As I wrote in April about my experience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I pointed out the compassion of so many diverse people who came to read the names of those who died during the Holocaust. On the wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Hall of Remembrance, there was an inspirational passage in large letters on the wall from Deuteronomy 30:19, concluding “Choose Life – that you and your offspring shall live.”
On June 10, 2009, one man did not get this message, one man did not understand this fundamental imperative for all human beings to choose life and to choose life for our fellow human beings. One man did not grasp the truths that we hold self-evident that all men are created equal and deserve the inalienable rights of liberty and equality. Such truths can be hidden from the eyes of some who are blinded by institutionalized hate, which takes many different forms. Because of such hate, on June 10, one man, James Wenneker von Brunn allegedly took the life of an innocent security guard, Stephen T. Johns, at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and killed him in Washington DC. Mr. Johns “died heroically in the line of duty.”
The person who killed the guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum did not “choose life.” He chose hate, and following hate’s ultimate conclusion, he chose death.
As I asked the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial on April 4, I ask again for those of you who reject hate to pray for and work towards the lifting of hate and death from the hearts of those burdened by its disease. We must daily work to continue to “choose life” and all that truly entails in our shared home with our fellow human beings.
In “choosing life,” we must reject institutionalized hate and all of its forms of supremacism and totalitarianism against our fellow human beings. In “choosing life,” we embrace our inalienable human rights of liberty and equality for all of our fellow human beings. In “choosing life,” we must offer an outstretched hand, not a fist, to those who we agree with and to those who we don’t agree with — equally. In “choosing life,” we must choose to remember our responsibilities to the family of humanity in love, dignity, and decency.
There have been various news reports linking James Wenneker von Brunn with white supremacism, stating that Mr. von Brunn didn’t believe the Holocaust “existed,” and linking him with neo-Nazis. As I stated in our group’s public rally challenging racial supremacism at the Lincoln Memorial two months ago, the threat of racial supremacism, the threat of Nazism – is alive and active in American and in the world. We don’t need to slur others we disagree with as “Nazis;” the fact remains that there are very real Nazis here and active in America and around the world, as I have been reporting on our blogs and news tracking web sites. Moreover, as I pointed out in our April rally at the Lincoln Memorial, the SPLC hate group map lists at least 540 white supremacist groups and 203 Nazi groups just in America – and let’s not forget, these are just the ones that they know about. Nor are these the only type of hate group. Imagine the pain and sickness from the disease of hatred that those individuals who hate must suffer and how it must warp their view of humanity and the world.
Faced with a continuing mountain of institutionalized hate, we must choose an answer that will challenge such persistent hate. And there is only one such answer. The answer remains, and always will be, the answer of love.
The answer of love is a serious solution to a serious problem, and it is not without serious responsibilities. The answer of love demands a lot of us as individuals and as organizations. It requires that we abandon neglecting our fellow human beings. It requires that we abandon viewing our fellow human beings as just labels and view them as individuals. It requires that we challenge institutionalized hatred by supremacist and totalitarian ideologies, ESPECIALLY when it is inconvenient, when we don’t have the time, and when we don’t have the resources. The answer of love rejects indifference, the answer of love rejects limitations, and the answer of love rejects situational and political ethics. The answer of love demands much of us. It will not let us “pick our battles;” moreover it demands that our approach to those who challenge human rights and human dignity be done in the spirit of love itself. The answer of love is indeed a very demanding, involving, and all-consuming answer. In fact, the answer of love in endless… and that, after all, is the point.
Despite its demands, it is the answer of love that will call us back to what is the best and brightest in our human experience and our ultimate destiny. It is the answer of love that will bring us around to recognize that there is only way to view our fellow human beings, as we would want ourselves to be viewed. It is the answer of love that demands for all humanity — universal human rights of equality and liberty — not as some special gift, but as a recognition of the inalienable rights inherent in all of humanity… the truths that we hold self-evident.
We define our life on Earth as the life we live together as fellow human beings on our shared home of Earth. The choices we make about defending our human rights and human dignity don’t just affect us individually, they affect us collectively. Both our actions and our inactions ripple across the sea of the human experience.
Choose your fellow human being’s universal human rights and reject hate.
“Choose Life – that you and your offspring shall live.”
