(no subject)
Crossposted from everywhere else I am:
A lot of people are writing a lot of erudite and historically educated posts, starting with an assumption that the people reading know the history of the Weimar Republic, etc.
I'm not going to do that.
I want to talk about stories.
All stories have a lesson for us, and many of the lessons are in the background, the nearly invisible scaffolding around the plot, the commonalities in the stories we tell. The lesson for today is that no matter where the story is set, no matter how upside-down and backwards the world, the people living in it treat it as normal.
The children show up in Narnia, and everyone has settled into a life, basically, in their frozen dictator-ruled land.
Everyone Alice meets treats her as the weird one for not understanding how their world works, for thinking up should stay up and down should stay down and children should not turn into sneezing pigs and run away.
In our endless dystopian YA novels, the children are endlessly given for tribute, and the world just keeps turning. You don't ask why, unless you're the protagonist, you just keep going through your day and adjusting to whatever happens.
We adjust to everything, we humans. Sure, we remember that maybe things didn't use to be this way, but for today we have jobs, and something to do, and if things were really that upside-down, surely, it would be obvious. The sky would turn green, or there would be a giant neon sign perhaps, or at least everyone would be yelling. It's fine. We'll wait and see, and deal with today's day-to-day, and the same for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Here's a story for you.
My family story.
Growing up, we didn't really talk to my father's parents for many reasons. I never really knew them, so I can only imagine how they would have told their story.
What I know for sure is that they were in Germany during the war. I know that my father was born in Germany, in 1947. I know that they moved to Canada several years later.
I know, also, that I was told that we think they were Nazis. That they denied, until their death, that the Holocaust occurred. I grew up with the shame ringing in my head that at the very minimum, they were collaborators, that at the very least they decided to stay safe, they decided to embrace the "normal" that was 1933 and beyond. I know that they went to Canada, because whatever they did during that regime, it was enough that it wasn't comfortable to stay in Germany when all was said and done.
I know that they were relatively normal people, who had their own tiny human dramas, marriages and divorces and hopes and dreams and that whatever happened in the end, they never started out saying "hey, you wanna be evil? let's be evil."
Almost no one does. Everyone is the protagonist in their own story, the one where they're deciding how best to get through today. But that slow slide of normal is how you get there. "Let's see what he does now" is how you get there.
I will not collaborate. I will not let this be normal.
The sky is green and I am yelling.
A lot of people are writing a lot of erudite and historically educated posts, starting with an assumption that the people reading know the history of the Weimar Republic, etc.
I'm not going to do that.
I want to talk about stories.
All stories have a lesson for us, and many of the lessons are in the background, the nearly invisible scaffolding around the plot, the commonalities in the stories we tell. The lesson for today is that no matter where the story is set, no matter how upside-down and backwards the world, the people living in it treat it as normal.
The children show up in Narnia, and everyone has settled into a life, basically, in their frozen dictator-ruled land.
Everyone Alice meets treats her as the weird one for not understanding how their world works, for thinking up should stay up and down should stay down and children should not turn into sneezing pigs and run away.
In our endless dystopian YA novels, the children are endlessly given for tribute, and the world just keeps turning. You don't ask why, unless you're the protagonist, you just keep going through your day and adjusting to whatever happens.
We adjust to everything, we humans. Sure, we remember that maybe things didn't use to be this way, but for today we have jobs, and something to do, and if things were really that upside-down, surely, it would be obvious. The sky would turn green, or there would be a giant neon sign perhaps, or at least everyone would be yelling. It's fine. We'll wait and see, and deal with today's day-to-day, and the same for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Here's a story for you.
My family story.
Growing up, we didn't really talk to my father's parents for many reasons. I never really knew them, so I can only imagine how they would have told their story.
What I know for sure is that they were in Germany during the war. I know that my father was born in Germany, in 1947. I know that they moved to Canada several years later.
I know, also, that I was told that we think they were Nazis. That they denied, until their death, that the Holocaust occurred. I grew up with the shame ringing in my head that at the very minimum, they were collaborators, that at the very least they decided to stay safe, they decided to embrace the "normal" that was 1933 and beyond. I know that they went to Canada, because whatever they did during that regime, it was enough that it wasn't comfortable to stay in Germany when all was said and done.
I know that they were relatively normal people, who had their own tiny human dramas, marriages and divorces and hopes and dreams and that whatever happened in the end, they never started out saying "hey, you wanna be evil? let's be evil."
Almost no one does. Everyone is the protagonist in their own story, the one where they're deciding how best to get through today. But that slow slide of normal is how you get there. "Let's see what he does now" is how you get there.
I will not collaborate. I will not let this be normal.
The sky is green and I am yelling.