Watson Coleman: “historians Will and Ariel Durant have told us, ``The present is the past rolled up for action and the past is the…”

“historians Will and Ariel Durant have told us, ``The present is the past rolled up for action and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.'' In our search for understanding and guidance for our actions, we are pausing today to commemorate one of the darkest moments of modern history, the Nazi Holocaust, the effort by the Nazi regime to exterminate the Jewish people. Six million Jews were sent to their death before the end of the death camps. Sixty years ago today, the Auschwitz death camp was liberated, bringing an end to the slaughter of well over 1 million people at that location alone. As unfathomable as that reality is, we need to seek to understand it in order to prevent it. I am not sure if we can ever truly understand it. In some ways it is kind of bizarre, but we need to understand that while genocide in Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere may end up as a kind of mass insanity in some almost bizarre way, it begins in a terribly misplaced idealism.”