I remember reading a while back a fictionalized account of some Austrian town during the Nazi occupation. It was based on real events.
The main character was a young boy who had watched his parents get murdered in the street. There was a secret group of Jewish leaders in the town who did their best to survive, to make sure, in this case, the boy survived in the face of the horror of that genocidal occupation.
The story expressed that horror as best words could.
Shortly thereafter I was reading an article in a paper about an issue in a wealthy suburb of Boston. It turns out there were people who attended town meetings wearing too much fragranace, and that offended others.
The anger, the vitriol, the expressions of horror at this were every bit as strong as the expressions of horror in that Austrian village. The outrage, the call to arms, the fight, the struggle to get a town meeting where fragrances were banned…
Will Shortz, the NY Times puzzle geek, recently published a puzzle with a clue about a baseball being thrown at the head, and the answer was beaner, a variation of bean ball. Turns out he didn’t know beaner was a derogatory word for Hispanics.
Social media exploded with vitriol, the anger, the downright hatred aimed at this man for including that answer. How it symbolized everything that was wrong in this racist society, how intolerable it was that people like him did the things that they did.
It was no different from the horror and anger I remember reading about after the torture and murder of the young Emmett Till.
