This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Atlantic Magazine showed up this week with a thought-provoking story reflecting on two huge past human tragedies:  Slavery in America and the Holocaust in Germany.

Of course, those tragedies are separate, defined by location and specifics.  But, both indicate an incredible, foreboding reality:  Hate for a class of people – Blacks in America and Jews in Germany – has existed and could still exist.

For its December cover story, Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith — who has written a book about historical sites and memorials of slavery in America — spent time in Germany, visiting sites of the Holocaust and studying the debates around them.

He recounted how many Germans are making sure the Holocaust is not forgotten.

Smith’s reflections prompted me to remember a couple of my visits to Germany where, while I did not visit Holocaust sites, I found myself wondering whether German citizens reflected on the huge misdeeds of the Hitler era, or, if they did, how they did.

Today’s Germans had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but it was so horrific that I thought they must have views about it.

In an Atlantic interview, Smith said this:

“Like many people, I read books about the Holocaust in grade school.  I read Anne Frank’s diary and Elie Wiesel’s Night; I spent time with a lot of these narratives that gave me a small insight into what happened.  But I’m a big believer in the power of putting your body in the place where history happened.  It gives you a different sense of your own proximity to that history.  I think I felt that most at the Dachau concentration camp.

“I’ve been to plantations.  I’ve been inside of execution chambers.  I’ve walked the halls of death row.  I’ve been to a lot of places where death and violence are, and have been, enacted on people.

“But I’ve never experienced the chill in my body and in my spirit that I did when I was walking through the gas chamber at Dachau.  I was startled by how deeply I felt it in my body, how deeply unsettled I felt in my spirit. And then you realize how recent it was.  This was less than 80 years ago.”

Smith said that one of the most moving memorials he encountered was what he called “the stumbling stones.”  There are more than 90,000 brass stones spread across 30 different countries in Europe, and they’re typically placed in front of the homes, residences, synagogues, and schools where Jews and other groups were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, or where they last lived before they were sent to their deaths.

He talked with a Jewish woman who lived in a home that had two stumbling stones in front of it, and she said, “Can you imagine what it would be like if you had this for slavery in your hometown, in New Orleans?”

At that moment, Smith said he looked down at the stones and, in fact, imagined what it would be like in America if the stones were a memorial to slavery.

Entire streets, he said, would be filled with stones.

“I think about what it would be like if we did something commensurate with that here.  What would it be like if we had stumbling stones or markers in every place where enslaved people were sold or held or rendered captive?  What might it do to our collective understanding of our history?  Would we have such a distorted sense of what America has been and what it is if we were regularly reminded of what it has done?

“Markers and stumbling stones are not a panacea by any means.  But the thing about Germany is that these sites of memory are ubiquitous.  There are so many reminders, everywhere you turn, of what Germany did, that it becomes an indelible part of the national psyche.”

And, I say that’s good because one way to avoid repeating a horrific catastrophe like the Holocaust is to remember it!

Smith added a useful perspective for Americans.

“In the United States,” he said, “there are 41 million Black people in this country.  And, so you can’t simply build a memorial to slavery or put a wreath down once a year on Juneteenth and say, We did this terrible thing. We won’t do it again, without accounting for the material implications of what happened for the people who are right in front of you.

“Contrition without reparation would feel empty or incomplete.  Across the country, we see the manifestations of a lack of reparations in the pervasive inequality between Black and white people.”

For me, contrition and reparation are separate issues.  The latter is very controversial.  The former – contrition – should not be, especially if it can motivate beliefs and actions today.

Further, Smith said memorials to slavery in America do not have rely on government – or, perhaps, should not.

“There are examples of communities in the U.S. that are not waiting for the government to tell them that they should build a memorial or that they should create sites of public memory.  I think one of the most compelling is a group in Connecticut that’s doing a Witness Stones Project, based on the stumbling-stones project in Germany.

“Middle- and high-school students are placing stones to mark the spaces where enslaved people lived, worked, and worshiped.”

So, this bottom-line thought for all of us – one underlined for me on my trips to Germany:  Do not forget past misdeeds in any country. 

For Germany, it was the Holocaust and may it never happen again.

For us, it was slavery and may it never happen again.