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We continued on the tour, and afterward I asked the tour guide how he managed to do
this every day. How he lived telling this tragic story over and over.
“This is the story of my people.”
“But doesn't it make you sad?” I asked. “It's the twenty-first century. We have the In-
ternet, McDonald's, and here we are standing in front of bones that used to cover the entire
field because someone decided to commit mass genocide. How do you go back to modern
life after living in this past every day?”
“This is modern life, too,” he reminded. “Maybe not here. Maybe no more. But some-
where, this is modern life.”
He was right. Every day these atrocities continue to happen across the world. The wrong
person comes to power. The people are poor and hungry and tired. And then they become
convinced that things might be better if only the enemy among them were destroyed. And
so good men do terrible things, thinking all along that what they are doing is right. And
years later, tourists arrive and say the words that we have all said too many times:
never
again
.
Our guide looked out to where we had just walked, passing the open ditches that once
contained people he knew, people he might have loved. “I think it is very important that
people in the world and in the second generation come to see and learn about this. So they
do not forget.”
So they do not forget.
I hoped that every country wouldn't have to go through this in order to learn the same
lesson. But yet I knew that most of them had. America lost over six hundred thousand men
and women in the Civil War, and that doesn't even count the deaths from slavery. Britain
lost over two million in the two World Wars. And that is nothing in comparison to the Rus-
sian loss of twenty-five million during World War II alone, or the Holocaust that culmin-
ated in the murder of six million Jews. The numbers are staggering. We could choke on
them, and yet new wars break out every day.
We break our hearts, and then we break our hearts again. I walked back to Kindness One
and it felt like I had been on the bike for years. Everything in my body hurt; my soul was
exhausted. I tried to remember that for every tragic story, for every killing field, there are
a million more stories of kindness. Of people loving one another despite their differences.
But I couldn't help but wonder: Could those kindnesses ever balance out the loss?
* * *
