Recently, while watching a show entitled “50 Years of Guns” on MSNBC, the show’s host, Al Sharpton, made mention of a piece of writing that emerged after the Holocaust. He only referenced it briefly, but it was enough to pique my interest and move me to research the quote that he’d mentioned. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the piece Sharpton referred to is a poem taken from one of the extemporaneous lectures that Pastor Martin Niemoller gave during the early postwar period after the Holocaust. Because of the unscripted nature of Niemoller’s speeches, each time he spoke, the poem was recited slightly differently, and which therefore has resulted in many versions of it, often coined “First They Came”. In each version, Niemoller reflects upon the guilt he felt about the role his complicity – through his silence (along with that of the Protestant churches in Germany), played not only in what happened to the millions of Jews and other groups of people that were annihilated during that period, but also to his own subsequent capture and imprisonment.

When Sharpton mentioned this poem during his show, he was relating it to the problem of gun violence in America, and how many suburbanites and well-to-do citizens have stood idly by over the years as the inner-city, lower income population have been plagued by the effects of this country’s lax gun laws, presumably in part because the problem did not affect them. He argued that only now, in the wake of mass shootings such as Columbine, Aurora theatre, Sandy Hook, and the latest school shooting in Colorado, is mainstream America beginning to take notice and demand that something be done.

Police: Shooting not related to Newtown – CNN Dec. 13, 2013

Unfortunately, this is often the case, people are unconcerned about the suffering of others, and it is only when the problem comes knocking at their own door that they are forced to take an interest and take action, but by that point it often times is too late. This quote featured in “50 Years of Guns” brought to mind many of the issues currently being debated within the city of Detroit, such as violence in the neighborhoods, stripping of city pensions, and any number of other issues that some have chosen to turn a blind eye to because they are of no concern to them. I would urge those people to read Niemoller’s poem, and to try to understand that as a community, when one group suffers we all suffer, and that once you condone injustice towards others, you have in essence invited the same injustice to be visited upon you. It will be very difficult to build a new, unified Detroit without ensuring that all of its residents, from the wealthiest and most powerful, to those most in need and without a voice, are all afforded the same opportunities and protections in this new metropolis.