I remember that, and - well. At the time, what I wanted to say, and did not was, roughly speaking, this:
It's been said that humor is a tragedy happening a long way away to people you don't know. And in that sense, I guess I can see, intellectually, that those images could somehow become funny for someone who is privileged enough to be far removed, insulated and protected, from all that they represent. But my family was fractured beyond repair in the Holocaust. We lost whole branches. Seventy years on, we're still dealing with the fallout. I spent one summer transcribing the diaries of a family member who was in a concentration camp, and it was an almost sureally painful experience. So I am not far enough removed from the tragedy of the Holocaust to find any part of those images funny, no matter what the context, and it's painful for me to think of someone using them for the purpose that poster did. And I really didn't want to see those images in any context, let alone that one. A warning for tastelessness - look, that's not the word I would use, and it didn't serve the purpose warnings normally serve (to warn and thus protect people who cannot handle the content in question), and if a deficiency of taste is the only aspect of that that you can see that might be potentially problematic, perhaps you are not looking closely enough.
But I didn't say that, and I didn't defriend the person in question, either, although I avoided her posts for a while and still flinch when I see her name and remember that post. Which is why I'm very glad you posted this. When I saw that post, the only comments were positive ones, and I took from that a) that no one else was troubled by the post and b) my sick, hurt feelings were obviously my problem, my issue, my fault. I mean, if I'd articulated that, I'd have known it was stupid, but it wasn't a conscious thought, just an instant conclusion. So thank you for this. (And I'm so glad to learn I'm not alone in still being distressed and actively thinking about it all this time afterward.)
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It's been said that humor is a tragedy happening a long way away to people you don't know. And in that sense, I guess I can see, intellectually, that those images could somehow become funny for someone who is privileged enough to be far removed, insulated and protected, from all that they represent. But my family was fractured beyond repair in the Holocaust. We lost whole branches. Seventy years on, we're still dealing with the fallout. I spent one summer transcribing the diaries of a family member who was in a concentration camp, and it was an almost sureally painful experience. So I am not far enough removed from the tragedy of the Holocaust to find any part of those images funny, no matter what the context, and it's painful for me to think of someone using them for the purpose that poster did. And I really didn't want to see those images in any context, let alone that one. A warning for tastelessness - look, that's not the word I would use, and it didn't serve the purpose warnings normally serve (to warn and thus protect people who cannot handle the content in question), and if a deficiency of taste is the only aspect of that that you can see that might be potentially problematic, perhaps you are not looking closely enough.
But I didn't say that, and I didn't defriend the person in question, either, although I avoided her posts for a while and still flinch when I see her name and remember that post. Which is why I'm very glad you posted this. When I saw that post, the only comments were positive ones, and I took from that a) that no one else was troubled by the post and b) my sick, hurt feelings were obviously my problem, my issue, my fault. I mean, if I'd articulated that, I'd have known it was stupid, but it wasn't a conscious thought, just an instant conclusion. So thank you for this. (And I'm so glad to learn I'm not alone in still being distressed and actively thinking about it all this time afterward.)