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Wednesday, January 29, 2025

A-B-C-D

Phoebe made me a bookmark during reading time this morning. It's a picture of Luna (the neighbour's dog), obviously. You can tell because of the legs.

We're reading Codename Kingfisher by Liz Kessler, but my thoughts are only tangentially on the topic of the book (which is a holocaust story). Or perhaps they are precisely on target, but also tangential. 

Because everything looks the same, everything feels normal. Until it's not. 

In the book, first the father loses his job, then the mother, then the kids are shipped off to live secret lives with secret identities. Things were fine and fine and fine (not great, but fine) until suddenly they spiraled into a huge amount of chaos. Huge. Amounts. Of chaos. 

I was reminded of years ago when I read Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick about North Korean defectors. One message from that book that has stuck with me all the years going forward was how quickly a seemingly thriving nation can fall to shambles. I haven't read the book since 2011, so don't quote me on the details, but I recall one account in the book talking about how when the government stopped attending to the infrastructure of the country, the people started scavenging to fill their needs, removing things like telephone and electric wires because...they were defunct anyway. Which on the one hand feels like kicking a thing while it's down (how will anyone restore electricity now?), but on the other hand...just...the...way that country was picked down to the bones. 

And it happened quickly. 

But at first it didn't feel like much had changed. 

Somehow it doesn't ever feel like anything has changed even as things are clearly changing around you. How do we not see when things are changing?

Sometimes I wonder if you need to be looking back to piece things together.

It was recently Holocaust Remembrance Day and this quote has been circulating the interwebs again:

"Remember, it didn’t start with gas chambers..."

That seems to have originated in an old post from the Auschwitz Museum, dated from November 2018 (and I'm not linking to it for...reasons):


It's quoted in The Hill a few days later. And it was widely circulated in 2020. And is making the rounds again. And that's fine, because it's not wrong. I mean, some of the renditions circling have ideas added and subtracted that do change the intent of the message, but this original message is not wrong. 

The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers. 

It started with little things. With asking Jewish workers to stop coming in—take a vacation until things blow over. With wearing a star outside (what's the harm in that?), with following a curfew (again, what's the harm?), with...you know just a bunch of little things that slippery-sloped the world (slowly at first, then quite rapidly) into dark, dark (evil) spaces.

I dunno. 

We just finished reading My Nest of Silence by Matt Faulkner this evening, which I think, perhaps, romanticized Japanese internment camps a little too much. Overall it was a good book, an interesting multimodal format. And the author did mention how little the houses were, how dusty the camp was, how bland and boring the food was. And there is no happy little bow tying everything together nicely at the end. There are setbacks and disappointments...

But life seemed too rosy. While there was plenty of discussion of a mess hall and a little discussion about communal laundry facilities, there wasn't enough discussion on the shared bathrooms (perhaps—because, man, the lecture we got at Topaz when we visited there still haunts me to this day) and, I dunno, everything seemed a little too rosy. 

The dad wishes the tower guard good luck on his way out of the camp? Like, "Hey, thanks for being our prison guard for the past three years! Take care!"

Wut.

I get that the father was being polite (the mother and daughter, on the other hand, choose to look straight ahead and ignore the guy) and that the default was to smile and nod about things (that's why we have pictures of smiling people being hauled away to internment camps—despite having already suffered exculsion, dehumanisation, and escalating violence...everyone says "cheese" when there's a camera in their face). 

Still, we saw very few clashes between guards and prisoners in this book. In fact, I'm not sure my children fully realized Manzanar was a prison. So we'll be supplementing this read with some other books. 

*****

At dinner Andrew said to Alexander, "After dinner you need to have an S-H-O-W-E-R."

"Can I please have an A-B-C-D, too?" Phoebe asked. "Please, please, please, Daddy, please!"

Her naïveté was astounding(ly adorable). She had no idea what she was asking for, but she wanted to be "in" on the spelling of things and the having of things (whatever those things were—she didn't care). 

She did get to have a shower, lucky girl. And she loves baths and showers and basically any opportunity to get wet. So asking for what she didn't understand worked out for her in this scenario.

But I wonder if sometimes society is like an illiterate toddler, screeching for A-B-C-D without understanding that A-B-C-D eventually leads to X-Y-Z, you know? And it's possible that X-Y-Z isn't at all palatable, even if A-B-C sounded fine.

****

Cute little octopus-dog, though, right?

Also, tangentially unrelated, here's song called 'ABBG' from Kuch Naa Kaho that I made Rachel listen to when I told her about what Phoebe said at dinner (the big kids had to eat on the run to get to mutual on time because Wednesday evenings are...busy):


The ABBG TPOG IPKI UPOG is some chatter about who has tea, but the lyrics are funny because phonetically it's all made up of letters in the English alphabet. 

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