Not Rain Nor Snow Nor Glom Of Nit

Reading @historicity-was-already-taken's Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the bits that cite large numbers of people killed - and I'm frantically running the math in my head and trying to picture it.

The massacre at Babi Yar [Ukraine] lasted thirty-six hours between September 29 and 30 [1941]; thirty-six hours, in which the Einstazgruppen murdered approximately 33,700 Jews.

On average, that's a little under a thousand people murdered an hour.

July 22nd to Sept 27th, 1942 - 68 days -

According to both Jewish underground and official Nazi accounts, the Nazis murdered between 275,000 and 310,000 Jews -- in Treblinka and in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto -- between July and September 1942. [Exact dates taken from earlier in the chapter]

That's between 4,044 and 4,558 murdered per day.

The best way I have for visualizing large groups of people is theatre venues. Because I worked in theatre for so long, and know the capacity of each venue I worked at, I can picture it full and say ok, this is 200 people, this is 3,000 people.

And yet. Picturing a filled venue, and it's only a tiny drop in the bucket of how many people were killed even in individual killing events in the Holocaust--

I don't know how Holocaust education can really impress this on people. Because the scale is just beyond what a person can imagine and hold in their head.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic, Sarah Gilbreath Ford

“hey don’t use eugenics language to describe a thing you don’t like”