The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, on the site of the World War II Nazi death factory, has banned visitors from playing Pokemon Go in the camp where more than 1 million people were murdered.
What stubborn, silly creatures we are, how forgetful and beautiful and foolish.
I'm on the side of the people who did the banning. Playing Pokemon Go at Auschwitz takes the bland office accusation of "inappropriate behavior" to new heights.
But look at us, we humans, so quick to heal from our terrible hurts, so fast to forget, so determined to play in a terrible world.
Memory doesn’t really mean much to us, not for long. We have so little time to live. My father died 30 years ago, and I miss him, but I can’t mourn the way I did the day he died. Or the year after he died.
Pokemon Go is a smartphone game, an app that allows you to capture imaginary creatures in a real-life setting. It’s foolish, like professional soccer or perfume.
Every soccer ball ever made, every ounce of perfume ever bottled, is our silly little denial of death.
Who can think of death every day and manage to live? Who can mourn forever, for generations, for eternity? Life is always the same, whether created in a suburban marriage bed where there is an expectation of college for the child, or created behind a dumpster where there is no expectation of the next meal.
Grass grows inside Auschwitz. Rain falls. If the camp had not been preserved by people doing the right thing, it would be a grassy hump now.
The idea behind such preservation is that, if we remember, it won’t happen again. But it will, and it has. The human race is lovely and foolish and stubborn and evil and brutal and awful to look at sometimes.
We can oppose the awfulness with our belief in God, our nobility, our compassion, our stubborn urge to do right no matter how difficult.
And we can oppose it with stupid little games, sappy love songs, pet dogs, kissing, balloons and every other inconsequential, ornamental, unimportant thing ever invented by our tribe of frolickers in the face of death.
We mourn, and we dance. We lock the doors against the terrors of the night and open the windows to the summer sunshine. We lose our children to sickness, and we keep right on making love. Life is a funeral and we tell funny stories about the deceased. When you consider the age of the earth itself, humans are like those flies that live for only a day or two.
Auschwitz is a dead serious place, built to kill with the dry efficiency of a tax preparation company run by a maniacal accountant who can kill you if he doesn't approve of your deductions.
And Pokemon Go is life being ridiculous, it’s beating the living hell out of death and the memories of death, if only for a little while. Keep playing. It’s just about all we’ve got.