Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTph7mer3I

"I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me"
--Anthem, Leonard Cohen

It is November of 1938 in Germany, and broken glass litter the ground. Jewish-owned shops lie in ruin and hundreds of people have been murdered, both jewish and anyone mistaken for Jewish. Several thousands are sent off to concentration camps. Somewhere, a synagogue is burning.

It is February of 2017 in America and over 500 headstones have been toppled since the beginning of the year. Since the beginning of the year, 53 Jewish community centers across the country have been targeted by bomb-threats.

Every year during Holocaust memorial the phrase "never again" comes up. I like the sentiment, but it assumes that the forces of anti-antisemitism ever stopped. The names have changed, and some of the faces, but the game is very much the same: scapegoating and fearmongering by totalitarian leaders, then silence as people carry out hate crimes fueled by the fear they deliberately planted.

*sigh* This is all kind of a downer. If there is one bright spot in all of this ,it's the value of collective memory. Todays totalitarians doesn't have anywhere near as much unanimous support as the Nazi regime had, I think mainly because we have been down this road before and we know what a tyrant with a military-industrial complex behind him can do. Right now we're learning some valuable lessons about how cyber-security attack and surveillance is added to the toolbox that'll certainly come in handy the next time this bullshit rolls around that our children and grandchildren will have to deal with. Assuming of course we haven't reduced the planet to rocks and cockroaches by then.

"There is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"