There's Only Grey Area

One thing that really stood out to me on this trip is that there is no such this as "black" or "white". There's no such thing as "good" and "evil". We are human, we are flawed, and there is a base evilness and a higher good in every one. What we do with the situations we are put in determines which path we take in our lives. WE determine who we are. Not our parents, not our society.

When talking about the Nazis, its easy to debase them and call them monsters, evil, or less than human. We build them up to be something other than human. After all, how could one human (or even hundreds of thousands of humans) decide to play God and determine who lives and who dies? How can they determine who is worthy of life and who is not?

But whats even worse than calling Nazi's monsters and murders is calling them HUMAN. It reminds us that this kind of doing resides in us all. The hate, the prejudice, the racism - the humanity. But I believe this is so important. In order to make sure the past is not repeated, we must recognize that there is this ability for an influential individual to call to hateful action millions of other people. That once we start pitting "us" against "them" we start a dangerous cycle. Once we start determining who is more important than others. Once we start shifting blame to an entire culture or religious faction. THAT is when we become no better than those we point our fingers at.

After WWII, the communists took over East Germany and East Berlin. Extreme socialism shook the country and left that part of the country underfed, underrepresented, and oppressed. Therefore, nowadays we have a sigma around the word socialism. But we cannot just give a blanket statement "socialism is bad".

Why?

Social Security? Socialist. Using taxpayer money to pay for elementary - high school? Socialist. Medicare? Socialist.

As Americans, we value some very important socialist constructs in our society, as demonstrated above. I believe some people fail to recognize this. I do believe that you earn what you work for. Those who work hard in an honorable profession, are passionate about what they do, and are working for something they believe in, should be rewarded.

Obviously, I am not the most politically versed individual in the world. But I do believe there are many people in the world who do not understand how our world's history can repeat itself. In order to keep our world at relative peace, we must be vigilant. We cannot jump to conclusions. There is no Right or Wrong. There is no Black or White. Nothing is perfectly Good and nothing is perfectly Bad. It would be ignorant to state otherwise.