Neutrality and Silence
As the world grapples with a deadly pandemic, the United States has plunged into cataclysmic grief that cries out for justice. The confrontation with systemic, institutionalized racism is not unique to the USA. Nonetheless, for those of us who live in this country and witness the agony of people whose voices have not been heard … and whose breaths are not permitted to be taken … we must stand in solidarity with the pain so many of our neighbors are experiencing.
Generally, I approach my blog postings as something light-hearted, even though the past few months I had to acknowledge that Covid-19 has transformed most of our daily existence, even as it takes away so many lives. As June approached, I considered several options for the blog but was unable to settle on a topic. Now, with the nation in crisis, I felt that even if no one wants to read my thoughts on the protests that emerged since the murder of George Floyd, I cannot be guilty of keeping silent.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke eloquently about the suffering of the African American community, as well as for all disenfranchised people. His profound words often come to my heart and mind. However, I turn to a different author, thinker, and Nobel Peace Prize winner: Elie Wiesel.
Elie Wiesel was a prolific author who wrote in almost every conceivable literary genre. He was an activist. He was an inspiration to his students and to the reading public. Most Americans know Wiesel because of his short, powerful book Night. What many readers don’t realize is that after Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp by American soldiers in 1945, he promised himself that he would wait ten years before he wrote about his Holocaust experience. His first memoir was an 800 page book in Yiddish, entitled And The World Kept Silent. In it, and in his later highly condensed editions in French (La Nuit) and English (Night), he grappled with the horrors inflicted upon European Jews by the Nazis . . . and the world kept silent.
He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. I draw from his Nobel Prize Address because his thoughts help me clarify my own. His ordeal under the Nazis led him to take a vow: “. . . I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. . . Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.”
Today, the United States is at the center of the universe, not because of peace and dignity, but rather due to disgrace and injustice. As a white person in America, I can only imagine a fraction of the pain, torture, and humiliation that my brothers and sisters of color undergo every day. I am old enough to remember the Civil Rights movement; it staggers belief that decades later, we still have so many of the same fundamental problems.
I conclude with words from Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize Address: “What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled, we shall lend them ours . . . ”
May the protests of today lead us all to a substantially better tomorrow.
