Modern Day Hitler

The day after Christmas, I went to see Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise movie about the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1943. I actually went to see it despite Tom Cruise (ew), and I really did enjoy the movie. It's not exactly an upper of a flick, but I didn't see how it could be considering the fact that I already know they didn't kill Hitler. To expect it to be happy would be like going to Titanic and hoping the boat makes it to America. Hollywood will play with the truth and all, but even Hollywood has standards. I saw the film (oooh, don't I sound like a pretentious teenager using film instead of movie? Or maybe James Lipton?) right on the heels of watching a documentary about the pre-CIA's psychological profile of Hitler. It was amazing to watch, and eerily accurate even though it was the first profile done without actually meeting the subject, in the days before profiling was actually a thing. Through out the documentary and film I kept thinking the same exact thing. How in the world did this little twerp get all of Germany to fall down and worship him? None of the usual culprits behind baseless adoration applied to him. He wasn't physically attractive unless you like pervy little mustaches. He had nothing in his heritage to recommend him as a great leader, or even a celebrity. He wasn't nauseatingly wealthy and therefore commanding of undeserved respect. He was spewing disturbing hate-filled vitriol at a group that made up a large chunk of the German population, and yet, an entire country placed their future in the hands of a lunatic. I realize that hindsight is 20/20, but this guy was waving red "I'm crazy" flags with all his appendages. How could the good people who saw through him and fought against the Nazis possibly be outnumbered? I kept coming up to the same question--What is up with that, Germany? What were you thinking? Hitler!? Nice picking.
Eventually, I decided that without being in the political climate of that location and time, I will never come to a satisfactory understanding of how Hitler seemed like a good choice. I will never understand what would cause a people to choose such a terrible leader. History will look back at Post WWI Germany and always wonder what they were thinking exactly. The why will always be a mystery.
It's not just Hitler's hold on Germany that is completely inexplicable to me. Slavery is another thing I don't understand ever being okay. Was there not a meeting before slavery caught on where someone raised their hand and said "Excuse me? We are talking about buying and selling people for manual labor?! Are we all drunk? There is no way that this is okay!" I just don't get what type of mentality devolved into that. How do you get from normal to certifiably insane as an entire society?
My thoughts evolved from that generation to our own. I wonder if someday the our great-grandchildren will be reading history books and looking at some of the things we do and ask themselves "On what planet did that seem like it was okay? Seriously, what in the world were you thinking?! You must have all been morons." I actually came up with a few things that I think history will eventually deem completely unfathomable within the next few generations. I call these our Modern Day Hitlers because we (meaning society, not me) find them perfectly acceptable now, but someday, left unchecked, they could derail the world and we'll all wonder how we got there. Good people need to rise up and overthrow them now, before we're left to nothing but a Hollywood film honoring our failed attempts.
Big Brother. Not the show specifically, but yes, the show, at the same time. I'm talking about our willingness to let cameras into every minute aspect of our lives. I'm not an anti-technology psycho here--I blog after all--but YouTube, traffic cameras, cell phone cameras, reality TV...we are not only letting our privacy be violated daily, we're handing it over on a silver platter. People are so hungry for their 15 minutes of fame, they are putting their drunken rampages on TV. They are uploading commission of crimes on the internet. There is no such thing as private mistakes or even successes. At any given time, during any family moment outside your home, someone could be filming you with a phone and putting it on YouTube. Surveillance cameras are always watching us, it wouldn't surprise me at all if within 10 years, you could track someones entire day on film, from when they leave the driveway to when they come home. I find it disturbing. While I'm all for safety and crime prevention, at what price? Facial recognition software, entire cities putting up cameras, mandatory fingerprinting, GPS tracking, where does it stop, 1984? Someday our descendants will wonder why the country founded on freedom handed it all over for a probably false sense of security. They will wonder why we were so fame hungry. They will be stymied by our seeming lack of concern over the entire process. That's assuming of course, that Big Brother hasn't shot them in the back...

The issue I think most likely to disturb and nauseate our descendants, however, is abortion. I think (and hope) that someday our children will be disgusted by our generation for allowing abortions. "Do you mean to tell me, that not only was killing the unborn legal, they actually demonstrated in the streets for the right to keep it legal kill their own children?! They thought that after the deed was done, and the child was already on its way was the time for 'choice', and not beforehand? They called the right to kill the right to 'choose'? They punished an unborn baby for their bad judgment? They didn't consider the weakest of all living to be a human being or in need of protection? What is the matter with these people?" The argument for abortion is pathetically weak and tissue-thin, it will never stand up to the scrutiny of history and clarity of hindsight. Someday, the evil abortion represents will be cast into full light and future generations will cringe and recoil from those who condoned it. Humanity will rise to the surface again, and when it does, abortion will be relegated to it's proper place in the realm of the unspeakably terrible. Today's abortion activists will tomorrow's slaveholders or SS in the eyes of history. The cold, hard selfishness and twisted, cruel heartlessness toward children that abortion requires in order to operate within a society will someday be the ultimate black mark on our generation's permanent record. Our only hope of leaving a legacy to make future generations proud in the face of this monster is our resistance. Good people always exist to fight evil, and the fight is ongoing. Someday, there just may be a movie about the unspeakable evil of abortion, and those that fought it. In this film, however, I hope with all my soul that the good guys win. So while I still don't understand what made Germany lie down for Hitler in the first, I now realize that all it takes for one of these modern monsters to take over is for me to say nothing. I refuse to be part of the problem, and I am going on record to say that losing our personal freedom, and aborting our unborn children is NOT OKAY.