View from Abroad

Pardon the gap in posts, internet dried up at the end of our trip, so this is not quite timely. Home safely now, I'll try to do a couple wrap ups this week.

One decision had been made as another one was weighed; Maggie and I had gone back and forth on visiting Aushwitz as our stop in Krakow loomed. I first pushed the idea but Maggie feared marring her return home to Poland. But just as I began to change my mind after seeing the memorial in Berlin and the letters written by people just hours before they entered the gas chambers, Maggie changed her mind, and decided she did want to go. While we weighed the decision whether or not to journey to Aushwitz, Andy Reid had already decided to sign the Dog Killer, fresh from a federal penitentiary, to join his team.

A trip to a concentration camp seemed obligatory upon arriving in Europe. Historically, they are shrines to the most horrific attempted genocides of our world, and serve as a testament to the ugliness of bigotry, racism and power. On the other hand, the stories of survivors, the horrifying pictures of emaciated bodies stacked in pits to be burned and the rhythmic thud of the AK-47s that I had encountered at Washington’s Holocaust museum proved to be too much for my nerves, and the thought of viewing the site at the center of the Nazi’s terror sent shivers through my body.

But the Aushwitz-Birkenau museum was not like the memorials, which were structured in remembrance of the individuals who had died and their stories. Rather, the concentration camp was more fact based: here was where the gas chambers existed before the fleeing Nazis destroyed them, there is the wall where prisoners were shot, and that is the platform where it was decided who would go straight to their deaths and who would suffer for approximately three months under the tyranny of the guards until collapsing in exhaustion and malnourishment. The majority of the prisoners exited the train and went straight to the gas chambers, to their deaths; the men who were strong enough worked, many pulling the dead bodies out of the chamber and loading them into the ovens in the crematorium, but only after shaving the victims’ hair, pulling out gold teeth fillings and removing any jewelry.

The horrors in southern Poland are too great to name, and the skill and order that the Nazis exhibited in carrying out the atrocity is terrifying. Ironically, as I studied a genocide abroad, the U.S. media was building up its wrath against a perceived genocide at home, the one Mr. Michael Vick, the newest Philadelphia Eagle, served two years in Leavenworth Penitentiary for carrying out.

Allow me to digress to fill in those who are unfamiliar with his case. Vick was convicted on counts of federal dog fighting, for funding an illegal dog fighting ring and for transporting dogs across state lines for the purpose of fighting them. He was often found guilty of torturing and murdering dogs that did not do well, as alleged by prosecutors and his co-conspirators, who rolled over on him in order to avoid lengthy jail sentences themselves.

Vick’s actions suggest a deviant and violent personality, one that appears to have gone on unchecked for quite some time and who took his frustrations out on defenseless animals. I have always maintained, however, that Vick truly got shafted, first by his celebrity and secondly by a media that plundered the man’s soul with its sensationalist reporting. And it has continued, as he is railed upon from local Philadelphia writers and their national peers, eviscerating Reid and the front office for signing a player of such poor moral conduct and such malicious character, all for the attempted betterment of the team, an attempt which is certain to fail, because it did the last time the team took a risk with a character we all know by two simple letters.

But what they miss are the white players who go hunting, the lesser known players who commit vehicular manslaughter and only serve 30 days in jail and the millions of human lives who are lost around the globe due to governments similar in their bigotry to the Nazis. Vick murdered, tortured and fought dogs, certainly a terrible crime, but Dante Stallworth killed a man earlier this year because he was driving drunk and has already been released from jail. Leonard Little, defensive end for the St. Louis Rams for so many years, killed a man when he was driving drunk, did community service, returned to the playing field, and a few years later, was again arrested on drunk driving charges, only to restart his career anew once more.

So, why has Vick been treated so harshly while the media sweeps these other instances under the rug? Certainly, we don’t value the lives of dogs over people, do we? Does Vick’s intent to hurt the dogs outweigh the reckless stupidity of getting behind the wheel intoxicated when you are fabulously wealthy and could easily afford a taxi, or a limousine, ride home? Is this merely a case of malicious intent that has our priorities so skewed?

But what has truly frustrated me is the idea that Vick should be banished to the netherworld, that the NFL’s system of justice should for some reason be stricter than the government’s, that he should never play another down of football ever again. It is impossible to believe he could be rehabilitated, and on top of that, he is only a 56 percent career passer, so to hell with him.

Perhaps the Nazis were right then, and Vick, along with all other criminals, should just be wiped from the face of the earth. The NFL is a privilege, and Vick is unworthy of its lofty standards, those set by greedy white men who rob their fans with seat licenses and $30 parking fees and $200 shirts with fans’ favorite players’ names on the back. The man killed dogs and served his time for it, while each day, hundreds of young men drop dead in our own streets and we do nothing more than gloss over to the next news story. The world is full of evil men, and when we begin to put ourselves above others, complexes such as the one in southern Poland are erected to eradicate the unworthy ones.