Nothing funny about this facebook posting which I have permission to share:
"""MY FATHER WARNED ME THIS DAY MAY COME!
My father, who just passed away this October, was born before WWII in Berlin, Germany in 1922. He managed to survive the Holocaust, thanks to a little known organization called KINDERTRANSPORT (KT) which facilitated his rescue in 1939.
Kindertransport (German for "children's transport") was an organized rescue effort that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools and farms. Often, they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. My Dad was taken, even though he and his parents were baptized Protestant, because his grandparents were Jewish. They and his parents, my grandparents, were later gassed in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
My dad was an olden day version of a Syrian refugee who was fortunate to be placed into a safe home in London. To avoid a fate like the one in the famous photo of the Syrian child, dead on the shores of the water, his mother and sister brought him to the Berlin train station with the hope that maybe, by sending him away, he may survive. They said goodbye, and he never saw his parents again. His sister, too old to qualify for the program, remained in Germany but, miraculously, survived in the basement of a home outside Berlin. They reunited years later in America.
When I was a child, my Dad told me horror stories about what happened during the Holocaust. He warned me many times that, one day, there might be another Hitler, someone with a large ego who would hunger for power and would use it against certain people. He feared that, or some other kind of Nazi uprising in this world, until the day he died.
I didn’t need a news organization to understand what was happening, within this last year, as Trump rolled down his escalator to utter bigoted and racist comments about Mexicans, or later, to make fun of the disabled, to demean women and to promise to ID all Muslims in this country. I know first hand what ID-ing people on the basis of religion means. My grandparents were considered Jewish, not because of their faith, which was Protestant, but because of their ancestry.
When I was 10, my mother converted to Judaism. She felt more comfortable with the Jewish “faith” and way of living than she did with her Protestant upbringing. My Dad was against my converting for the fear of another Hitler coming to power and using my religion as a way to victimise me.
Now, a month after my Dad's passing, and just within the first two weeks of announcing the new President-elect, we have over 400(?) reported hate crimes. Within the D.C. beltway alone, on two separate occasions last week, one being inside a Federal government building, and the other inside a restaurant in a very Jewish neighborhood, people were seen giving NAZI salutes. There was not one mention from the Republican party to shut it down. Nothing from the President-elect, to admonish the acts. It took an insistent interview with 60 Minutes to have him speak about it and then, all he said was “Stop.” This is beyond frightening. A world leader needs to answer about his supporters violently attacking people, spray painting swastikas on churches and schools. A simple request to say stop is insufficient.
I am a gay man, blessed with a loving husband. We were finally granted the right to be equal and are now in terror over losing that right. The House of Representatives is already proposing laws that allow discrimination against the LGBTQ community. Our Vice President-Elect, who resembles Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of Hitler’s Germany, supports gay conversion therapies and wants to completely defund Planned Parenthood.
As reported by The Independent in September, 2016, the number of white nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathisers on Twitter have multiplied more than 600 per cent in the last four years, outperforming the so-called Islamic State (Isis). That is homegrown terrorism. On CNN Monday afternoon, a chyron read "Alt-Right Founder Questions If Jews are People.” Esquire reported as if Trump denouncing neo-Nazis is a political risk.
I live in a country with contradictory messages: that we are a great nation, an open and safe haven to all; and that we are a divided country falling into bigoted violence. In the next 100 days, we have a system of checks and balances. Come January’s inauguration, we could be a country where civil liberties are fading fast, where one ideology will control every aspect of our government, where dissenting voices are ridiculed or suppressed.
With the death of my Father and his words still fresh in my ears, I am afraid of history repeating itself. Is my father’s premonition coming true? Now is not the time to sit and wait. Now is not the time to calm down. Now is the time to take action - to protest and stand up for our humanity, our lives. We must not be like the population in Germany in 1933 who thought they saw a great leader - someone who would take them out the economic failings of the Weimar Republic - a leader who promised jobs, but who also promised a purer race and a world that was isolationist. The world didn’t worry as he rose to power and did nothing to stop his expanding empire. The German people and the citizens of the world ignored it as millions first lost their rights and then, like my grandparents, were sent to horrific deaths. When it was all over, a collective world scratched their heads and whimpered, “How did this happen?” Well, we know how it happened then. We can’t let it, or anything like it, happen again.""
49er
