I have lots of silly pictures and stories to post, but I spent this afternoon at the Resistance Museum, a place beautifully documenting Holland during WWII and the terrible and sometimes very brave things that happened then. I can't help wondering where I would fall in times like those, although I am in no hurry to find out. Neutral, outspoken, quietly brave, completely cowardly, ignorant, kind? I wonder. The place was a strange mixture of despair and hope; it's incredible that some people can be faced with fear and death and charge at it full force with underground newspapers, safe houses, massive spying efforts, and even small kindnesses like milk and bread. Still, it's hard to read the simple list of statistics about those dead, gassed, executed, disappeared and walk out of there feeling particularly good about the human race.
I paused just now, unsure of where to go, and I took a moment to throw open the window looking out onto a gorgeous spring afternoon. Two ladies are in the garden down below, giggling and chatting, a mother is holding her sleeping child and carefully watering a window box, and someone in an apartment across the courtyard is practicing the most beautiful opera. Music and laughter and love; if those things can't justify the human race's continued existence, I'm not sure anything can.

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