Sharing a birthday with Adolf Hitler typically means I expect bad things to happen on or around April 20th: The Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine school shooting, and this week, the Boston Marathon bombing.
Today on my 32nd birthday, I find comfort in knowing that both of the suspects of the Boston Marathon bombing were caught and captured.
On the lighter side of things, for my birthday today… I’m trying to think of a… more masculine… way to say it…
Mommy took me on a much needed clothes shopping spree!
Half the clothes in my closet were from before I met Mommy in 2006, while the other half were bought nearly 5 years ago when we got married. A lot of my clothes are either worn out, out of style, or simply sloppy and baggy.
I let Mommy be my guide, picking out what looks good on me, not what I think looks good on me. Left to my own demise, I would end up picking out clothes that were all blue, and of course, baggy and sloppy.
As for you, some friends from our church watched you in their home. This marks the first time ever in your 2 years and 5 months of existence that we’ve had anyone other than family watch you while you were awake.
Needless to say, it went very well. They sent me the picture above while were Mommy and I were at Old Navy.
Granted, you were pretty psyched about the whole event to begin with. You could barely contain yourself as we unbuckled you from your car seat to take you into their home:
“Hi Nelda, look: I brought my purple truck!”
By the time we picked you up about 2 and a half hours later, we found you kicked back on the recliner with Stan, Nelda’s husband, watching the NASCAR race.
So I would say your first babysitting experience by a non-family member, while you were awake, went quite well.
As a treat for you, we brought you home some Thomas the Train “big boy” underwear.
Hint, hint… don’t you want to start going potty so you can wear them the right way, instead of on your head?
In his New York Times bestseller, Eating The Dinosuar, Chuck Klosterman proposes a theory I’ve subconsciously thought about for a good number of years now:
“Let’s say you built a time machine to kill ‘Baby Hitler’ in 1889. Committing that murder would mean the Holocaust never happened. And that would mean you’d have no motive for going back in time in the first place, because the tyrannical Adolf Hitler, the one you despise, would not exist.”
Not only would you be killing a yet still innocent baby, who’s to say that an even worse, unstoppable antichrist wouldn’t have risen up during that same time and took his place? Like Super Shredder in the 2nd Ninja Turtles movie.
But forget about killing Hitler as an infant. Instead, as a friend on Facebook recommended, why not kidnap “Baby Hitler” and then raise him as your own, therefore causing him to never become the demonic monster we know him as today?
I’m not endorsing kidnapping infants here, but my friend did get me thinking:
Could pretty much any of us have prevented Hitler from becoming Hitler?
Sure, none of us parents are perfect. But I have to assume that if I raised a future Hitler, with my structured yet loving parenting style, things would have turned out a lot different.
This is an ultimate question of nature versus nature.
But am I wrong? As parents, does our influence not have enough power to raise up a child to be good?
And by “good” I mean “not Hitler.”
I realize this Dadabase post is so weird and abstract and potentially unrelatable (and offensive?) that it may easily never show up in the Most Read Posts or Most Recent Comments section at the top right side of this page.
Just the same, if there are any other parents out there willing to engage me in this hypothetical question, I would love to hear your take on it:
If you raised “Baby Hitler” (or any potential antichrist or at least a serial killer, for that matter) from infancy, would they turn out as a normal human being instead? Would your positive influence on an innocent child be able to prevent the outcome had the actual parent raised the child?
Despite being 33 minutes long, “180″ reached over one million views in less than its first month on YouTube. The extremely engaging video consists of a Jewish man asking people on the street whether or not they would have killed Adolf Hitler if they had the chance. Then he follows up by asking if they would have killed Hitler’s mother while she was pregnant with him.
Eventually the people are asked to finish the sentence, “It’s okay to kill a baby when…”.
“180″ shares the interesting comparison that over 11 million people (not just Jews, but also homosexuals and children with Downs Syndrome) were killed under Hitler’s direction, while over 53 million babies have been aborted since abortion was made legal in the United States back in 1973.
Back in August, I published my most controversial (and 2nd most popular) Dadabase post to date, entitled “The Half Abortion: Only Keeping One Twin.” Since then, it has received comments on a nearly daily basis. Why? It asks some deep, yet relevant questions.
We all like to think of ourselves as good people; that if there is a Heaven, we will be good enough to make the cut. By asking these deep, difficult, and controversial questions, it makes it easier to decipher the differences between “good” and “evil.” If Hitler is the obvious worst person who ever lived, then who’s with him?
Is it legitimate to compare the Holocaust to legalized abortion in America?
I am very curious to hear your thoughts on this. Of course, it will be pretty hard to take your comment seriously if you haven’t actually watched the entire video. So now I invite you to go deep into some serious stuff here with me today.
In 33 minutes, leave a comment to let me know your thoughts.
*Warning: Video contains some brief, disturbing images.
