An anniversary arrives tomorrow. But it's a grim one--December 7th. Pearl Harbor was bombed and the U.S. entered WWII. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it "a date that will live in infamy."
How does a world get over the grief of the atrocities that happened in WWII? There are SO MANY victims and so much UNPROCESSED grief that gets handed down through the generations like genetic predispositions to diseases. We can heal by remembering the events and learning from the stories. For instance, The Shoah Foundation does an excellent job capturing moving accounts from Holocaust survivors and their families. We can honor them by listening and remembering and grieving the pain.
There is a caveat though.
Anger can fill us up along with a desire to take revenge when we hear of such unjust attacks on humankind. However, in order to truly achieve peace, our primal instinct to fight back needs to be checked by our higher level of reasoning. If not, we run the risk of perpetual escalation and nonstop violence. That's why we listen to the stories. We learn the lessons from the past and try not to repeat them. Remember the definition of insanity is doing the same behavior and expecting different results.
Remember. Grieve. And don't repeat.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.