Whose opinions are we listening to?

Monday 23 June, 2014

Monday morning and a new week ahead of me. Sitting here, waiting to take “Cookie” to her dental appointment in town. Soon there is no point of return. Today they will put the rubber bands in around her back teeth, in order to create the space they need, to put on metal tubes back there. I feel sorry for her. D. is teasing her. And I scold him for it, since noone understands how much she will be hurting for the next couple of years. Not even herself. If I told her, she would not agree to this and at this point, I am not sure if it is all worth it? Is it worth the pain, when all the teeth can wander back to their original position, when she is done with the braces? But, I must keep a straight face on for her and be the moral support she needs. I must believe in that this is the right thing to do. She can’t have her lower front teeth pile up behind each other, the way they look now. And if her slight over-bite is not corrected, she will continue speak with a little bit of a slur and who knows if it is the cause of her head aches? An improper bite.

“Gubby” has begged all morning to be allowed to come along. I don’t think he wants to be left behind, with his always fighting brothers. He and I, sat this morning trying to build a shark with beads. I bought him and “Boo” two pattern books, for the summer holidays. Only, I did not realize that some of the things created with the pattern books, are done on two templates laying side by side. So, our shark is lacking it’s back-end, including the tail. After all that work! I promised “Gubby”, we would go buy two square templates, which can be put right by each other, so we can finish the shark. We will have to move bead by bead, as well, but I will help him with it so it will not feel like too much. He worked so hard and concentrated on making the shark, so it was really upsetting when we noticed, there wasn’t room for it. I just don’t know if his little legs and feet will be up to all the walking in town. The dentist is in one end of town and the craft shop in another end!

I am also contemplating looking for a tiny album, which he can hold on his lap easily or a mini binder with mini page protectors. BUP said that I must document his every day life. I document the days which are different. The ones that might raise questions in his mind. But to make books at photo companies, specializing in this, would be too expensive. I really don’t want to do too much scrapbooking on the pages either, in order to get them done quickly. So, a small binder would be ideal. For photos from our D-day adventure in Helsingborg, which has not been posted yet, since noone is helping me with getting the photos from the camera on to my iPad. For photos from the traumatic day at the hospital last week…

Right now, I am killing time, I suppose. Nervous about D. bicycling in town, all the way out to the village. He just phoned and said it took him an hour and a half to get to the un-employment office. And now he is on his way back, in pouring down rain, which was not supposed to come until 19:00 this evening. He does not want to wear a helmet because it is not cool enough and how does one force a 19-year-old to take safety precautions? I am also sitting here being upset, about all the hatred I am receiving from twitter users. I have already mentioned my comment, that I left to ADL, about their research findings. They published a report on how wide-spread anti-Semitism is today and that the people who deny the Holocaust, are getting more and more in numbers. I find this information most disturbing and felt that I just couldn’t leave it at that. I re-tweeted the tweet from them and said that it is a disgrace. That when we forget history, it will repeat itself. And when people deny that the Holocaust ever happened, the Nazis won after all. Today, I got a rude comment from someone not particularly intelligent, I suppose. No, the Nazis did not win the war. Hitler killed himself, when he saw that his mighty Third Reich, would never really materialize the way he wanted it to. He killed himself since he felt his own, had betrayed him and not lived up to expectations. He always thought very highly of himself, and felt that they did not deserve a leader like himself anymore.

Well, that is what he said anyway. I’m sure that the suicide’s true reason was the fact that the man was a coward and did not dare to stand trial in front of the entire world. Only a fool could not figure out what the sentence would be. Twitter really is a ghastly place if you think about it. You get 144 spaces to type a message. You really have to get it right, to get your point across. Most nasty comments on twitter, no doubt stems from misunderstanding a tweet. I opened my account many years ago and then abandoned it for years, because I hated the fact that I could only use 144 letters and spaces to say something. But Facebook turned out, to not be my thing at all. So I turned to my blog, but I must admit, sometimes I just want to show that I am alive, and who wants to follow a blog, where the blogger now and then write only something like “I am still alive”. It feels like I need to say a little bit more than that, for it to be worth someone’s effort, to surf in on my blog.

I can not but regret that I wrote anything at all, in response to the ADL report. Not that I am ashamed over my feelings, or what I wrote. But I really do not appreciate the hateful comments I am receiving, days and days after the response was tweeted. Why should my e-mail box have to contain these comments, which I do not want? Should I go in on twitter and remove the tweet I made? But if I do, they have won. They have silenced me. And why should I give them that satisfaction? If we are all silent, and do not speak out against anti-Semitism and revisionist history, then we give it our approval! I just read an article linked to twitter a couple of days ago, written by a journalist who had discovered some terrifying facts about comments to newspaper articles. She (I think it was a she?) has noticed that many journalists are strongly affected in their writing by comments and feedback, they have received on articles. They read the comments and adjust their writing, so that their audience will like what they write. But now it has been researched, who indeed the people are behind the comments made. This research pertained to Britain, and it showed that only 0.0037 % of the readers ever wrote comments. And all comments came from the same people. In other words, it is a certain sort of person who gets involved. A certain kind of person who feels he/she must say something and something on EVERY topic. In other words, you can have one person read through an entire newspaper and comment on every article and what that person writes will affect the writings of every single journalist employed by the newspaper, because they think it is the will of the people. Think about the damage which is being done! It becomes censorship before the articles are even written. If this small amount of the population are of the same opinion, you will soon end up with a Nazi government in charge, won’t you? Because this is exactly what happened in Germany! A small minority made their opinions heard loudly, and killed everyone who objected, so that it in the end, looked like them taking power, was the will of the people.

Why did the Nazis win after all? Well, their first and foremost goal, was not really to win the war, was it. When all was lost, they still went on with their mass murdering. Priority number one, was to exterminate all Jews from this planet. They did not quite accomplish this feat, BUT six million Jews were murdered and IF we deny that these Jews died, that they were killed by the Germans and their willing accomplices, then they did win. Because one of the pillars in the Nazi ideology was to get rid of them. The Nazis, according to Laurance Rees’ book “Auschwitz”, did not come with any new thoughts, they just rode on the existing wave, and said what people were already thinking in their minds. Society in the 1930s was anti-Semitic and not just in Germany. That is why the Nazis could state that noone would miss the Jews and would thank them for killing them. And that is exactly what is happening according to ADL’s findings! People do not miss them at all, they deny that they were killed. People feel that the numbers are over-exaggerated and that the Holocaust is just a myth. And even worse, there is not less anti-Semitism today, when we have all sorts of media to educate us of the truth, than there was during the Middle Ages. The hatred is stronger than ever. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” has never been out of print nor has “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the two most anti-Semitic books there ever have been. Both are best sellers in the Arab world.  So how then can a person on twitter write me and ask what on earth I mean, with the Nazis having won. Of course they have. The entire Muslim world is thanking them for having killed six million Jews and the Muslim world is ready, as one twitterer “screamed” at me, to finish the job the Nazis started. And not only that, they will kill everyone who disagree with them as well, since they will count us as Jews too.

Can one really stay silent, when hearing stupidity and threats? I can understand why a lot of people refrain from making comments on Twitter and to newspaper articles. Because someone out there will always send you hatred back. But is it right to stay silent? That is what people did in Nazi Germany. And today, none of us accept that there was opposition. There is not, if one keeps it to the dinner table! Why is it that it is a majority of  the haters in this world, who are the only ones who dare to comment and respond to what they read? It is a sort of terrorism, because it frightens the average person in to silence. It frightens the average person to think that he or she is the only person left in the world, who believes in right and wrong. If this is what Internet has done to the world, becoming a place for the haters of this world to congregate and get their batteries charged, then we really have to mourn this man’s invention!