Kimberly Emerson

One week in Sunday school, when I was in junior high, our teacher threw us what I thought was a complete softball of a question.  “Is peer pressure a good thing or a bad thing?  Go to the left if you think it’s good, to the right if you think it’s bad.”  It almost seemed beneath my dignity to answer.  You couldn’t turn around in middle school without hearing a lecture telling you not to jump off that proverbial bridge which all of your friends found so attractive.  As I trudged to the “bad” side of the room, however, I was stunned to find myself in the minority.  Three other kids sat with me.  The other ten or so – including all of my friends – were on the opposite side, spouting off the most inane justifications I’d ever heard about why peer pressure was really the greatest thing since television.

That was almost thirty years ago, but the memory came rushing back to me last weekend as I walked through the Museum of Tolerance.

Ah, life and its extremes.  Last weekend, I was in New Orleans with three dear friends, eating some of the best food in the world and meeting some of the nicest people.  This weekend, I was at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, reliving the Holocaust.  (That funny sound in the background is God chuckling.)

If only it were as pleasant as the name sounds.  The museum exists to teach you tolerance, by leading you through what was arguably the world’s most intolerant moment.  If you’ve never been to the museum, I highly recommend it.  Everyone should go at least once in their lives.  No, it will not be a rollicking good time, I’ll warn you of that in advance, but it will be worth it.  You will go home with the urge to hug someone close, and apologize for something.  Anything.

I went this past weekend along with the present generation of middle- and high-schoolers at my church, since I have been assigned to be the mentor of one of the girls.  (Probably the sweetest teenager on the planet.  If I ever do have kids, I’m putting her parents on speed dial.)  I walked with her and the other kids in the class around the incredibly well-designed exhibit, learning about just how low humanity can sink.   I steeled myself to withstand all the hatred I would feel toward Hitler’s manipulation and the Nazi abuses of power.  But somehow, I found the modulated voices narrating the journey through the building pointing me to another responsible party: the average person.

It was almost as if they said, “Look, we’re willing to buy that Hitler was awful, that some people in life just give up and go over to the dark side.  But what about everybody else?”  And I found myself thinking that they had a point.  The labeling of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and anyone else Hitler decided he didn’t care for; the herding of all the Jews to the ghettos; the designing and building of concentration camps (to say nothing of the day-to-day staffing) – these things took manpower.  It couldn’t have been enough just to enlist the bad people.  Somewhere along the line, ordinary people had to decide that this was okay with them.

I kept flashing back to that question in Sunday School.  We’d had it drilled into our heads endlessly that we needed to learn to think for ourselves, and yet, there were all these people that I genuinely liked, saying that they loved it when their classmates told them what to do.  How do we get to that place?  There are, of course, charismatic people in any group – the born leaders, the ones that everyone else copies.  I think some people just have a sales gene that causes them, without even thinking about it, to persuade others to emulate them.  What, I wondered, if one of those people in the class had made a mistake, had heard the question wrong, and suddenly found himself surrounded by others who were used to following his lead?  What if, too embarrassed to admit that he’d zoned out at the wrong moment, he just decided to fake his way through it?  And everyone else, even if they did think what he was saying might not be altogether correct, thought, “Well, he believes it, so it must be okay”?  Or maybe even, “He might be wrong, but I’d rather be wrong with him than right all by myself.”  (I hate to admit it, but I thought both things back then, from my place on the sparsely populated side of the room.  Not enough to change my vote, but still.)  As a born salesperson, with the help of all those nodding heads, he might just even have sold himself on the idea.

Extrapolate this idea times a billion.  I’m not saying that a few influential people heard Hitler wrong.  But Germany was in the midst of a crushing economic depression when Hitler came to power, so the chances were good that they heard him at one of their weakest moments.  Borrowing on millennia of anti-Semitism, he pointed them toward the Jews, a group of people with a history of dressing, eating and worshiping differently than most of Europe.  These people are to blame for all your problems, he told them, and if you punish them, your life will improve.  The born leaders in society listened to him, and other people listened to them.  Hitler sold this idea hard.  He had to.  Without a huge labor force, his ideas were never going to come to life.  What if everyone had said “No, thank you, I don’t think hurting someone else will actually do me any good”?  Hitler would have been left standing on a street corner, spewing hatred to himself because no one else would listen.

Consider the idea for a moment: the ordinary person holds all the real power in life.

All those of us who will never have buildings named in our honor, who will never see our faces etched in marble, who won’t be mentioned in history textbooks…we run the world.  Literally.  Average people work on farms, sell clothes at the mall, teach children history, and do a million other things that no one thinks about most of the time, but if they stop doing these things, society as we know it ceases to be.  It’s why strikes are effective.  We don’t know how to cope when ordinary things stop getting done.

I’m sorry to burden you with this, because you probably already have enough stress in your life, but I have come to an inescapable conclusion – you are responsible for the future of this world.  Major events will happen or not happen because you decide to take part, or you don’t.  Don’t tell me that everyone else will do it without you.  Hear this and hear it well:  everyone else is making this decision alone, just like you are.

Walking around the Museum of Tolerance last Sunday, I saw the point that its designers, the people putting together assemblies in junior high, and my Sunday school teacher all worked so hard trying to make: Peer pressure depends on followers.  Alone, that born sales person is just one person, and one person can only do so much.

Today, as you go on doing those million ordinary things that you always do, remember: you have enormous power.  Use it wisely.  The world is depending on you.

Kimberly found the Museum of Tolerance to be a powerful and emotionally exhausting experience, and was revived only by the medicinal properties of peanut butter and chocolate.

Tags: Holocaust, Museum of Tolerance, peer pressure, Simon Wiesenthal