Creepy!

Today we have received several robo-calls identified as coming from "Final Solutions."  That is very, very creepy!  Now, there might be a legitimate business named "Final Solutions" and maybe the owners/managers don't know history, but that is very creepy.

Do they not know that the Final Solution was the euphemism the Nazis gave to the Holocaust, the genocide that killed six million Jews in an attempt to rid Europe of them, along with another five or six million people the Nazis deemed undesirable?  Perhaps they don't.

But the Holocaust is a stark reminder that history includes chapters we aren't proud of and shouldn't be.  It also teaches us humility.  While we criticize the past and people from the past, that should remind us that we are no innocents ourselves.  No doubt our children and grandchildren will be critical of us--what we've done and not done.  We shouldn't forget that.  Perhaps the robo-call company/people don't know that.

If they don't, that is troubling.  I remember the quotation, maybe from one of Chaim Potok's brilliant novels:  "...the profound humiliation of belonging to a species capable of such unspeakable acts."  Of course, he (if Potok or whoever) was writing of the Holocaust.  That is something we should always remember, if not of ourselves directly, at least of our "species."

BTW, on his show yesterday, Dennis Prager pronounced it correctly, "Naz-ism," not the almost ubiquitously mispronounced "Nazi-ism."  I recall the high school AP US History teacher referring to the years prior to the Civil War as The "Anti-," not Ante-Bellum Era.  Again, maybe I quibble, showing snobbery.

Of course, I was reminded of my first biology course, in high school, this AM.  Carrie and I were talking about walking occasionally during our running.  (I don't think walking while running is a big deal, certainly not a sin.  If someone thinks so, well he/she is welcome to try to keep up with me for a week.)  One of us brought up the word "metabolism."  In high school, for the longest time I called it "met-uh-BOWL-iz-um."  I guess I had the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble.  At Amherst, in one of my first history courses, we read about this guy "Goethe," you know, the famous "GO-eth."  I had little idea, in class, who the instructor and other students were talking about when they said, "GER-te" or something like that.  Maybe I shouldn't be the one to cast aspersions.

I still mispronounce words, often on purpose, but not always on purpose......  Sometimes I'm just ignorant.

I'm reading Dan Brown's Inferno, about half through with it.  I've read The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons.  Like Carrie said this AM on our run (We have wide-ranging and sometimes deep discussions.), "I wish I had read Angels and Demons first......"  I think that would have made The DaVinci Code a bit easier, maybe.  The recent Brown book is, of course, based on Dante's Divine Comedy, the first book of it--Dante's descent into Hell.  Brown tries to put the epic poem into perspective, that is, how it was received by the people of the late Middle Ages.  And it's frightening.  Supposedly, Church attendance increased threefold because of the terrors of Hell described by Dante.  It's something that is hard to teach in my class.  I try to instill in students that people didn't always live the way we live now.  This is a good example.  Imagine students today with television, movies, video games, etc. trying to visualize people scared out of their wits by a poem.  Teaching history isn't always easy.

I may have to re-read The Divine Comedy; after all it's been almost 50 years since I did.

Brown has given me a couple of ideas on how to approach this in my class, though.  And I hope these ideas will help me make a connection (a segue?) between the latter Medieval Period and the Renaissance.  I can try at least.

For whatever reasons, I was thinking earlier today (no, not running with Carrie, but on my bike ride) about two of the men who maybe had the most profound influences on my life.  I am forever grateful to them and one of my regrets is that maybe I didn't express that, at least once.  A major reason I still do some of the things I do is to pay back, if not these men, at least their memories, my memories of them.  Silly?  Maybe, but......

I'm reminded of them and of history.  I know both of these men had flaws, serious ones.  They were not evil men, not even bad men, but often neither was good.  So, how do I reconcile my appreciation with the fact that frequently they were not paragons of goodness, far from it?  I don't know if this is analogous, but I'll try.

Remember Andrew Jackson?  There's that brouhaha over his portrait on the $20 bill.  In addition to his horrid treatment of Indians, the man owned slaves, a lot of them.  But history is complicated.  Jackson and his times did a lot to influence the growth of democracy.  Can anyone argue that was a bad thing, the growth of democracy?  "But Jackson owned slaves?"  Ah, the complications!  Yes, he owned slaves.  Jackson was a resident of the American South.  Influential men of the South owned slaves.  Had he not, had he freed them, had he spoken out against slavery, he would not have become President.  He might have been a far better man, but he would never have become President.  What, then, of the growth of democracy?  What other American of the time could have expanded democracy the way Jackson and his influence did?  Yep, I am still trying to think of one, too.   No, we are not, at least I am not, comfortable with Jackson, but yet I realize......

It's the same with these two men who influenced my life so greatly.  OK, maybe I think too much.