That damned Shakespeare — he always seemed to nail us humans with all the irony due us. Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. 76 years ago today, the Russian army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi’s death camps. 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, died within Auschwitz’s razor-wired fences. Some were openly murdered — shot, gassed, hanged. Others were worked to death. Others succumbed to sickness or disease or just the weariness of hopelessness. This happened because some humans regard other humans as “cockroaches”.
Nobody’s a cockroach, ya see. We’re all humans. Capable of great things. But, alas, also capable of great evil — all while seeming filled with the potential for good. Sometimes, irony burns hotter than the sun. What a piece of work IS man? In “Hair”, Galt McDermott (working with James Rado and Jerome Ragni) even put it to music —
“What a piece of work is man? How noble in reason?”
“How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!”
“In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!”
“The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
“And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
“Why it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”
Never forget. Never again.