Blame

I’m sitting in  hotel room by the Isar River in Munich. It’s been swelteringly hot here, a city where air conditioning has never really been needed… until now. European farmland is drying up, and folks are coping as best they can. It’s not the first heat wave this year, temperatures soaring above 100F, and no one here thinks this is a passing phenomenon. Climate change is very real. A bit under the weather, I spent most of my time recovering with excellent medical care from a local doctor. Gave me lots of time to read, surf the local channels and just sit and people watch.

I remember my history books, how post-World War II Germans blamed the harsh reparations demanded by the victorious allies under the WWI Versailles Treaty for provoking Germany into a second war to rebuild their economy and their dignity. Most Germans in 1945 felt that the “purported” extermination of Jews and other “undesirables” were either fabrications or perhaps isolated incidents of a few rogue Nazis. The Nuremburg trials focused on the bosses and missed the massive collaboration, the blind eyes to the obvious, of so many ordinary Germans, enlisted soldiers not associated with the SS or other comparable reprehensibles. 

Germans mostly were an unrepentant lot… until one German Jewish lawyer, who had fled to save his life, was brought back to Germany to prosecute rank and file soldiers, local citizens, where the routine “we were just following orders” failed to convince anybody. Slowly, Germans began to learn the truth. Ordinary Germans had enabled mass exterminations mixed with torture, depravity, cruel experimentation and slave labor. Many escaped convictions; others did not. But the truth flooded out.

Death camps were turned into ugly museums. School children were forced to visit them as a part of their education. Aryan purity came crashing down. Germans embraced their shame. Chancellor Willy Brandt even dropped to his knees (pictured above) during a 1970s visit to Warsaw, Poland ghetto, from which so many Jews were extracted and shipped to concentration camps,  as gesture of sincere apology on behalf of the German people.

German children were shocked when they learned of the their parents’ effective complicity, and by the turbulent sixties, it seemed as if German youth were rebelling in disgust at their elders, rejecting capitalism, militarism and traditional religious and cultural values. There were riots and local terrorists trying to bring down the system. It took time to restore balance, but German attitudes changed. The notion of blaming others for their own failure (Germany stupidly started WWI because of the vanity of the Kaiser, wildly supported by the people) stuck out as the incredible sign of weakness that it always is. Jews were contributors to German greatness, not remotely the pariahs Hitler convinced his people that they were.

In the last few days, I watched as happy couples, many racially mixed, stroll down the river banks, stopping in at local coffee shops and eateries. Bicycles are everywhere, but not because people cannot afford cars… because it’s easy, good exercise and parking is a snap. There are no harsh signs, no serious political rantings, voices are soft and muted. Germany is productive. The migrants here are finally settling in, bringing new foods, new music and new culture to a welcoming population. 

I was expecting to see the rejection, the rise of the alt right and the racism against refugees I had been hearing about in the US press. Instead, I found a very friendly city, and a country with the political party with the largest constituency being the Greens. Germans I met spoke of sadness at the rise of a very divisive Donald Trump, now mirrored in the UK with Boris Johnson, reminiscent of their own bout with denial, mythology and blame. The diversity of the city astounded me. I was jealous.

What this experience has taught (reminded) me, a lesson I already knew but failed to recognize its significance, is that the politics of blame, seeking to pin failures on others, is both a sign of extreme weakness and a precursor to potential catastrophe. If you have failed but will not take responsibility to fix what has gone wrong, if you believe that hurting, expelling or blaming others will make your life better, you and all who follow that path will lose. When that blame rises to a national cry, the loss to that society will rise to a scale unimaginable. When facts are replaced by mythology and wishful thinking, when responsibility dissolves into the acidity of blame, you get paralysis, extreme polarization often leading to civil war or worse, and nothing gets fixed.

Here are the facts: climate change is real and accelerating faster than predicted with devastating consequences, pollution kills, the United States has legitimized corruption by fostering gerrymandering, voter restrictions and by giving the rich a disproportionate political voice, we have the worst income inequality in our history and among the developed world, racism has found a new legitimacy, our failed healthcare system is reflected in rising infant mortality rates and declining longevity statistics, social mobility has been relegated to the history books, our educational system is sliding downwards fast, coal is not coming back, blue collar jobs will continue to be automated (with more than a few white collar jobs along the way), money for research is vaporizing, we spend more on military costs but have not had a significant military victory since WWII, China has not remotely been responsible for any American decline, undocumented immigrants have not cost jobs or exploded the crime rates (MS-13 was born in Los Angeles!), there are too many guns and too many shootings… am I making my point? Lowering taxes, cutting food stamps and denying medical care have never made a country great.

If we want change, we must deal with reality. See facts. Accept truth. And as long as we think blaming and persecuting others will solve our difficulties, as long as we don’t take up the pick and shovels ourselves to build what we say we want, as long as we can complain on social media and desperately cling to some notion that we can turn back time, we must lose. Do we need to wait for the diehards to die – they tend to sit with older Americans? What if the crisis explodes before they pass? Remember this: almost half of all the fatalities faced by American soldiers in all of America’s wars combined came from our Civil War. And we have way more guns out there today, 15 million military-grade assault weapons alone (out of well over 300 million guns in civilian hands). If we cannot find a compromise in our national heart, we are done.

              I’m Peter Dekom, proud to be an American, but sadly, Munich gets it, most of Germany gets it… and not much of America does.