Today is Holocaust Memorial Day

Don’t worry if you don’t know about this. Chances are, unless you are of Jewish descent, a WWII veteran, or a European expatriate, this will be news to you since Holocaust Memorial Day rarely gets a mention by the American media (not even NPR which holds itself up to some of the highest standards).

After checking several different (American) online news sources, the only article I could find was on CNN, which has a story about an American soldier remembering the liberation of Auschwitz.

Of course there are several big news stories that are still monopolizing the headlines, the main one being the devastation in Haiti following the January 12 earthquake. There’s also President Obama’s up coming (tonight) State of the Union address. If you’re a techie like my husband, you were probably eagerly awaiting word of Apple’s latest gadget (rumored to be a tablet size computer).

It is all these things that have pushed the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Concentration Camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau very much to the back pages if mentioned at all in America. This is just further proof how geocentric our world view (as Americans) is, most not knowing or caring what goes on beyond our borders. Should we blame the media or should we blame ourselves?

Either way, each one of us should take a quiet moment today and say a prayer for all those who perished in the camps, and pray that such genocide never happens again (it still does but on a much smaller scale).