Noster Culpa, Noster Maxima Culpa

“ZACHOR!”– “Always remember”, is the mantra of my people – the response to one of the most egregious racial assaults in the history of civilization.
As a half-Jew I claim membership in another body – comprised of Jew and Christian and Moslem, of those of many faiths and those who claim no faith at all. I am an American and as an American I claim my place in and a part of a history that began with the first immigrant people millennia ago. As an American I am both oppressor and victim. Zachor.
As an American I am the beneficiary of a tradition of living for millennia in harmony with ones' environment. I am a beneficiary of a tradition of resilience, of adaptation to an endlessly changing social and political climate. I am the beneficiary of a noble political experiment. I am a beneficiary of the richness of a myriad cultures and traditions. And I am a beneficiary of an ever-evolving social consciousness that recognizes inequality and injustice and mores inexorably to correct it. I am grateful to be an American.

   But if I am to fully embrace my heritage as an American I must acknowledge the dark histories that permeate the American soul: genocide against indigenous peoples, the slaughter of brother by brother over ownership of human beings; participation in countless wars abroad and to the south, both active and by proxy; the domestic wars of racism and anti-Semitism; institutionalized assault on dissent and governmental assault on our human and civil rights.
    George Santyana once famously said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
    American has a history of war which, collectively, dwarfs the Holocaust. Our wars have been an assault on humanity whose effects are felt throughout the world. If we can claim two “good wars” they would be the Revolutionary War and the Second World War. And yet Canada never underwent a bloody revolution; and an enormous toll was exacted from the German and Japanese people, from Dresden to Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War, as they say, is hell and those other than the perpetrators and decision-makers pay the price.
    War is an unimaginable horror. I am proud to be an American pacifist. My lifelong task has been the prevention of war and though I have failed, repeatedly and miserably, I refuse to give up. In the modern pop-vernacular, I am a codependent in a dysfunctional family with a generational history of abuse and I will not give up until America emerges from over 200 years of denial and acknowledges, “Noster culpa, noster maxima culpa.”
    Therefore I propose the establishment of a National Memorial Center, much like the various Holocaust memorials, where we may examine in excruciating detail our chambers of horror.
    The centerpiece of this exhibition must be a place of meditation and of healing and so I further propose a central park, which a representational sculpture of hope, of healing, of forgiveness, a memorial to the millions who have died, not in vain, but with a cumulative legacy that cries out, “No more, no more!” This is a place, too, where we may acknowledge our manifold blessings and imagine a world free of war.

Two projects must emerge: First of all, at least token, representational reparation to those we have, as a nation, wronged. We cannot fully repay our blood debt, but we can and must demonstrate our sincerity. And that may be done, most importantly, with the second: We must establish a National Center for Nonviolence, Peace and Justice, to be directed by a Cabinet-level Department of Peace as proposed by Ohio’s Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich. The Center will be a clearing house for grievances, foreign and domestic . Its goal, through education, accompanying (a la the Global Nonviolent Peace Force) and conflict resolution, will be, as Rep. Kucinich so eloquently states, to make nonviolence a fundamental operating principal in our society, not only at home but abroad. Then God and humankind may forgive us.