We keep saying “Never again the burning times”. But they keep happening.
(For those who know me — no, this isn’t about me. I’m a bit player in this tale.The real story isn’t that some people have gotten burnt lately; it’s in the fire itself.)
My name is Jeff Mach. I was born, raised, educated as a Jew; by Jewish law, I still am one. I have been a Pagan for 20 years. Both cultures speak of a burning — one, the Holocaust, the other, the Salem Witch Trials. In both cultures, I was taught the same message: never again. And by this we meant: Never again will we permit ourselves to be burned, literally or figuratively, by mobs out to destroy us; we will remember, we will understand history, and we will stop it from happening again.
But we do. Time and time again.
Why?
Because we want to.
We want to believe in an easy-to-understand good and evil. We want to believe that we are good. We want to believe that those who oppose us are so evil that their every word, their every gesture, their every action is incorruptible proof.
So we spin forward ever-faster, the speed of our communications leading directly to the speed at which we can call each other monsters.
And once you’ve given something that name, you’re allowed to do anything you want; no rule of law, no rule of religion, no rule of any kind protects monsters, right?
And if someone questions you, there can be only one reason: the only people who defend monsters are, of course, monsters. So you don’t have to deal with them.
And so we set each other on fire again. Not because we’ve forgotten the burning times, but because we’ve convinced ourselves of this very, very ugly lie: The Burning Times killed good people. But our opponents are bad people; all our friends say so.
As the smallest, pettiest symptom of this disease, I realize that I need to say, explicitly, that I am speaking with bitter sarcasm. I do not think we should be trying to destroy others. I despise the Burning Times. I despise genocide, as we all do. And I’m not saying “What’s happening now is like the Salem witch trials”. I am saying “What’s happening now is that entire cultures are ignoring the lessons we swore to remember, by pretending that they don’t apply.”
Fires burn hottest when we trap them inside angry hearts and closed minds. We begin to extinguish them only when we open our hearts and heads to each other.
Otherwise, the fires rage out of control; and ten or twenty or thirty years later, someone says, “Those were burning times, but they can’t happen again.”
They can. And if we don’t stop them, they will.