Darkness

Got back fairly late from work, settled down with a cup of tea and a curry puff, switched on the tv just for something to do, flipped to the History Channel which I usually find disappointing, got sucked into a brilliant documentary on the genocide in Rwanda. I suppose 'sucked into' isn't quite accurate: I found a good deal of it so painful to watch that I was basically stunned into a kind of grief and anger that made it almost a duty to watch. The programme featured contributions from Philip Gourevitch whose book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families is the best one I know on the tragedy. (I almost wrote 'the most readable' then realised how extraordinarily inadequate such terms are in the face of what took place.)

When I was in secondary school, the second year I think, we were exposed to short documentaries related to the Holocaust. (I don't think the term was in use then - we thought of them as films about the concentration camps.) I remember thinking then how utterly dark the heart of man can be, and how important it was to understand that. I assumed that all kids were exposed to this material and it was only years later, when I became a teacher, that I realised this was not the case. It seems to me that no education is close to complete that goes without a long hard look at the enormities of which our species is capable.