such thoughts as what ipod shuffle brings

So I was driving home from Worcester an hour ago and my iPod shuffled a neglected album into hearing. The soundtrack to Empire of the Sun. I had, but wherefore I know not, a very curious fascination with that movie once upon a time. The soundtrack was part of that affection… one that I took beyond multiple weekly viewings of the VHS in junior high.

One could argue – I could argue – that part of that fascination was and remains Christian Bale. But, I don’t know… maybe it’s a past life thing… or maybe it’s just my undying need to comprehend the weirdness of human history… that movie spurred a curiosity over Japanese internment camps during the second world war.

When I was 18 (oddly enough just before Speilberg upped the ante with Schindler’s List) I took a free form research project for an English comp class as my long awaited opportunity to educate myself about the fact versus fiction of that movie. It was a bit of a challenge to find the research, actually. The world wide web had yet to make its premiere. And I was limited to what I could find in libraries.

But I won’t bore you with the prehistoric methodology of college term papers. I did discover some grizzly details… and the original book upon which the movie was based. And for whatever reason, as I was stuck at a traffic light on Route 9 and the song for the closing credits played on the radio, I was reminded of those camps.

And I was sitting there thinking about a vivid scene in JG Ballard’s book. About an old man worn to thinness waiting for a moldy potato. Of the all around starvation and death and stripped down existence of men and women who were the white elite only years before in China. People who left their native England and America to pursue… adventure, knowledge, wealth… educated, wealthy, moral people… or at least in their own world view. Only to descend to that bare minimal state of survival at the end of their lives on earth.

Obviously, the Japanese weren’t the only ones perpetrating such horrors upon members of the human race in the 1940’s. I think it goes without saying that conditions were far more grotesque in Germany… but… what was it about the world at that point in time that different nations decided it was okay to not see people as people? That you could take a doctor or professor and put him in a prison camp, starve him, and strip him of dignity, of hope… of the desire to wake up each morning and face any other challenge but one of bitter survival? How did the world tune that out and decide it didn’t matter that people were treating other people that way?

My train of thought shifted to Europe with that question. Five years ago I read a biography of the Mitford Sisters, an eclectic group of woman from that generation in England. In spite of their familial bonds, they had polar opposite political views. Two were friends – yes, friends – of Hitler. They were fascinating women, championing a cause they felt was the betterment of the world at large… but… somehow that world did not include the Jews.

So… I sit there in my car and think, well, we’ve evolved. We learned from those horrors. They won’t happen again. Because, we have television and Facebook and the Internet… so we can see it happening. It isn’t just speculation and rumor that is easy to deny. We know what they are doing… and we won’t let it happen.

But we do. Sudan. The Republic of Congo. Rwanda. Haiti. New Orleans. Okay… these are varying degrees of horror… but all horror to which, even with plain and obvious evidence, we tune ourselves out and decide it doesn’t matter. And even this week… our Senate decided that so long as one part of the population is okay with their tax bracket, then maybe we can pay attention to the suffering of other people.

I don’t want to belittle the horrors of what happened to prisoners during World War II. But.. when it seems so important for us to remember Pearl Harbor Day or D-Day or Hiroshima… why can’t we trouble ourselves to remember what we were fighting for? That we were fighting against the inhumanity. That as victors, we took responsibility to help the poor and hungry get back on their feet? Why have we decided now that just as long as we’re okay, we can’t be troubled too much about how everyone else is not?