What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
By: Rachel Afshari
Seventh period is fifty-five minutes long each school day. These fifty-five minutes I have spent in my seventh period class each day have changed the way I chose to live my life and inspired me to be a better person everyday. Seventh period is when I have Facing History and Ourselves.
Throughout this course I have learned about, read about, and watched about various cases of intolerance and genocides that have occurred in history. One of the most important and dominating lessons of this course is to always be informed; never be ignorant. Ignorance can lead to horrible decisions, but if you are informed and know all the facts it is a lot easier to understand situations and make the right decision. I’ve learned that there are so many different sources to get the facts. You have to look at as many as possible from every different angle possible to fully understand the facts. That’s just what this course has done for me. I’ve learned the proper way to obtain all the facts. I’ve seen the facts. I’ve been informed. Now I understand and can make the right decision.
Perpetrator, a person who performs and is responsible for an act or wrong doing. Victim, a person who suffers from destructive action or agency. Bystander, a person present but not involved, a spectator. Rescuer, a person responsible for freeing or delivering from confinement, violence, danger or evil. Resistance, the act or power or opposing or withstanding. These five words help to bring meaning and understanding to this course. Most humane people would say that if they saw an innocent creature being horribly victimized they would do something to stop it, they would be the rescuer. But when really put in the situation would most people actually be the rescuer? Unfortunately the answer to that question is most people would not. Some people may not for fear of their own well being, or decide that its not their problem so why get involved, or they may think its not worth it because whatever they do won’t make a difference anyway. Whatever the reason may be when put in that situation a good amount of people just wont do anything. Facing History and Ourselves has showed me what horrible outcomes this awful tendency of being a bystander can result in. You can see the results in history, an example being the Armenian genocide. The rest of the world sat by and watched while the Turks eliminated over one million Armenians. By not taking action and being a bystander the world allowed the Armenian genocide to take place. You can see the results today as well, taking place in high schools everywhere. A child or a teenager is bullied constantly. People see it happening and choose not to do anything, to be a bystander. Then one day this child commits suicide because they can not take the torture anymore. One more life lost. A life that could have been saved if someone had been there to help. A life that could have been saved had people chose not to be a bystander. In the past whenever I have seen footage from the Holocaust and the concentration camps it shocked and confused me every time. I would always wonder how something so horrible could happen on such a large scale. After taking this course its very clear to me a large reason the Nazis got so far is because people let them. The bystanders are partly to blame for things getting so out of control. By the time someone stood up and said this is wrong we need to do something about it the damage was already done. Because of this course I no what can happen if you sit around watching and do nothing to intervene. I am proud to say that after taking the course I will not me like “most” people and be a bystander.
The thing that did it for me was the Holocaust. When learning about the Holocaust the course took us all the way back to the roots of anti-Semitism. I saw Nazi propaganda and documents regarding the Nazi youth. I saw films which explained the circumstances in which allowed Hitler to get power and go as far as he did Information on Hitler, his officers, the SS, and the Gestapo was looked at and discussed. I watched various movies and documentaries on the actual war against the Nazi’s and the horrific event that took place at the concentrations camps. I saw or heard about the Holocaust from the point of view of both a Nazi and Jew . Only through the surplus of information from many different sources, and the passion my teacher, Mr. Gallagher, had when teaching was this course able to touch me in the intellectual, moral, and emotional way that it did.
All my life when I walked out of a classroom my head was filled with facts. When I walk out of my Facing History and Ourselves classroom not only do I leave with the facts, I leave with a true understanding of what happened to the various groups of people who where victimized throughout history, and how such a thing could happen. I leave with empathy for those victims. But most importantly I leave with a moral duty, a duty to civic agency. A duty to educate and share the stories of these victims in an effort to prevent it from happening again. A duty to never be a perpetrator, and most importantly a duty to never be the person who doesn’t say anything and watches someone be victimized, a bystander. Already I have made changes in my life because I desperately want to carry out this duty, and I know I will continue to do so for the rest of my life. The fifty-five minutes a day I spent in period seven Facing History and Ourselves is time I wouldn’t trade for anything else in the world. It truly was a life changing experience.
