no title for this one

I watched a movie tonight called Conspiracy. It's a recreation of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 during which Hitler's "Final Solution" was agreed upon by SS and other Nazi leaders. There are many striking aspects to this film, and one which resonated with me was the lack of humanity and emotion in much of the dialogue about the Jewish people that were to be terminated. The Nazi leaders, probably out of fear for their own lives, had stuffed all emotion deep inside themselves, hiding it away, and were treating Jewish people like parts on an assembly line, or simple objects that had to be dealt with. There's no denying this is a horrible way to go about life - yet, I think to some extent we all still do it.

Please know, it is not my intention to trivialize the Holocaust here, but rather to pull some tangible lesson from an event that was so gross in concept and scale that comprehending it as a whole defies words.

There is a danger in pushing your human feelings so deep inside so that you cannot experience them. On a large and hard to imagine scale, as is horribly depicted in Conspiracy, you can forget that everyone on this earth is a human being, and that they have as much right to breath the air as you do. On a smaller and more identifiable scale, ignoring your emotions is dangerous because it makes you capable of treating other people in your life as if they have no humanity themselves. When you smother your own ability to feel, you also smother your ability to empathize. The result is that you disregard people as objects, doing and saying things to them without the ability to understand or care how it will affect them.

We've all done this, knowingly or not. And some of us continue, knowingly or not. Don't sit quietly and ignore a voice that is trying to bubble up from inside of you. Don't push away a thought, a conversation, or a person because you don't want to deal with a particular feeling. If you get too good at doing this, you'll end up hurting a lot more people than you're able to realize.