I'm Going to Germany

I’m going to Germany.

For many years I would not have considered going. My position was that if I had to go to Germany I would walk down the street carefully and only if heavily armed, because I think they are trying to kill me.

People would ask, “Why do you think they are trying to kill you?” and I would usually respond, “What makes you think they are not? They never stopped the killing until someone forced them”. See “The Holocaust”, supra. No German cars either. Even when Detroit put a gun to my head with crap vehicles and said “Buy foreign” it was Japanese cars for 25 years. Even when Eddie Carson at the gas station disapproved, “Those yellow bastards killed my brother”.

But in more recent years I’m getting soft. I’ve decided there should be a statute of limitations on grudges, and I have established it at 20 years. 20 years is enough to property nurture, feed, feed on and ultimately get rid of a grudge. Time to move on. I no longer bear grudges against the people who wouldn’t hire me in the 70s, the girls, who, well, anyway,…and I’m OK with Harvard which rejected me 3 times. There are some continuing annoyances which get refreshed from time to time, Jimmy Carter and Al Sharpton come to mind, and I am unsure yet whether only their infractions within the last 20 years are worthy of grudgedom. Even if I were to make a special exception for the Germans certainly 50 years would have been enough.

We are going on a Main-Danube cruise which starts in Nuremberg and ends in Budapest via Vienna and several cities in southern Germany. We have tacked on a couple of days in Prague, undecided as yet whether to go to Terezin. Thereisenstadt. The Daughter thinks I will react poorly, and #2 son was there in the spring and did not enjoy seeing people with his name on the wall. The cruise looked good, my bride and I could agree on it, and I am reluctant to trip on my own feet to keep the grudge alive. The statute of limitations for grudges is a good thing.