‘I had to tell him, “Dear brother, fellow man, Jew, before you say anything, I say to you: I acknowledge my guilt and beg you to forgive me and my people for this sin.'”
Martin Niemoller sermon in Erlangen, Germany 1946
Poetry often succinctly captures a moment of time, sometimes an era. The words of a poet can move the heart in ways other literature cannot. Great poets are remembered, and their writing spoken of and written about for long years, decades and centuries afterward. Sometimes poetry is a commentary on culture, pointing out deficiencies and moral failures. Are we at that place where moral failures are dismissed, and the courage of our convictions have withered before the heat of adversity?
Philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” It is nearly universally understood today that Santayana’s statement was meant to be a warning to all freedom loving people that we must never allow the moral failures and outrageous behaviors of treasonous, treacherous, evil people to be repeated in our time. Since we lived through atrocities of the past, it is our duty to not allow the same atrocities to overtake us again. Yet that is exactly where we find ourselves today. Let me explain.