A Denunciation

We didn’t do many movies when I was in high school, but I went to see The Hiding Place with my church youth group. I’d read the book, but was not truly prepared to see a family risk everything to hide their Jewish neighbors and then be incarcerated in the Ravensbruck concentration camp on screen. I wondered if I would have been as brave as the ten Boom family.

Three years later, like many Boomers, I watched the series Holocaust on TV in 1978, and for this muddled born Catholic/ Methodist Youth Group/ Evangelical the depth of horrors shown within its 9.5 hour s were both unfathomable and felt all too real.

We asked ourselves ‘What would I have done?’ and ‘Never happen again’ and ‘Couldn’t happen here’. We knew the people around us would never be part of such inhumanity and cruelty.

Yet this week the same people that taught me God made the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th (because He was tired?) rejoice that a concentration camp was built in this country in 8 days.

I am shattered. We are broken.

Give it a cutesy-cruel name, slap an AI-generated mascot on a reel, have the government sell swag to make it seem normal: Stop. Just stop.

This is not normal. This is evil and cruelty. That’s the point, though, isn’t it? I refuse to use the made up name: this is a concentration camp.

People are targeted, grabbed, stolen away, vilified, denied legal counsel and due process, denied food, phone calls, and incarcerated. I watched the president of the United States laugh as he described the coaching future inmates would receive on outrunning alligators.

I saw quotes and social media posts, film clips and speeches elected and appointed officials have made about 'feeding illegals' to alligators. I saw film showing that this place is already flooding and Florida isn't even in the throes of the hurricane season.

Making people ‘other’ because you want control and creating a group to collectively blame and punish has always worked well for the bullies, hasn’t it?

• Jew
• Japanese
• Black
• Female
• Irish
• Italian
• Mexican
• Queer
• Chinese
• Muslim

Using skin color, nationality, faith, gender, sexuality to isolate and demonize another human being in order to give society a scapegoat isn't healthy. It's not right. It's inhuman. Fascists perfected it. White Christian Nationalists are running with it now.

White Christian Nationalism is certainly the upcoming brand of fascism. More than upcoming- It’s here.

It’s touring the concentration camp and laughing.

It’s printing t-shirts.

It’s boasting of hungry alligators and venomous snakes.

It’s wearing gimme hats and mouthing prayers.

Literally- lifting hands, chanting, speaking in tongues at the White House asking God’s approval of these atrocities.

No.

This is not Christian.

This is not Christlike.

This is not NORMAL.

I have failed. I tried and failed to explain what was planned if Trump became president. I tried and failed to explain what was in Project 2025. I tried and failed to communicate the seriousness, the possibilities, the certainties of disaster with a President guided, controlled, and coddled by The Heritage Foundation.

I’ve broken relationships that considered me too radical and ‘unchristian’ because of what I think, say, and post. The call me reactionary. Naive. A melting snowflake.

Snowflake. Like the ones that fell upon the ground of those deathcamps where the Nazis used gas made from pesticide to murder people before they used furnaces to burn their bodies and raise a black cloud of morning over the frozen ground. No alligators; just actions they called the Final Solution.

I’m not going to stop. I won’t make things ‘comfortable’ for people that support this madness and cruelty. The cruelty has always been the point, like hungry dogs turned on each other for sport, and enraged roosters with sharp spurs fastened to them to draw blood for the crowd: cruelty has drawn humans together year after year. Gladiators. Bull fights. Spectacles.

My voice may not change the world, but I can make my actions improve things for those in my community. My voice will continue to call out the depravity that indifference and negligence has enabled. Join me.

~

My outrage surfaced with this piece, which carries a content warning.

This piece by @Mother Combs encouraged me to write. Since I frequently judge these Prompt pieces, this article will not be entered into the challenge.

Also: I worry that we, the Writers and Creators on Vocal are edging closer to creating our own 'others' as we battle bots and fraud. Just because someone hails from a country that doesn't support Stripe payment doesn't make them evil.