In Response to "Snowflakes" and "Freight Trains" on a Boro Facebook Page

 I posted this on my town page today …. It has been received well.

Before you read this post, please know that I love this town and the people in it. Also, know that I have a doctorate in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and it is from this human rights perspective that I am drawn to speak out.

Sometimes, especially in election cycles and bad times, people use language without understanding or intending its implication. I have to hope that was the case today. However, I am deeply saddened, scared, and angered to have read a comment on this very page involving offering to pack “snowflakes” onto “freight trains.”

I moved to Raritan after there was a swastika painted on my house in Hunterdon County. We are better than that.

I love snow, and I love when our neighborhood is all outside after a snowstorm or after any of the weather disasters we have had in the past decade or so. We look out for one another because we are community. Yes, my neighbors have a sign on their yard for one party and I have a sign for another, but I can assure you that we love each other very much. And when it comes to shoveling the snow, there are times when they help this single lady. They don’t call me a snowflake- not for my political association nor for my relative physical weakness!

Packing people into freight trains and sending them to slave labor or the ovens was the Nazi result of what began as a campaign of language. Nations were divided into “us and them.” (Sound familiar?) People kept to their own groups so they began to distrust one another. (Now this happens on social media and the divided ways we get our news.) Then the dehumanization began. Nazi victims were compared to rats, poisonous mushrooms, and insects that needed to be “exterminated.” The freight trains written about here were not people-cars but rather cattle cars. Dehumanization began with us vs them, augmented with language and then ended in mass murder.

I am not saying that we are headed to mass murder. But I am saying that the same hatred we saw in the early 1930s was apparent on this page today. We are better than that.

How do we prevent the snowball effect (pun intended) from making the chasm between groups here even stronger?

We need to listen to each other, and we need to speak civilly.

We need to see our shared humanity. We need to see ourselves as Community.

We need to think before we speak, and err toward kindness.

We are Raritan. Let’s be better than this!