Lessons Learned?

It's heavy to look back and think about how a tragedy like The Holocaust produced so much poignant writing, art, and film. I think for most of us, exposure to art representing The Holocaust was limited to reading Anne Frank's diary and watching Schindler's List. Consider how many millions of lives were erased, and how much music, paintings, stories, and more potential artwork were lost with them. Persecution of Jews is nothing new, nor has it stopped after World War 2. And we've learned that genocide is something that is still executed by many throughout the world. It's sad that in the grand scheme of things, so little lessons have been learned in the last 80 years. Greed and self-interest make it very easy to look the other way. At what point will we be on the side of the persecuted and culled, hoping someone else will help us? The sad thing is that Hitler alone could not have made The Holocaust happen. The entirety of Germany could have kept it from happening. The rest of the world could have kept it from happening. The rest of the world has continued to let genocide occur with little or no intervention. The goal of art is to bring to light, elevate, record, reflect, and teach. But time and time again we ignore these lessons. I wonder if we just expect too much from humanity. Are we, as a species, capable of coming together and preventing these types of things from happening again? Thousands of years of history seems to suggest we aren't. How will we look back at The Holocaust 100 years from today? What new horrors will we have created that will overshadow it? Or will we somehow, magically, just figure it all out? What new ways will we find to erase people that scare us or become our scapegoat? The Klan member on horseback becomes a guy in a pickup truck covered with flags. A simple phrase like "Black Lives Matter" gets distorted by hate groups to mean something selfish and exclusive. We'll spend billions to build a wall, while we let thousands die a day because wearing a mask is somehow equated with being weak. We have a President that says Democrats want to destroy the Constitution at the same time he literally tries to subvert the rights it gives us to put someone new in the office. The unanimous Supreme Court denials of his attempts at least give a small glimmer of hope. We've come so far as people. I hope we figure it out.