I sat in the theater Wednesday weeping and hoping no one would notice.
The Victory Theater is a part of the National World War II Museum just off St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and I had taken my grandson who was out of school the week after New Year’s. The “movie,” I suppose we can call it that, was called “Beyond All Boundaries,” and showed how this war was conducted, how it affected everyone, how it changed everything.
I forget how many millions of lives were ended as a result of that war. The number is astronomical but gets into the stratosphere when we add the millions exterminated in Hitler’s concentration camps.
What hit me–and this was never an actual part of the story on the huge curved screens–was that much of the cause for the war was a failure in the politics of past years.
In saying that, I do not discount the sheer-genius and near-insanity of Adolf Hitler. No amount of diplomacy could have prevented him from doing what he did. He seemed to have understood only the language of brute force.
That said, it’s still true however that the greater war was a failure of the politics of the previous generation. And that’s what needs to be gotten across to our younger generation today.
Young people are bored with politics. Heads of states meet and deliberate and issue dull news releases. Embassies close down, secretaries of state exchange documents, summits are held, the television covers it all and newspapers blare it in their headlines. The football game is more interesting, so we turn to another channel.
Politics is (are?) mind-deadening to the vast majority of our people. Especially the young. And therein lies the problem.