Local Opinion: It’s Happening Here, and Now
Barbara Crews is a former college instructor and administrator, and a former City Council member and mayor of Galveston, Texas. This opinion piece was posted to Arizona Daily Star on June 1, 2025
I have been a docent at the Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center for two years. Educating, informing and sharing history with groups of people from age 9 to 90 has been a rewarding, exhilarating and sometimes emotionally challenging experience. It’s not an easy topic to discuss, much less explain. It is fraught with so much pain and suffering, even generational suffering, that it is often difficult to comprehend.
I am certainly no expert on this monumental topic, but I grew up learning about it from childhood. My grandparents came to this country in the early 1900s, most likely fleeing pogroms. As a second-generation American, I have tried to understand what they escaped, what they foresaw and how it might have shaped their lives.
How do such monstrous acts as the Holocaust occur?In 1987, Dr. Gregory Stanton developed a model known as the Stages of Genocide. There is an entire wall in Tucson’s Holocaust Center devoted to these stages (or processes). It is helpful to take visitors through these in order to teach them that the extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and many disabled persons by Hitler was part of an ever-tightening set of rules, laws and restrictions on the rights of these individuals. It happened gradually.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of leading a 7th-grade class through Dr. Stanton’s stages. I will describe four of these here, starting with Classification which requires that we see the world made up of people we classify as us vs. them; Symbolization — forcing Jews to wear yellow Stars of David marking them as Jews; Discrimination — when laws and customs prevent groups of people from exercising their rights as citizens or as human beings; and Dehumanization. Dehumanization is when the perpetrators call their victims names like “vermin” or “rats”, cockroaches or … criminals. These names and labels have a purpose. They send the message that the victims are less than human and therefore, their lives don’t matter as much as others.
It struck me during my presentation that I wasn’t just describing what happened 80 years ago but what is happening now. Just the day before I took these seventh graders on their tour, a young student at Tufts University in Boston was freed from a Louisiana prison after being incarcerated for 45 days without due process simply because the current administration in Washington didn’t like her letter to the student newspaper, and they revoked her Visa.
In the last four months, we’ve experienced a series of shocking events, including Executive Orders gutting civil rights, brutal deportations and people snatched off the streets of America by masked men and put into unmarked cars, as well as attacks on law firms and Universities.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote “It Can’t Happen Here” about a fictional fascist president of the U.S. It was eerily prescient. It was a reaction to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and the spread of populism by the demagogue Huey Long in Louisiana and Father Charles Coughlin, the antisemitic radio preacher at the time. The hero of the book promises to restore America to greatness.
But we are here. It is happening here in our country, not in some distant land, and it is happening now.
As Dr. Stanton would tell us, the ultimate antidote to the frightening, unconscionable and unconstitutional trends that we are seeing and experiencing in our country is to resist every form of discrimination, dehumanization and hate speech. We must have the courage to challenge, to speak up and speak out against racism, hate speech and the polarization in our country if we are to survive as a democracy.