WYG Day 13

Once Upon a Thirteen

It really sucks being Cassandra sometimes. Wait, I mean all the time. If I were in a fairytale, I would be one step beyond the crone–I would be the person gifted with foresight but cursed to never be believed. Do I think I have been personally blessed and cursed by the gods? No, but I can relate to this story a little too often these days.

I have spent a lot of time learning, reading and thinking about the Shoah. Ever since 2005, I have tried to understand the horrors of hate of the other. How Jews were scapegoated. How Germany became Nazi Germany. How Germany slid into banning books, banning Jewish people from everyday life in their trades, making them wear the Star of David so they were easily identified, and then the slide into the Final Solution. I know I’m going over this simplistically. There was nothing simplistic about it at all, but it was quite simple how it happened all the same.

The normalization of hate, the normalization of the Other as the source of all our problems…It’s something I see every day in the news now, and it’s terrifying to have spent nearly two decades studying something that seems to be starting to happen all over again.

Sorry, sometimes fairy tales are political.

So I get to be the person who sees things happening and go, “Hey, that happened before! Don’t you all remember what happened?” and I get to be the person who is laughed at for speaking out about things like this, even as they happen, even as families are ripped apart: migrants who came here in search of a new life, a better life, a safer life, are used as political pawns: even as uterus bearing people are having their rights stripped from them; even as LGBTQ+ people find their very beings under fire; even as books are being banned.

It’s all happened before and I fear it will happen again.

Being Cassandra sucks, but it won’t stop me. I just don’t want to be the one in the end to shake my head sadly and say, I knew this would happen.