I have written before about a person's First Amendment right to peaceful protest.  But, when I watch the news on television, listen to it on the radio, and read it in several newspapers, I wonder if more and more folks are becoming radicalized or they just don't know any better.

            The most recent head-scratcher came on Monday.  During a memorial in New York's Union Square honoring those slain at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023, a large crowd of pro-Palestine and anti-Israel protestors attempted to disrupt the memorial.  Some were lighting flares and others waving a banner celebrating that slaughter.

            But, one video was particularly disturbing.  A man, standing among the protestors, was clearly seen and heard saying that he wished "Hitler was still here because the Nazi leader would have wiped all you out."  A few seconds later he repeated it for emphasis.  I wondered, how many others feel that way?

            He was bellowing out his hateful comment just four days after the 80th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944.  The day the Allies invaded France for the beginning of the end to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.

            More than six million people, most of them Jews, died at the hands of the Nazis and der Fuhrer's government.  Looking at the commenter, he might have become one of the victims back then.

            According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jews were not the only ones persecuted from 1933 to 1945.

            The Nazis also targeted the following groups of people (listed in alphabetical order): Black people in Germany; civilians (non-Jewish) accused of disobedience, resistance, or partisan activity; gay men, bisexual men, and other men accused of homosexuality in Germany; Jehovah's Witnesses; people with disabilities; Poles; political opponents and dissenters in Germany; Roma and other people derogatorily labeled as "Gypsies"; social outsiders in Germany derogatorily labeled as "asocials" or "professional criminals"; and Soviet Prisoners of War. 

            Many had no place in the Nazi vision as they did not enable the growth of the Aryan population and/or were deemed unfit to be soldiers.

            Perhaps the protestor was absent from school during the classes instructors were reviewing the time prior to, during, and after World War II.

            I wonder how many others were absent from school for those lessons. Maybe they were and just chose to forget.

            In the early 1900s, George Santayan wrote in his book, "The Life of Reason: The Phases of Progress": "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  That led to several variations over the years that include: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it; Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes; Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it; Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them; and those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

            Is what we are seeing in today's violent protests a product of the history education process or is it madness?