{"id":984,"date":"2014-07-15T18:41:09","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T01:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talkinggrid.com\/dev\/?p=984"},"modified":"2014-08-18T20:32:32","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T03:32:32","slug":"tolerance-curiously-absent-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/tolerance-curiously-absent-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolerance Curiously Absent at its Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"img_4502_med\"<\/a>\u201cAre you in the military?\u201d she sniped, with a condemning jerk in the direction of the plastic airline pins I\u2019d affixed to my beloved mustard yellow thrift store safari jacket.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I stammered.\u00a0 \u201cI am an artist.\u00a0 I put these pins on my jacket, at a birthday party last night, for my dear friend….\u201d<\/p>\n

I began to say, defending myself, explaining myself… before she turned away, marched out of the auditorium where she had just finished speaking on the evil that she survived as a Jewish victim of the Nazi during the second world war.<\/p>\n

The rest of the small audience was gone.\u00a0 They had listened, taking in the toxic tales of hardcore woe and mind boggling cruelty, before hopping back on Highway 405 or Highway 10 and heading… wherever.\u00a0 The dispersed listeners, people from various ethnic groups, none particularly likely to feel any better about her words and content than I did, all took the quick exit prescribed by the speaker\u2019s abrupt departure.<\/p>\n

I was speechless, a flood of tears crashed from my eyes onto my face.\u00a0\u00a0 My eyeballs released my body\u2019s liquid reserves. I wailed.\u00a0 \u201cNO!\u201d I would not get up.\u00a0 I was, \u201cNot going to leave.\u201d\u00a0 My mind went into full Rosa Parks mode.\u00a0 I was crushed. Damaged.\u00a0 Empathy: overload. The Second World War, its infamous horror has always set me on edge and destroyed my ability to move on without taking time to process the horror.\u00a0 As a child, a curious pre-teen, I took in many books and diaries, the documentaries, and collected histories… portrayed in library books, videos, etc… I invested myself in reading about the outrages against the Jewish people, whereas I avoided learning about the horrors endured by the kidnapped and sold slaves of West and Central Africa.<\/p>\n

Why?\u00a0 Why did I decide to avoid learning about the holocaust suffered by a portion of my ancestors? The reason is that I feel… invested in both, “teams,” I am the HAPPY CHILD of colonialism. \u00a0I am as much a part of the historically victimized group as I am of their oppressors.\u00a0 I know my family history and I know I am as black as I am blond and that my physical appearance may not indicate this truth to the uniformed but that it is what it is.\u00a0 I accept it.<\/p>\n

Yet, at the Museum of Tolerance<\/a>, my eyes remained glued to the empty chair where The Survivor had sat, talking for an hour about the unspeakable.\u00a0 I was lamed, incapable of getting up and getting on with the business of life, which is my expertise.\u00a0 I\u2019m a person focused on loving LIFE, now; never postponing the pleasure in simple pleasure of being present. Yet, today, I\u00a0 couldn\u2019t just get up and walk away from the horror that the, \u201cnice little Jewish woman,\u201d had laid out for her audience\u2019s anti-lunch.<\/p>\n

“No! not I!\u201d\u00a0 I cried.\u00a0 My face felt like a rubber mask of Edward Munch\u2019s \u201cThe Scream.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I was in bits.\u00a0 My soul was mush under the crushing sole of The Survivor\u2019s horrendous story.\u00a0 I would not, could not, move. Feeling drained, abused, and defiant;\u00a0 I was stuck to the folding chair provided, starring at the the vacated, looming, vociferously empty chair.\u00a0 The vacated chair was speaking volumes, in a strange code of objects, energized by symbolic power.\u00a0 I could hear every unspoken word.\u00a0 The chair, a perforated metal object, kept talking to me.\u00a0 Tears tracks and smeared make-up, I was a woman in public distress.<\/p>\n

The entire time she was speaking, behind her head the names of activist heroes, glowed, on a luminescent wall: above her head it said, \u201cMartin Luther<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyone that knows even a little about the protestant reformer knows that he was a virulent anti-semite.\u00a0 I believe the wall was referring to \u201cMartin Luther King, Jr.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Yet, the high irony that this Jewish woman was sitting beneath the name of \u201cMartin Luther,\u201d at the Museum of Tolerance, and he was famously intolerant of the Jewish people living among German Christians, the empty chair was now under the name, \u201cMartin Luther.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I stared at the name and thought that the she was to be gone, soon… an old woman, lucid for now, yet slated for the unavoidable death that waits us all.\u00a0 Yet, fortunate that she had narrowly missed death in a gas chamber as a young girl.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a real blond, back then,\u201d she said, still shocked that this fact alone, coupled with her (callously) \"img_4494-2_med\"<\/a>self-reported high status of her professional parents, among the Star-of-David wearing members of her despised ethnic group, did not immunize her from institutional abuse.\u00a0 She was one of the five, among hundreds, of local Jewish girls chosen to attend high-school in her community.\u00a0 An only child, she had received the lion\u2019s share of her parent\u2019s caring.\u00a0 Summers were spent as summers ought to be spent by pretty teenage girls: swimming and carefree, oblivious to the war, barely noticing the streams of near starving Jews, that came asking for a little food, so they could continue… searching for an escape route, living.<\/p>\n

Time stopped.\u00a0 The empty chair was a throbbing void.\u00a0 It screamed of all the people for whom she was speaking that hadn\u2019t been so fortunate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was then that I was, suddenly, rescued from my conviction to stay put, to remain planted in one spot until some new thoughts, good ideas sprouted again, and then I might again move with the ease that is my signature.\u00a0\u00a0 (I guess I was not meant to spend eternity starring at an empty chair, tears inking down my face.)\u00a0 A man, appeared, popping out of near-by conference room, full of ernest well-groomed people.\u00a0 He was\u00a0 well-formed mildly muscular with very smooth skin.\u00a0 He wore a neck tie and a shirt with a comforting blue grid pattern.\u00a0 He was conservatively attired man with long Jesus hair and dark round luminous eyes filled with pity and understanding.\u00a0 He had the professionally honed look of obvious caring.\u00a0 Without pomp, he saved me.\u00a0 He plopped down into the foreboding, mind numbing, cosmically portentous, empty chair the holocaust survivor had abandoned.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, I was not alone, again.\u00a0 My friend, a Muse, was witness to my outburst.\u00a0 More than a little surprised by my utter breakdown, the snot flowing from my nose, the crust forming on my tear streaked face, she got up and went to the bathroom, leaving me in the company of the sudden companion, (I\u2019m sure) feeling very surprised that I was hyper sensitive response to this story we have all heard before, surely.\u00a0 \u201cYou have read or watched documentaries about this before, No?\u201d\u00a0 She asked me, her voice characteristically gentle, her face slightly distorted by concern.<\/p>\n

His thick beard was decorated with a few stripes of gray, reddish brown skin, he looked like kindness personified to me.\u00a0 The mustache came with a little bottle of water, which I later realized was bottled by Nestle, a company that has attempted to privatize ALL the WATER on the planet, and some tissues. Hah!\u00a0 Hah!\u00a0 Hah!\u00a0 The irony!<\/p>\n

He said that he \u201cunderstood,\u201d how I felt.\u00a0 He said, that \u201cit happens, sometimes,\u201d that people can\u2019t just \u201cget up and go,\u201d after one of their speakers has delivered their payload.<\/p>\n

It was horrible.\u00a0 The stories she told, most of you have heard stories like hers before and worse stories.\u00a0 Yet she proclaimed herself, \u201clucky,\u201d to be alive.\u00a0\u00a0 She had grandchildren, and a great grandchild.\u00a0 She had enjoyed a long marriage with a man she loved.\u00a0 She looked perfectly put together.\u00a0 She was trim and petite.\u00a0 She had intelligent, low-key, tasteful hair, even her bag had a little metal tag\/label that said \u201cRelic,\u201d on it.\u00a0 She was perfect.\u00a0 An educated woman, successful, competent, in flat nurse\u2019s shoes.\u00a0 She was lucid speaker, convincing in her telling of a story I can barely write about.\u00a0 She has lived in Los Angeles for decades.\u00a0 She shared these personal facts and more without prompting.<\/p>\n

The details of her outfit fascinated me.\u00a0 I took notes.\u00a0 I made a sketch.\u00a0 She wore a dark purple sweater, with a very smooth and clean black top underneath, dark slacks.\u00a0 She spoke about the \u201cshiny boots,\u201d of one famous Nazi doctors at the concentration camp, she spoke about the starvation diet, the constantly burning oven, the crematorium, the gas chambers,\u00a0 the angle of death descending… She spoke about the unspeakable with smooth efficiency.\u00a0 Her speech was well rehearsed.\u00a0 She was a practiced public speaker.\u00a0 She even ended her presentation with a poem on postponing morning, until now, an old woman with time on her hands… She knew that she had me, mouth open, vulnerable, on the hook.\u00a0 She reeled me in and then struck me on the head with the mallet of her personal truth. That she managed this feat, without qualms, and without hesitation is clear to me. She did it all without thinking, an experienced deliverer of deadly blows.<\/p>\n

For reasons I do not know, she took an instant dislike to me.\u00a0 It happens, sometimes.\u00a0 Some people find me repulsive, too this or too that… I\u2019m sure this happens, to everyone.\u00a0 It usually doesn\u2019t bother me, because as a matter of policy I only go where I am welcome and made to feel comfortable.\u00a0 I have no desire to be the uninvited guest.<\/p>\n

She, I could tell… was not a person capable of any patience for my constantly playful being.\u00a0 She would never understand my point of view, my Caribbean perspective on life, would always be foreign to her.\u00a0 It is likely that she defines herself as NOT, whatever she decided I was.\u00a0 She had zero tolerance for whoever it was she thought I was… a person \u201cin the military.\u201d\u00a0 Hah!<\/p>\n

We, humans, traditionally have farmed animals to eat them.\u00a0 (Vegans are exempt.\u00a0 Yet, I\u2019ve noticed a tendency in animal rights activists to forget that many animals, like us, eat meat.\u00a0 There is also a tendency to forget that cows, pigs, and chickens would not exist in the volumes that they do, without farmers. Moreover, eating synthetic meats and industrially processed soy-cheese from a lab cannot be healthy.)\u00a0 In animal farming, families of animals are raised and then separated.\u00a0 Trucks used in transporting them to slaughter.<\/p>\n

\"img_4500_med\"<\/a>The trucking and transportation of Jewish people from their villages, to camps located mostly in Poland\u2026\u00a0 this outrage was only one of many insults, the mounting injustice, which equated people with animals, in order to strip them of human value and social value.\u00a0\u00a0 The gradual erosion of privileges,\u00a0 the subtle and consistent message that the Jewish people were not as human as \u201cpure-blood,\u201d Germans, the \u201cmost civilized,\u201d nation in the world.\u00a0 Many felt that the Germans, had a grand plan yet the idea … the Germans… the world\u2019s biggest consumers of pig products… were actually gassing and cremating millions of humans, as a part of their all-out-war strategy… well, that no one could believe it.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until our speaker was in a camp, stripped of her clothes and personal belongings, head shaved, and wearing a number… then she believed it.<\/p>\n

Cultivating the so called, \u201cbliss that is ignorance,\u201d I\u2019ve avoided, most of my life, the cold embrace of history\u2019s worst moments.\u00a0 For example, I purposely dance around, so called, \u201cAfrican American History,\u201d because the stories of kidnapping, killings, beatings, whippings, and lynchings make me sick.\u00a0\u00a0 The fact that countless beings were kidnapped from the African continent and taken like stock animals to serve as unpaid workers in \u201cNew World,\u201d plantations is a historical given.\u00a0 Yet, there are few respectful monuments to this truth.\u00a0 The African diaspora isn\u2019t organized around promoting and improving understanding for its contributions and abyssmal exploitation during and after slavery\u2019s institutional sway.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, that man, the one with the Jesus hair, came and said a kind few words to me, gave me water (which I did not drink because I am boycotting the Nestle corporation\u2019s water and other, cheaply produced and fundamentally debased chemical laden simulacra of wholesome, products) and reminded me of the Museum\u2019s security might take umbrage with the idea of my remaining fixed in this auditorium chair beyond the Museum\u2019s rigid hours of operation.\u00a0 He warned me.\u00a0 I asked him to sit and allow me to make a sketch of him.\u00a0 I made it clear, that IF, I really decided to stay… well, I wasn\u2019t moving until it happened naturally.<\/p>\n

After making a boxy sketch of the patient man, I giggled.\u00a0 The laughter got me up and out of the chair in a blink.\u00a0 I was back on my feet.\u00a0 I refused, however, now that it was time to exit, to go down the ramp… (why do all museums have swirling ramps, at their hearts, these days?\u00a0 Is it architectural homage to The Guggenheim Museum in New York City, or yet another message that we, crowds of humans, are to be easily herded?) I did not want to be like a sheep or pig sliding down the belt to the butcher\u2019s block.<\/p>\n

Historically, we have all taken turns being victims and victors, captors and captives.\u00a0 We come from the loins of killers and captains, queens and chambermaids.\u00a0 We all like to think that our suffering as special, unique, \u201cOur People,\u201d more abused or less abusive or more fearsome, than others…\u00a0 Yet, we ALL come from one source and we are all equally capable of cruelty and kindness.\u00a0 The nobility of Europe, have been the target of bloody uprising and public de-capitation, let\u2019s not forget.\u00a0 We can all suffer and relive endless horror as long as we see it fit to take a dip in the fetid pool of communal blame.<\/p>\n

Undeniably, there are humans that want to recreate their own feelings of worthlessness in others.\u00a0 They feel fundamentally less-than, thus IF they can reach out and touch you, leaving a stain behind, that stain is their version of immortality.\u00a0 It is their way toward living forever.\u00a0 By creating living records of the destruction, the emotional bruises and physical scars, numbers branded on the flesh of living beings, these people may cause more harm than good, more suffering than celebration.\u00a0 Is it better to forget, leaving behind the past, and investing in the present?\u00a0 Embracing healing and mental health?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know… Yet, I guess, we all have a purpose in this world.\u00a0 I learned a lot, from this woman\u2019s public revelations.\u00a0 I was reminded that social alertness is required.\u00a0 Activism is a must, writing truth, and staying sane, lucid, and vigilant: these are my responsibilities.<\/p>\n

In short, we must all take responsibility for our lives and pay attention to the writing on the wall.\u00a0 We must remain alert to injustice and cruelty.\u00a0 We must avoid buying propaganda wholesale and sliding down the many ramps to the abyss.\u00a0 Or risk… brutal awakening.<\/p>\n

Yours truly,<\/p>\n

Frau Kolb<\/p>\n

Ongoing mission:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Process the joy.\u00a0 Follow up on the initial dive into “the ocean of air,\u201d the sea of light which Turrell<\/a> slices into edible portions of delight, left me full of ideas, ready to digest the delicious experience of the eternal which is always NEW.\u00a0 Stay connected to the joy of discovery in the visual arts by introducing children and others interested to the joys of museum going.<\/p>\n

Thank you, once again, to all that make the Talkinggrid, possible.\u00a0 Without the indefatigable social support of our donating friends and loyal readers, this website could not become a reliable source of alternative ART and MUSE NEWS!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAre you in the military?\u201d she sniped, with a condemning jerk in the direction of the plastic airline pins I\u2019d affixed to my beloved mustard yellow thrift store safari jacket. \u201cNo,\u201d I stammered.\u00a0 \u201cI am an artist.\u00a0 I put these pins on my jacket, at a birthday party last night, for my dear friend….\u201d I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,28,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultural-commentary","category-museum-visits","category-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/int-rotator4-LARGE.jpg?fit=1500%2C604&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1648,"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/1648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}