Happy 80th Birthday, Anne Frank! We need you more than ever.

"With a diary kept in a secret attic, she braved the Nazis and lent a searing voice to the fight for human dignity." --Time (1999), naming Anne Frank with the heroes and icons of the 20th century on their list of The Most Important People of the Century.

Anne Frank was born just 80 years ago in Frankfurt, Germany on June 12, 1929. A Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis with her family, Anne kept her sanity before her capture and subsequent death in a concentration camp by recording her thoughts in a diary. That diary, given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. It became a classic when it was published after her death: The Diary of a Young Girl, one of the most widely read books in the world.

As we reel this week from the fatal shootings and deaths in Washington DC's Holocaust Museum, initiated by a man with a virulently anti-Semitic past...

when we view photographic evidence of unspeakable acts of torture inflicted by our military in prisons far and not-so-far away...

when indigenous defenders of the Amazon jungle are gunned down like criminals...

elections are so suspect that the citizenry must riot in the streets...

a Minuteman leader is apprehended for a double homicide in AZ...

...we ponder with broken hearts our own human capacity for evil and struggle to find the hope we need to remain faithful to working for justice and peace.

These quotations, taken from Anne's diary, are worth recalling today as a celebration of her life, her voice, her courage, her open heart. In Anne we find the antidote to despair that we sometimes desperately need:

On our infinite possibilities:

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

On optimism:

"I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

On the restorative power of nature:

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be."

On personal power:

"The final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands."

On gratitude:

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."

On human nature and hope:

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. ... I think peace and tranquility will return again."

On happiness:

"Whoever is happy will make others happy, too."

On human potential:

"Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!"

Happy birthday, Anne! Your life, your spirit is as relevant as ever. May we, the living who are blessed with your example and inspiration, live today more fully and humanly.

when killing someone is kinder

story here

people in america need to see this- we torture people. we torture teens and children. we torture for no other reason than we can. who will stop us?

fox news host: 15 year old detainee 'maybe deserved' harsh treatment

Child warriors

Everyone should read this article in today's NYTimes about Omar Ahmed Khadr, an Al Qaida fighter who was captured after a fire-fight in Afghanistan when he was 15 and who has been detained in Guantanamo for five years — one quarter of his life.

The Times goes out of its way to point out that, for all his youth, Khadr was a dangerous warrior from a dangerous family. And I have no doubt that he was. But he was also 15. And he was one of many child warriors being used in wars around the world:

To American military prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is a committed Al Qaeda operative, spy and killer who must be held accountable for killing Sergeant Speer in 2002 and for other bloody acts he committed in Afghanistan.



But there is one fact that may not fit easily into the government’s portrait of Mr. Khadr: He was 15 at the time.

His age is at the center of a legal battle that is to begin tomorrow with an arraignment by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of Mr. Khadr, whom a range of legal experts describe as the first child fighter in decades to face war-crimes charges. It is a battle with implications as large as the growing ranks of child fighters around the world.

...

“More and more child soldiers are being recruited, and they are committing heinous crimes. This is an issue the international community is going to have to confront,” said Michael A. Newton, a former military prosecutor and expert on the law of war who teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School.

The article gives the last word to one of the soldiers Khadr wounded:

One person who has reached a different conclusion about the culpability of child fighters is Layne Morris, a housing administrator in a Salt Lake City suburb. Mr. Morris is a former Army Special Forces sergeant, who, like Mr. Khadr, is half-blind because of the firefight that day outside Khost, Afghanistan.

On a recent day, Mr. Morris remembered the stream of shots from AK-47s inside a compound a coalition patrol had surrounded. He remembered the hand grenades that kept coming over the wall. And he described the feeling of the shrapnel that took half his sight.

He said the battle did not unfold quickly, as it sometimes seems in the retelling. American forces surrounded the compound. And then they waited. Some women from the compound emerged and were allowed to leave, Mr. Morris said. A boy fighter would have had the chance to walk out of the gate, too, he said.

There were shots. And more waiting, as the Americans called for air support.

Anyone who was inside had a choice of fighting or surrendering, he said, including Mr. Khadr.

“There is just no way you can say this is a poor befuddled, brainwashed kid,” Mr. Morris said. “This is a kid who made a whole lot of decisions on his own.”

I don't think Mr. Morris's final statement holds up. The brainwashed do not suddenly become rational. It takes a while.

But even if Mr. Morris is correct, I fail to see how imprisoning and/or executing children solves any of our problems.

The law should not be an instrument of revenge.

I don't mean to be bleeding-heart about Khadr in particular. But the problem of child warriors has been one that has disturbed me for years.

I can't write a closing for this post. To turn a child into a killer is a crime against humanity. But more violence doesn't seem to be the right solution.

Cross-posted at Sherry Chandler.