The Forgotten

I wrote today's poem while wandering through a holocaust museum in France. The photos of both the dead and the survivors in that place have never fully left my mind. I have seen the news footage, watched the war documentaries, thumbed through books on the subject. There is a haunting emptiness, a hopelessness, in the faces of those who have suffered most. And we who sit in the safety of our comfortable little academic world and try not to think about them, we attempt to blot their memory from our own minds so we won't have to experience their suffering. Nor was the holocaust the only terrible suffering of this past century. Much more recently there has been ethnic cleansing and racially motivated rape in the Balkans, the genocide in central African nations, religious persecutions in Indonesia, political killing by virtually every new totalitarian government, gas used on the Kurds in northern Iraq and mass graves discovered other places in that same country. The list goes on and on, but we don't like to talk about it. Such images don't make good prime time footage so we are often mercifully spared from them. Perhaps, however, it really isn't merciful at all. We need to see it all, to have those terrible images burned into our memories forever. Will it keep us awake at night? I hope so. We forget far too easily. Atrocities are not the unspeakable actions of the past-they are happening in the world right now. And every person who is executed because of his or her race or political views, every child who starves to death while his food supply is held hostage by a warlord, every civilian (or soldier for that matter) who murdered by a terrorist act, is a martyr for the cause of freedom and human rights. Now, in this modern age, the world has gotten entirely too small for these atrocities to persist. Tennyson's Arthurian concept of "might for right" is as valid in the real world of human ethics as it was in the fictional pages of the round table. Too easily are the downtrodden cast aside and forgotten as acceptable losses in the political machinations of the big, wide world. They must not be forgotten and we, who have the wherewithal, owe them justice ... lest they will have died in vain. We must dredge up those haunting images of the unimaginable and drag them out into the light. Only then will we be able maintain the corporate will, as free people, to continue the cause of freedom. No, the world has gotten far too small to look away any longer. They must not be forgotten.

The Forgotten
I am haunted by their faces still
The depth of sorrow in their eyes
By the plight of those downtrodden
I faintly hear their anguished cries
Cries that well up from their
Shallow desecrated graves
Where humans were discarded
Degraded, even beyond slaves
Swallowed by an evil darkness
So severe and so complete
Trampled by the heartless boots
Of an army's marching feet
But we close our eyes, we turn away
Concede how dreadful, what a thing
Then we lock them in museums
So our hearts won't feel their sting
We quell their mournful wailing
With film and monuments and books
Devoted to their memory
But we cannot bear their looks
We dare not let them in our hearts
Where we might feel their pain
Yet we must, lest our resolve grows faint
And evil rears its head again
No, where there is still a tyrant
While there is still a slave
When the innocent are put to death
While they could yet be saved
We must raise our hands and voices
And if need be, charge to the fray
To somehow quell the world's injustice
There simply is no other way
By Frank Carpenter ©