We Never Underestimate The Value Of People
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as
God Himself.
Never.”.
“Never Shall I Forget” from Night
Elie Wiesel
Except as a cautionary tale, there is not a part of this story we want to write.
Out of respect for a family that has already suffered too much, we will not use names.
As counselors/therapists there are some things we know for certain:
In dysfunctional/drug and alcohol addicted/abusive families it is the most dysfunctional member who makes the rules.
The rules are
Don’t think,
Don’t feel,
Don’t tell.
When a 25-year-old West Manchester Township (Pennsylvania) woman began complaining of persistent auditory hallucinations and reported she was considering suicide, her mother “indicated that she didn’t want her daughter to die alone and was going to join her when she decided to end her life,” according to a Township police official.
Police reports indicated that over a number of days in late January the husband and father wrote a series of letters, which read almost like a journal, convincing himself that he could not live without his family. Among the letters they left, the family wrote specific instructions for the care of their dog, which was drugged so that it would not bite responding police officers. The York County Coroner noted all three victims died of gunshot wounds and gun residue was found on all three bodies. “[T]here are other things that we may never know,” explained the police chief.
“There were varying degrees of mental illness, I believe, that played into each person’s decision to end their life,” noted a WMTP detective.
Almost as a general rule, mental illnesses affect every member of a family – worried, often terrified, spouses; parents who learn to “sleep” while waiting for the phone to ring or the sound of the front door opening; children who grow up never knowing what to expect next. Even adults and children one and two generations removed from trauma may find their lives forever marked by damage they never consciously experienced and will never fully understand.
In dysfunctional worlds, the most dysfunctional make the rules.
Just ask the Central Bucks [County, Pennsylvania] School District Board of School Directors and the CB South High School Principal.
CBSD is the third-largest district in Pennsylvania with more than 17,000 students and over 3,000 staff members. On their website, CBSD brags “One of the reasons why Central Bucks is a leader in education is because we never underestimate the value of people…”
Well…
Almost never!
When the nine members of the board meet, a sign directly behind them – two members of the board can touch it without leaving their seats – proclaims “Community Pride Starts Here. Leading the Way.” On another wall a sign proclaims, “We expect our students to be complex thinkers, self-directed learners and effective communicators.”
For context and because sometimes context is everything:
Romanian-American Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) was fifteen years old when he, his family and all of the Jews of Maramarossziget were confined to the ghetto in his hometown.
In May 1944, his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his mother and younger sister were immediately murdered; two older sisters survived the war. Eventually Wiesel and his father were transferred to the labor/concentration camp at Buchenwald, where “I knew that if I died, he would die.” Years later he recalled the shame he felt when his father was being beaten and he was unable to help. The camp was liberated by the U.S. Third Army on April 11, 1945, but not before you Elie’s father had died. Elie was seventeen.
Wiesel eventually authored 57 books, including Night, based on his experience in the death camps.
In 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee honored him with the Nobel Peace Prize and described him as a “messenger to mankind,” citing “his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps,” as well as his “practical work in the cause of peace.” The Committee described Wiesel as "one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression, and racism continue to characterize the world."
In 1986, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1984, Wiesel was awarded the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal; he received The Medal of Liberty from President Ronal Regan in 1986 and The Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
In January, days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Central Bucks High School South librarian Matt Pecic was ordered – by the high school principal – to take down four posters that displayed Wiesel’s famous quote from his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
“I swore never to be silent
whenever and wherever human beings
endure suffering and humiliation.
We must always take sides.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,”
“If I didn’t take it down, I knew there would be consequences that could impact me. It’s a horrible feeling. And you feel like you have to do something that you don’t agree with,” said Pecic, who has worked for the school district for three decades and was told by the principal that failure to remove the posters would mean that the district’s human resources office would become involved.
Pecic’s daughter, a ninth-grade student at Holicong Middle School, originally emailed him the quote. “This is where I get choked up. She said that ‘this quote reminds me of you,’” he told WHYY, a National Public Radio affiliate serving Philadelphia and Delaware. The librarian described himself as someone who often speaks up, “if I disagree with something, especially if I think it’s not for the benefit of students, I will say something.”
Apparently, the principal feared that the poster violated a school board policy that bans teachers from engaging in “advocacy activities” and displaying inclusive symbols like Pride flags in their classrooms – the board’s recently enacted “Policy 321.”
Last summer, the CBSD hired a public relations firm “in an attempt to repair strained public relations and improve the school district’s image” – at a cost of $15,000 a month, according to The Buck’s County Herald. [For those keeping count, that’s $180,000 a year or the salaries of several teachers.] Following the Wiesel posters brouhaha, the districted issued a statement. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, it said:
“We regret that the decision was made to remove it and in a manner that promotes not only the importance of the novel, but continued awareness and education surrounding the Holocaust and its National Day of Remembrance this coming Friday. The district apologizes for any hurt or concerns this has caused, particularly for those in the Jewish community.”
[Ya just gotta applaud a school board that “apologizes” for removing quotes from one of the most highly decorated American authors and defenders of human rights “for any hurt or concerns this has caused, particularly for those in the Jewish community.” And what can we say about a school board (and its $15,000 a month PR firm) that issues the above statement that does not even make sense? Please, read it again and see if you can figure it out.]
In late January, WHYY reported that the CBSD is currently reviewing five books after rolling out a harsh new policy “which aims to keep books that a yet-to-be-determined group might deem ‘inappropriate’ for unspecified ‘sexualized content’ out of school libraries.”
WHYY noted:
“Recent updates to the policy were reviewed by a conservative Christian law firm, Independence Law Center, as first reported by the Bucks County Courier Times. The Independence Law Center is the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which is a statewide branch of the national organization Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist group designated as an extremist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
On Tuesday, January 11, sophomore Ashley Gane addressed what many consider the anti-LGBTQ policies being established by the CBSD saying, “[A] lot of people don’t care until they see the actual tragedy of the death of an LGBTQ student.” Gane’s sister, Katie, died by suicide in 2019 as a senior at Central Bucks West; the school has a rainbow bench in honor of the young lesbian senior.
“She felt like she was being judged and no student in a school should feel like they are being judged for walking into a building,” Gane said as she told the board meeting that she was speaking to give her sister a voice.
“Maybe my sister couldn’t have gotten through it. I know she tried so hard. But I know that if she was here right now, she would tell everybody that they would be able to get through it. And I know she would be at this board meeting because she wants people to be happy and she wants people to be proud.”
Over the course of the next twenty-plus months, some right-wing politicians will attempt to roil supporters with anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, anti-Muslim and anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric and with words like “pedophile” and “groomers,” “they” and “them” and “we” and “us.” Like mental/emotional rapists and sexual and physical assaulters, they’ll hide under the guises of “parental rights” and “protecting our children.”
In 2005, Elie Wiesel spoke at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust History Museum:
“I know what people say – it is so easy. Those that were there won't agree with that statement. The statement is: it was man's inhumanity to man. NO! It was man's inhumanity to Jews! Jews were not killed because they were human beings. In the eyes of the killers they were not human beings! They were Jews!”
Today, to cite the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, it seems that in the eyes of too many politicos and their acolytes it’s Jews and Blacks and all “foreigners” and the LGBTQ community and “In the eyes of the killers they are not human beings! They are them.”
And, like the most dysfunctional member of any profoundly dysfunctional family – or any dysfunctional community, those same politicos and their adherents attempt to enforce their rules:
Don’t think,
Don’t feel,
Don’t tell.