At the Exeter (N.H.) High School prom, students were marked with a red or black Sharpie to indicate their vaccination status (“Sharpie marks at prom elicit comparison to Nazis,” June 16). This was done to facilitate contact tracing, if needed. This resulted in outrage among some parents and at least one state legislator, drawing comparisons to Nazi behaviors and the Holocaust.
Sharpie marks at a high school prom recalled the Holocaust? Recalled genocide? Seriously? The students were not forcibly removed from their homes because of their religion, gender preferences, disabilities or ethnicities. They were not denied their civil rights, jobs or their right to participate in society. They were not prisoners. They were not starved, worked to exhaustion, brought to a prison by death trains or by forced marches. They were not dressed in rags and forced to sleep in unheated and overcrowded barracks sharing their beds with mites, lice, rats, typhus and disease. The students were not subjected to random violence. They were not sent to gas chambers for being too young, too small, too weak or too ill to do slave labor productively.
I understand that some people were upset by a health strategy that they felt pointed fingers and betrayed confidentiality. It was a tough call by school officials, who had health protection in mind and who perhaps could have accomplished this goal in a less stigmatizing fashion.
However, for people to leap from Sharpie marks at a wonderful rite of passage in school to a comparison to the Holocaust (or any episode of genocide) cheapens those entire dark episodes in human history. It demonstrates a lack of understanding of the depth, gravity and horrors of genocide and the behaviors that facilitate such episodes in our history.
Please don’t trivialize systematically planned and conducted mass murder.
PAUL ETKIND
Grantham
The New Hampshire proposal to criminalize abortions after 24 weeks gestation is more than appropriate.
To those who say it is a woman’s right to choose whether to preserve or to kill the child in the womb, I say that after six months of pregnancy she has already made her choice.
To the physicians who claim that a pregnancy after 24 weeks gestation must sometimes be terminated via an abortion procedure to save the life of the mother, I propose an alternative way: delivery of the baby via emergency cesarean section. Perhaps these physicians have heard of this procedure? Surely, a competent ob/gyn can perform an emergency C-section much faster than spending hours dilating the cervix so that instruments can be inserted in the womb, the baby’s skull crushed and the brain sucked out by a vacuum.
Let the record show that I stand against perpetuating the American holocaust.
E. JOSEPH MAJEWSKI
Windsor