Disowning past mistakes...

Today I read a story with one of my students about the brontosaurus. Brontosaurus, which means "thunder lizard", spent its days eating its vegetarian diet, awaiting extinction. Unfortunately for the brontosaurus, his body was too big, his head too small. So in order to fit enough food through his tiny mouth to sustain his weight, he had to be constantly eating. Because of this, coupled with his enormous weight, he had little to no chance of outrunning his smaller, swifter predators, who held him as a prize dinner because of his sheer size. It seems the brontosaurus was doomed from the get-go, simply due to a minor malfunction in form.

I'm beginning to wonder if humans don't suffer a similar plight. Let me tell you about this "research study" I saw once on one of those Dateliney type shows. A cooler was left out on the summer streets of New York City full of icy cold sodas. One of the staffers had been assigned to walk by it, pull a soda out, open it up, and walk away. The intention was to see if others would follow suit. Well, lo and behold, as soon as they saw one person do it, others came by and took a soda too. It must be ok, they assumed, though they had no clue whom the cooler belonged to. But passersby continued to take the sodas until the cooler was bare.

Tonight I had the absolute privilege of hearing a remarkable tale of four brothers who led a group of runaway Jews to safety during World War II. The movie was called Defiance; and, it was quite the eye-opener. In this story, just as in The Reader (and similar to the case of Christine Collins as depicted in Changeling), those who were involved in the mass murder of the Jews claimed that they were under the authority of the Germans, that they had to kill in order to keep their jobs. They said this under the gunpoint of one of the brothers. This, they pleaded, was their claim to life. Please don't kill me, it was in my job description. Well, you can imagine how well that went over.

Later in the movie, once the brothers had established their camp of refugees, a German soldier is captured spying on their hidden quarters. As their leader decides what to do, the members of the camp begin to encircle him, yelling and cursing at him, as he begs for his life. One man spits on him. When the soldier tells them he has a wife and children as an attempt to gain their sympathies, men and women both begin to beat him with their fists and guns, screaming and crying about their loved ones whose deaths he contributed to. Their leader walks away as they beat him to death.

It was this scene that reminded me of the cooler experiment. No one in their right mind would say that killing people is okay. But when you see one person do it and then another, and then your boss tells you you have to do it to keep your job, it suddenly seems plausible. When you see one person spit on a man, another yell, and you hit him just to test the boundaries, and everyone else files in line, it suddenly becomes alright. One of the filmmakers on the movie summed it up when he said, "do we have to lose our humanity to fight for it?"

So, again, I wonder if we are permanently flawed, unable to exist on this planet without killing each other, ourselves. I wonder- where did all the anger come from? I wonder- when will it end? Is it possible for us to let go of the sins of past generations, and start over? And, if not, I fear we are as doomed as the brontosaurus. Big bodies, tiny heads.


This is a random picture I caught of a flashlight shining through the holes of my dog's crate, of all things, and onto the wall. I took it because I liked how the light formed little spiral flower designs. This is kind of how I see people- the many broken parts of one beam of light. Maybe if we all worked together, we could better resemble that Beam.