Politics and Science

               I watched the movie, “One Life” today. It’s about Sir Nicholas Winton, a London financier who went to Prague and helped almost 700 children, mostly Jewish, to escape to London. I also saw a Threads post in the past day or two that said that people do not learn the lessons of history. Keeping in mind events going on in the world, and antisemitism and islamophobia, as well as the events depicted in the movie, such as the invasion of Europe and antisemitism during World War II, I had the idea that people can have different motivations for studying history, one which is personal gain, such as profit or power, but another reason to study history is to prevent harm.

            Modern American culture tries to convince people to be afraid, and that their worth as a human is determined by their net worth. A person’s value is not determined by their amount of money or economic productivity. The American Dream consists of housing, healthcare, jobs (or income, such as maybe universal basic income), and having meaningful relationships. At times, some feel these are becoming more difficult to achieve. One of the steps of genocide is dehumanization. What is dehumanization? It usually consists of convincing people that another person, or group of people, has done something bad, or has some other bad quality. And because of this bad thing that they have done, or bad quality that they possess, then fear is justified. And then once you have convinced people that this group has done something bad or has some bad quality, and fear is justified, then once people are afraid, then violence is justified. In many ways, we are retracing the steps of the 1920s an

             Fear can be a tool of control- fear of communists, socialists, labor unions, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, the UN, other sexual orientations, gender identities, other races, teachers, professors, or vaccines. Fear of people does not solve problems. People are people first, and any other qualities are secondary to being human.             How do we define being  human? Humans have great language abilities. But there are people who have lost the ability to speak due to a stroke, or who never learned to read. They are human. You might appeal to our DNA, but a piece of human DNA is not a human either. You might appeal to our fantastically complicated brains, but there is a condition called anencephaly, in which an infant is born without a telencephalon, which is the part responsible for our most human behaviors. Infants with anencephaly are human too. Any quality that might be uniquely human, some people lack that quality and are still human. People can be kind, caring, and th