| THE ‘TEARS OF HATE’ ARCANE In Memory of Roddie Edmonds and Heather Heyer 1. My tears last night seeing my brothers and sisters in GI Jews were not only theirs shed 73 years ago outside liberated nazi concentration camps, —my uncles Boro, Meyer and Nathan, my cousins Sonny and Seymour among the liberators—, were tears of sorrow and of joy and, as the soldier rabbi said, “tears of hate” as well, after beholding the pits of masses of bones, eye-socketless spaces, the ovens with still smoldering skeletons. My brothers and sisters, 500,000 of Jewish origin who’d fought as GI Joes finally (if they’d had any doubts before) understood what the war was all about, what they were fighting and… 2. You’d be closing down the doors of your mind if you didn’t recognize those nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia shouting, “Jews will not replace us”, already are envisioning those ovens and mass pits here in the U.S.A., and those “tears of hate” on my part contain the urgent warning that the arrogant thug President, like any nazi, has neither doctrine nor principle, only lies, domination by division and violence and, if allowed to continue nourishing his bigotted base, what Sinclair Lewis meant when he wrote It Can’t Happen Here not only will happen but has happened, so get off the numbskulls you’ve been warming your asses on, brothers and sisters. In this war, as Roddie Edmonds, Protestant from Oklahoma, who captained GI Joes imprisoned in a nazi camp near the end of the war-- when the nazi commander demanded that all the Jews in the company line up the next morning—had the whole company line up and said, “We’re all Jews!” Because in this war, if you think anything different, and that includes the color of your skin, you can be certain Nazism’s winning. |    In the collection of Letterform Archive, San Francisco, CA Jack Hirschman reading the poem |
