Days of the Locust

A kind of good-German passivity has overtaken me and everyone I know. Even the most ardent of us can no longer bear to watch Rachel Maddow. If we do, we can’t sleep at night.  We’re not allowed to talk about the ugly mess our country has become. “One thing,” the daughter of friends of ours said, setting the ground rules for our dinner on the Fourth of July. “No talking politics.”  The next day, I was visiting my daughter in Bushwick and started spewing off to her roommate about the latest outrage. “Stop!” my daughter said impatiently. “We all know. No one needs you to tell us.” She's right.  I’ve marched in more protests this year than I did in the whole of the Viet Nam era. But it’s a listless sort of marching, mostly treading in place, no real hope any more of making any difference.  We’re all good Germans now.  What precisely was it that good Germans could have done to stop the Holocaust?

Thank you for coming today to remember my mother. I know how pleased she would be that you are here—friends, family, loving caregivers. In preparing for today, I thought a lot about my mother’s life. And I realized that she was different people at different times, and in each phase of her life she acquired a new name. So I thought I’d tell you about those names. The name she was given at birth was Millicent. Wikipedia says that means “brave strength.” Millicent showed her brave strength by always going for the win. She played hard, she used her elbows, and she broke the rules. As a child, she was known for refusing to do as she was told. A cousin told me that if Millicent’s mother told her not to step in a mud puddle, the next thing she would do was step in the puddle.  My mother herself wrote an email to my daughter about a similar act of rebellion: One night when she was 5 or 6, Millicent’s grandfather was going to babysit her. Before he arrived, Millicent’s mother gave her a