For the Dead and the Living We Must Bear Witness

We learn about genocide.  We see genocide on television, on the internet, in the newspapers.  But can we feel what a genocide is?    Is it possible to feel the starvation that the Jewish people felt in the concentration camp of Auschwitz?  Before going on this trip, I felt as if I knew all there is to know about the Holocaust.  At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in our nation's capital, Washington D.C., all of the exhibits there sent chills down my spine.  There is literally, a seemingly infinite amount of information that I have never heard about.  Hearing the voices of actual Holocaust survivors makes the tragedy all to real.  A number of 7 million Jewish deaths is just a number but when one can put a face to each and everyone of those people, the feeling is too surreal.  When one enters the front doors, one approaches the place where there are several pamphlets which are identification cards of a person who actually went through the Holocaust.

Identification Cards

 It is a face and one becomes attached with that person.  My person was Ivo Herzer.  I felt like I knew who this boy was, like I was his friend and as I went through each floor, I become worried that my friend wouldn't make it out alive.  But as I finished the exhibit, on the last page of the identification card, it says whether or not the person lives, my person lived.  It made me happy, although I did not know him personally, the feeling of genocide became real.  This museum was truly a life changing experience.  Shouldn't the world learn from this genocide?  "Never again...." But it happens today in Darfur. This trip really opened up my eyes.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.  You should definitely take a trip to this place one day in your life.

Visit the museum's online site here.

Future of Humanity

Well, after several weeks of working on our projects for Humanity, I feel overwhelmed with great information and Hope from my other classmates.  My group, Andrew, Alec, and I decided to do our project on the Future of Humanity.  Before doing this project, my thought was that the information of a project should have 90% of my focus and the presentation should be 10%.  That was sort of like a general rule of thumb I pretty much gave myself when doing any project.  But in doing this project, I have learned that the information, while still very important, should be 50% of my focus.  One needs to get his or her message out in the presentation in a nice, easy to understand way and that's how I determined what an effective presentation was.  I wanted to make a video that was simple and easy to understand, yet very powerful.  I tried my best to incorporate everything that we have learned into a a 5 minute video with a message that there his hope for the future of humanity.  I wanted to make sure that everyone got that message and that message was a big punch in the face, almost, in the video.  I wanted the audience to have genuine hope for humanity because my group felt the hope while researching for this project.  When we found a website giving a timeline of the future of humanity, it gave us a VISION.  And that was the biggest thing in our project.  Of course it wasn't completely accurate, no one knows for sure what the future holds for humanity, but we wanted to give hope for that future.  And we thought that if one cannot envision it, it cannot happen.  So with our video we hope people got that vision for a future with hope.  The future of humanity is bright and we think that the human species will one day become an empathic civilization: meaning we all care for one another and feel like we are part of the same family.  It is not a global government but the human species will feel like a connected family.