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I don't want to make a big fuss about this but when somebody does something for me, such as the guy who opened the door for me at Trader Joe's, and I said, "Thank you," I wish he hadn't said, "No problem." Back in the day, he would've said, "You're welcome," which sounds more elegant to me, or even "My pleasure," which is downright friendly, whereas "No problem" sounds dismissive, a shrug. He was in his twenties, I'm old enough to be his grandpa, and of course I am capable of opening a door and I know it wasn't a problem for him — my gratitude was for his good manners. I am grateful for his respect. I could've opened the door for him and extended my hand, to say, "After you, please" and he might've said, "Thank you." It's mannerly, a simple way of indicating that we each belong here, we have a right to respect, are not opponents engaged in a struggle for dominance. We are not raccoons. If we don't maintain our good manners, we may soon slide to the level of filthy savages who crap in our pants and shove each other aside and say, "Outta my way, scumbag loser, or I'll kick the daylights outta you."
Well, now I have made a big fuss about it, so I may as well continue. I was a shy kid who shrank from playground bullies so my third-grade teacher let me stay in the library during recess and I became a reader. I enjoyed Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, but I mostly loved history.
I loved to listen to my aunts tell stories about their schooldays and life on the farm and the hardships of the Great Depression and this led to curiosity about World War II — I was born in 1942 — and what interested me more than bird's-eye accounts of military campaigns and the calculations of major powers were the stories of individuals, and the book that moved me most was Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, which I read when I was 14.
Anne, a Jewish girl in Amsterdam, began writing the diary in 1942, a month before I was born, when she was 13. She and her family went into hiding in the attic of her father's business after her older sister was ordered to report to a Nazi work camp. They were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps where Anne died of typhus shortly before the war ended in 1945.
Fascism was built on the idea of racial/cultural superiority and Jews were the despised minority, and the power of the book is the plain humanity of the writer. Reading it, you come to feel you are her closest friend.
She talks about wanting to be a writer, about America, Hollywood, she longs to have a close friend, and she writes, "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."
She sits in a corner of the crowded attic, she can hear the patrols in the streets, Germans and their Dutch sycophants, searching for Jews, but she herself has some idea of the power of what she is doing. She says she wants to be useful, wants to go on living after her death. She says, "The sharpest weapon is a kind and gentle spirit." Sometimes she despairs, says she can't do anything to change things, so what's the point in living? But she takes satisfaction in writing. "Who else but me will read these letters?" she says, and yet, when I was 14 and her reader, I honestly felt that she knew I was there looking over her shoulder.
"I live in a crazy time," she wrote. So do we. A neo-Nazi candidate for governor draws big crowds in Florida and social media and podcasting have been a fertile field for all varieties of insanity that, back when we were a coherent nation with standards of decency, would not have been allowed on the air.
Still, I believe that people are good at heart. I believe that it will all come right. Dear Lord, haste the day.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.