I don't know quite what subreddit to put this on so I chose this one. It seems the most suitable seeing as it often deals with serious topics, and seems to garner a more mature audience than some other larger subs on the site.

I just finished watching Band of Brothers episode 9 for the third time in my life. It's the third time that I've watched the series, and I think that - in retrospect - episode 9 is the reason why I re-watch the show every so often.

For those of you unfamiliar with Band of Brothers, it's a show that follows Easy Company of the 101st Airborne as they fight WWII in Europe. Episode 9 is the episode where they liberate a German concentration camp.

I've been angry, scared, frustrated, what have you, about the American jailing of Latin and Hispanic people at the border for a long time, but lately I had accidentally let myself push it out of my mind. I rationalized that "The Republican party is finally losing power" and "this political stuff is probably ticking off my friends" but, watching that episode about that concentration camp, the town around it, and the people inside it forced me to think about it again.

This isn't okay guys. What we're doing is the same shit that happened in Nazi Germany in WWII, and we need to face that. I've run into too many intelligent people - including myself at times - that are unwilling to admit to themselves that we have concentration camps on our border. That includes some of the professors that I respect very much at the college level. And yes. They are concentration camps, if you disbelieve me that's on your to find out at this point - because you should know already - and that isn't entirely what I want to talk about in this post.

People are incredibly good at rationalizing what happens to them, and why it isn't their problem.

The situation portrayed in Episode 9 of Band of Brothers is a situation that happened time and again as the Allies marched into Germany. There were concentration camps and death camps right next to towns and villages and the people very carefully turned a blind eye to them.

This is happening in America now.

People do not want to face the wrong that they have done, or their simple complacency until they are forced to. The people in those villages may have had their own latent reasons for turning a blind eye - protecting themselves and their families from being killed is one - but they still had to live with that.

We, as Americans, will have to live with every single Child, Woman, and Man who dies in a cell from cold, starvation, lack of medical care, neglect, etc. for the crime of fleeing a country that was actively trying to kill them. We will have to live with putting those people there*. With the fact that our prejudice gets these Latin, Hispanic, and other people killed in camps, in bombings, terrorist attacks, shootings, etc. and that our own complacency to our government and institutions is largely responsible for those people's deaths.

In Band of Brother's Episode 9, "Why we fight", Many of the people living in the town knew that the camp was there. They didn't face what their complacency had done until they were forced to bury the bodies of the Human beings that had starved to death there. Some of those townsfolk buried friends that they didn't help because they were scared of reprisals. Many others wholeheartedly believed the propaganda until the second they had to bury one of those people. And some still believed it after.

That's what our complacency can and will do if we don't face this issue. We are not being loud enough. We are not fighting hard enough to end what our government is doing.

That's what I had to get off my chest.