grandpas, holocaust, sex
Friday, April 4, 2008
I have a conservative grandfather and I have a liberal grandfather. Neither is what you would call fanatical in his beliefs, but both definitely have an opinion and aren’t afraid to forward it along as an e-mail attachment. Oh yes, my grandfathers took the senior cruise across the digital divide, lingered in the “using e-mail” seminar and then grabbed a nap during the “please don’t forward everything” post-seminar lecture.
Interestingly, I get a lot of the same things from both of them, with slight differences. Replace “Hillary” with “McCain” or “communist” with “racist” or red font with blue font and much of what they send is basically identical. I usually refrain from responding to it, as I hate to encourage them, but a while back I got one that I couldn’t ignore.
It claimed that recently all the schools in the U.K. banned teaching about the holocaust in order to avoid offending Muslim students. There are about a million reasons that immediately flashed through my mind that there’s no way in hell that would happen, but to be be sure I checked a couple places. Turns out I was right, the U.K. didn’t ban teaching the holocaust, although that did happen in one school, apparently.
But boy, this is how prejudice takes off running and keeps on truckin’, isn’t it? My poor grandfather read that and believed it. He’s a really smart guy, too. I once saw him build an airplane out of a rake and some rubber cement. But he believed this forward enough to send it to everyone whose e-mail address he has. The message ended: “How long will it be until we forget about September 11th?” Or some crap like that. Look, no one is forgetting, okay? Who could forget? More importantly, even if the “banning the holocaust from history class” thing were true, that wouldn’t be forgetting. That would be altering curricula to placate the religious beliefs of a certain group, something we’d never do in the U.S., right? Oh, wait…
And sure, people who deny that the holocaust happened are operating on a level of blind faith that I can’t begin to imagine, but so are people who pray to an invisible man who apparently died for our sins (well, for the sins of those who pray, at least) and now lives in a magical, wonderful place where there’s no evil and no pain and free cookies.
There was a point in there somewhere, but I blacked out. I suppose things like this don’t need to have a thesis that’s all neat and tidy. That’s for college kids. Doesn’t the bloggers’ handbook say that you aren’t allowed to conclude a post with a paragraph that begins “In summation…”? This is “take away what you will” prose. What does it mean to you?
In summation, you don’t need to travel to dusty foreign countries to find religious fanaticism running rampant over sacred, government-run institutions. Take a walk around the block.
(By the way, this post had nothing to do with sex. What made you think it should?)
