“The White Rose”

Wherein the Enlightenment had so radiantly shone ...

descended a darkness o'er the land,

 a blackening,

not of locusts sent by God ...

but of a more stubborn Pharoah

whose heart was even harder ...

whose command over masses numbing,

yet which ultimately failed to blot out the light of day.

Had there been no foreshadowing of the darkness?

When the land forgot Moses Mendelssohn,

and bore Adolph Eichmann?

Had not Heine known wherein books are burned,

so will eventually humans be?

Where the din of the mob drowned out

 the admonitions of the few prophetic voices

and cynical lawlessness foreshown transcendent evil.

 When the fearful apathy of a once upright citizenry

began to terrorize living space and individuality's

resistance little remained.

Where Jewish blood-letting became a national pastime,

an opiate to drug the masses and passive stupidity

replaced the spirituality of free thought.

Not all debauched themselves on the altar of this

golden calf.

Hans and Sophie Scholl refused to forsake the

distinction between right and wrong, the ageless lesson

from the innocence of mankind.

The Gestapo executed Hans and Sophie Scholl

whose parents had taught them diligently and ...

spoken to them of good and evil at home, and

nurtured these young people on individuality's

inquisitiveness,

enough so that when almost all had become bad,

Hans and Sophie  believed in the courage of adherence

to good.

When the many hysterically applauded tyranny's

hypnosis,

this brother and sister had the presence of mind

to rise up and proclaim freedom's stubborn

persistence.

While the majority clung to falsehoods, deludely and

tenaciously,

Hans and Sophie held that living a lie was a betrayal of

life.

Our sages knew that few are the righteous who defy

evil across death's yard to the guillotine.

Blossoms push out the rot of weeds and beauty

overtakes ugliness.

For who could have foreseen that a WHITE ROSE ...

would burst forth in a land where the ashes of

auschwitz,

dachau,

buchenwald,

treblinka

fertilized

berchtesgaden.

Where the presumpton of guilt

became the standard of an obscene perversion of

justice, good people tried and condemned

perfunctorily...

those who managed to remain human in a country

where depotism reigned not because ...

there were no good prople left,

but that there remained so few.

Alan D. Busch

Revised 2007