OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). This letter is in response to an article about a Nazi flag on display at a downtown business, published April 27. The store owner subsequently changed the display.
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I am writing in response to the article by Greg McGrath-Goudie about a downtown window display deemed “disgusting” by a member of the community and a couple of council members.
Wars, holocausts, and genocides are not pretty. History is full of the manifestations of bad decision making, undisclosed priorities, and misinformed conclusions that become indoctrinated through almost fictional accounts. We claim to have the ability to learn from the past, and yet we shudder and feel personally violated by the reminders?
What kind of people weaponize sentiment around window displays? Are we that delicate that we can’t stand to look at ourselves? And to those who recoiled at my suggestion some months ago that our Second World War experience in Nazi Germany was an inappropriate comparison to the events of the last two-and-a-half years, perhaps you should reconsider the circumstances.
Get a grip, take a pill, do whatever makes you feel proud and secure, and Canadian, but let’s not play games. This is not about you. This is about civilization as we know it. And regardless of what you may feel as an individual, it’s time to pull back the veil and accept that while you’re criticizing a poignant reminder, there are people being slaughtered at a never-before-witnessed rate on the other side of this planet.
Sure, have your say, but you can’t hold your community responsible for whitewashing your sense of reality. If you don’t “like” it, move along.
Marg Gurr
Orillia
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