Compassion Heals All

The history of humanity since the beginning of time has been permeated with distraught and mass amounts of sadness; two most known periods are the Jewish Holocaust and the African Slave Trade. 

The Holocaust was a massive genocide in World War 2 that was responsible for the persecution and murder of about 6 million Jews led by the Nazi regime. 

The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were racially superior and that the Jews were inferior and were a threat to the German community. During the Holocaust, German Nazi’s would not only harm Jews, but they also would target groups they considered inferior such as gypsies, the disabled, communists, socialists, homosexuals, etc. German Nazi's would kidnap entire Jewish communities and send them off to concentration camps where they would work them until they murdered them off in mass amounts.  By the end of the Holocaust there were more than 20,000 camps to imprison and kill their victims.

The African Slave Trade, during the 16th through the 19th centuries, was a period of great wealth, and also great sadness. The New World started quickly with a new market of cash crops such as tobacco, sugar, and cotton. The need for plantation labor increased and Europeans started the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade which was the gathering, transport, and sale of African-Americans from Africa to other lands for labor. Over a period of approximately 400 years, about 10-15 million African American people were kidnapped and sold into slavery. These people were packed and smuggled onto tight, crowded ships, and brought to the New World (the Americas) as a source of free profitable labor. Lives for those living in these conditions were awful; they would return from working in the fields, and find their families completely missing, sold off to another city. Sometimes, entire villages were captured by the slave traders and loaded onto ships to be sold to other places around the world. Living back then as a slave was difficult. Living conditions were bad, confinement was a given, slaves were denied any education and they were even bred like animals. 

Learning about both the African Slave Trade and the Holocaust changed my outlook. They are both very similar in the idea they are both morally wrong and extremely painful, but they are also very different. I wondered what the similarities could be between The Holocaust and The African Slave trade, since both dealt with different situations and circumstances. Of course both were awfully unjust, but as I thought about each situation deeper I realized what they had in common is that in order to completely abandon all morality, you have to see the opposing force (in these cases: African-Americans, and Jews) as inhuman. The German Nazi's saw Jewish people as a threat and as animals that needed to die for the well being of humanity. The Europeans, when they enslaved millions of African American people, saw them as a lower status than cattle and pigs, which they traded for. The trade was supported by this racist ideology that saw white people as being the most perfectly developed and blacks as being at the bottom of the ladder.

The fact that someone could treat someone else as if they were an animal is such an alien idea to me, and really took me a while to figure out. By directly comparing someone to animals, or even less than animals, it makes it morally okay to kill and enslave millions of them. 
After thinking, I came to a conclusion that in America we do this as well, just on a different level. We push problems from around the world away from us, and since it isn't happening directly here, it isn't even happening in our minds. Instead of directly comparing humans to animals, we indirectly compare problems that are far away not as important since it isn't happening to us everyday. I believe our reason to do so is based on the fact that compassion hurts. When someone feels connected to everything that is happening in the world, you also feel somewhat responsible. When you are compassionate, you can not turn away. 
In order to fix this, we need to learn to carry the issues, instead of being crushed by them. We must grow strong enough to love the world, with all of it's issues but still remain empty enough to help in the best ways.

In the past few years, Children's Global Alliance has taught me just that. We can't turn our heads away from global issues just because it is the easier thing to do. And, like in both the Holocaust and the African Slave Trade, you cannot loose your morality. You must have compassion in everything you do in your life and know how to carry problems, without them burdening you. And like Anne Frank once said, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”