Suffering Endures--Just Look Around

Kenneth Turan’s review of “Schindler’s List” (“Restraint From the Master of Razzmatazz,” Dec. 15), set against the background of the Holocaust (more accurately called the Shoah, or “desolation”), contained an interesting phrase:

“This is a world where unimaginable humiliation was the stuff of routine, where people were murdered as an afterthought, and everyone who saw it did no more than blink.”

It does not trivialize that unique historical tragedy, the Shoah (in which most of my family was murdered), to cry out that the reviewer’s phrase--describing an evil totalitarian regime--finds an ominous resonance in our own confused, ailing, expediency-driven society. Who still operates on such quaint notions as right and wrong ?

So let’s not be so quick to point the finger. Our homeless, especially children and the mentally ill, endure “unimaginable humiliation.” So do those groups suffering systematic hiring, work and pay discrimination. In our urban hellholes, people are daily “murdered as an afterthought,” while “those who see it,” some inured to violence, some afraid for their own safety, do “no more than blink.”

Determined to hold the Union together, Abraham Lincoln said, in one of the documents from the Huntington Library’s current exhibition, that the United States is “the last, best hope of Earth.” And so we still are. But it’s later than we think.

SARA MERIC

Santa Monica