I was looking for a relevant thread to share this but came up short.... so figured I'd make a semi-relevant thread about deeper thoughts and musings. I've always been fascinated by history and how it impacts each moment that comes afterwards, not just as a community but ourselves. What seemed like small moments in the distant past have significant ramifications later in time, shaping our culture and lives for centuries. Reading about Anne Frank I came across some statistics that gave me pause. I know that my mother's family was massacred in the holocaust, with pretty much the entire family killed in Auschwitz with the exception of her father, my grandfather. He was a skilled metal worker and was kept in a variety of camps, notably Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. 75% of the Dutch Jewish population died. 97% of transported Dutch Jews died (according to some sketchy sources, but I'll run with if for now.) Only 3% of interned Dutch Jews returned home. I am directly related to one of that 3%. We're not Jewish as a family (my mother's mother was not Jewish nor was my father's side) but have a Menorah on the fireplace as a memorial. It's strange seeing a number that suggests how close one comes to not existing. But then again, had the parent's not met in a bar one night, it's just as unlikely. A missed phone call or late bus. In fact, so many small moments contribute to us being or not being. The statistics to actually being born are astronomical. (My Father's side also had significant tragedy with 2 of my non-Jewish Grandmother's 3 brothers executed along with others for trying to evade a German order to move to factories in Germany near the end of the war. They even made a doco about the massacre, but I digress...)
We are corrupt. Not in morals or ideals or even faith. Instead, we are literally corrupt. We attempt to sustain a system that is no longer sustainable. We do not receive benefits from our efforts equal to the cost of sustaining a system that only functions to preserve itself. We know it and defend it, and continue. Alas.
I feel like that, considering we are wasting so many resources and destroying our environment on trivial things, some of which actively harm us. So many 'normal' things are just not worth it in the long term, from small disposable yogurt cups to the over-the-top paranoia of germs. It's good to be safe, but people are destroying their health in a silly attempt to protect it while helping destroy the environment at the same time. All these detergents and chemicals are bad for us, bad for the environment and bad in general. I wonder where they think all those chemicals that they don't actually need go after they wash it away? We're so focused on money and luxury that we're becoming further and further removed from reality.
Under the Nuremberg laws, you would have been considered a mischling of the second degree. There's a theory which I think is called the forces of history. I can't find a reference to it, but it postulates that you can remove an individual from history, but the events will largely still unfold as they did. So even if you got rid of Hitler, someone else would have fulfilled his place in history - anti-semitism was rife in the 1920s and 30s. Henry Ford (the automobile industrialist) had publicised the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and there were anti-semitic movements everywhere in Europe. This is the opposite of the "great man" theory, which holds that history is written by particular individuals. To further drill down into your thoughts - it's not just events that made your existence possible - think about the events that made you, you. I would say that there are any number of small events in your life that could have made you an entirely different person, in a sort of Sliding Doors way.
