Daily Lessons from Life 11 June 2009

"Guard killed in Washington Holocaust museum attack
CNA Posted: 11 June 2009 0237 hrs

WASHINGTON: A lone gunman said to have links to white supremacist groups opened fire on Wednesday inside the Holocaust Memorial Museum, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself. Media reports identified the gunman as 88-year-old James von Brunn, a Maryland resident with ties to hate groups and anti-government organisations who served a prison sentence for taking a gun into the Federal Reserve.

Von Brunn has written books on the Holocaust, Adolph Hitler, and his views on white superiority including "Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog," which his website calls "the culmination of his life's work." In a recent posting on his blog, he railed that "America is a Third-World racial garbage-dump - stupid, ignorant, dead-broke, and terminal."

Obama last week became the first US president to visit the Nazi death camp in Buchenwald, Germany where he renewed a historic commitment to Israel. Flanked by Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama laid a white rose at a memorial plaque for the camp's more than 56,000 victims. He said Buchenwald was "the ultimate rebuke" to those "who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful." - AFP"

A horribly sobering tragedy that tell us racism and hatred about another race or races can and do drives a supposedly intelligent man, an author of many books it seemed this gun man, and OLD man of age 88 to kill! It also tells us that without proper help and guidance, time CANNOT change a person's mindset!!

Lessons for me are:

1. when we formed our opinion about certain thing or people and hold it true for many many years without the ability to have an open and two-way discussion with people that hold different opinions from you, you can be at a dead end and stuck with your original opinion forever!;

2. when the conscious mind keeps repeating this impression or understanding into your subconscious mind, you may eventually subconsciously act out that belief. Again, when there is no sounding board or other form of feedback, you will be convinced that your original view is the absolute truth!;

3. Living in a macro environment that supposedly embraced diversity and tolerance of different races and with a President that is non-white and who had just visited the infamous Nazi death camp for the persecution and killing of the Jew race WILL NOT change your original impression IF you did not reach out to the diverse resources available. Hence, change of mindset and attitude has to be a deliberate act. Start with the awareness of 'I need to change' and then repeat it in your mind repeatedly until it becomes a subconscious reflex. Then go act out that thought repeatedly until a new habit is formed or developed!

It is a sobering news. May all those with confused thoughts tied up in knots find a way out!!