, is a dangerous game, and once started, where is the line drawn?

we might call it moralistic, or being part of something, but everything, once taken to the extreme, becomes exclusive, and wow, how that word is bandied about. exclusive this and exclusive that, and what the hell, is anyone actually thinking that it might not exactly be the best word choice. exclusive being to the exclusion, and therefore shutting out of other things, or as is all too often the case, the shutting out of other people, other opinions, other ways of seeing the world. and when we start doing this then we are, whether it is meant or not, elevating ourselves. and more than that, we are depriving ourselves of ways of seeing and opportunities for learning. people are amazing, the whole human race is, fundamentally flawed, and this lends us much of our beauty, humanity comes from the fact we’re all in this together, and we none of us really know how to do it. people are just people, no more, no less. there is no one way to live, and the sooner we all learn and embrace that then the sooner we can learn to live together, without the need for exclusivity or barriers based on arbitrary markers. and once that’s done then at least we’ll be trying to make a world we can explain to our children, one we don’t need to edit expertly, one we can be proud of leaving them.