The Holocaust Museum

Part of a series in how I left liberalism behind.

We went to the Holocaust Museum here in Los Angeles a while back.  Have you seen it?  You are given a picture card of a Jew from that era, but you would not know if they lived or died until you got through the exhibit.  The exhibit consisted of dioramas of pre-war Jewish neighborhoods with period music playing, as they told the story of these lost places.  As you would advance through the exhibit, things got grimmer, and then you ended up in a camp.  And then in a gas chamber, where they locked you in and played the sound of gas being pumped in.  But by the time I got out of the "gas chamber”, I did not feel sorrow, nor sympathy, not even fear, but a black rage that almost cannot be described. 

Just then a wizened little old man with a tattooed number on his forearm came out to speak to us.  He asked several of us about our experience and then asked the following:

“Do you think this could happen again?”

Yes, said almost everyone.

“Do you think it could happen in America?”

Yes, again from almost everyone.  I was shaking my head “no” and I noticed another guy was too.

The old Jew pointed at me and asked me “why do you think this could not happen here?”

and the rage within me spoke:

Because I will rise up with my rifle and take the life of anyone who tries such a thing here…

I was expecting a stern lecture on non-violence, “love” and such, and instead, appearing to lose 40 years, standing on his tiptoes, he shouted:

If this does not happen here, THAT IS THE REASON WHY!”  While pointing at me…

It was a transformative moment for me.  I am certainly not the reason a holocaust does not happen here, but the collective spirit of the Minutemen and the right to bear arms certainly is. 

I think I lost the last of my sympathy for the left that day.