Night. There and Here.

He said he belonged to a traumatized generation, and he wondered if the world would ever learn.

Yes, he did belong to a traumatized generation, and the jury is still out on whether the world will ever learn. By his own admission, up until the moment Elie Wiesel and his parents were rounded up like cattle and shipped off to death camps, they had no idea. Nazism and Fascism were certainly not new, nor were the yellow stars sewn to their clothing. But they, like most of us, could never have believed, in their wildest nightmares, how inhuman humans could be. And they, like most of us, could never have believed that it could happen to them. Happen to us. Happen here. 

Even the wisest among us are slow learners. On September 11, 2001, I watched in horror, from my suburban Chicago kitchen, as a familiar landmark from my childhood crumbled. I watched lower Manhattan go up in smoke as I dictated the scene by telephone to my brother, a doctor at St. Vincent's, only blocks away from the scene. They had been herded away from windows, left to bear witness with their noses and ears. My two older children were in middle school; the principal had assured them they were safe. Something bad had happened, but not here. 

Wrong. Even for the kids who did not have relatives in New York, who had not been there only months earlier, 9/11 was here. What happened that day has shaped our world, here, on what we all liked to think was the safe side of various large ponds. Rudely awakened from our fantasy of geographic isolation, we pulled together and we rebuilt and we grew accustomed to long security lines at airports and waited to buy our water bottles at the gate and we gradually returned to our fantasy. Again, we believed. Not here.

Not here, but in offices and restaurants and cafes and, yes, airports, in Paris and Brussels and Istanbul and Bangladesh and the skies over the Mediterranean and even right around the corner from  Disney World. Oh, but that was an LGBT club, so still, not here. Right.

Last night, I fell asleep half listening to a CNN series about the '80's. The decade of AIDs. I was reminded of the early days, when a mysterious strain of contagious cancer appeared to be killing gay men. Them, not us. I vaguely recalled that fantasy of "sexual orientation isolationism," the comfort so many of us took in knowing we were safe as long as we steered clear of seedy bath houses. That is, until Rock Hudson emerged from his well-heeled closet and Ryan White and all the others who didn't do anything "wrong" (or foreign) caught the bug.

We are learning the hard way, Elie Wiesel. Not first hand, maybe, the way he had to learn, but we are definitely learning. There will always be humans who are inhuman, and there will always be atrocities, and they will happen everywhere, including here.

We belong to a traumatized generation, and we are learning, but, like Elie Wiesel, we are left mostly with questions, not answers. At least we are all paying closer attention.