Saved for a Purpose

In the usual scheme of things, I can’t say that I’m the biggest advocate of the ‘divine intervention’ concept. However, in this case, I make an exception.

Confronted with scenes of intense and unrelenting oppression, so many of us choose to switch off, to avoid the uncomfortable. After all, there is nothing that we can do about it, is there? What will be, will be, so why engage with it and the inevitable accompaniment of anxiety, when we are so far away from it? It’s happening over there, in the USA, not here in the UK, our cosy little oasis of calm. Flick the off switch and let them get on with it!

Say nothing.

Frustrated with the switcher offers, hundreds, thousands and millions of them, one single person shines through. Keep the switch to ‘on’, he says. Don’t ignore the blatantly obvious. Behind Trump, stands ‘The ghost of Hitler.’ Steven Frank, at 90 years of age, speaks out, puts into words what all of us can see, and what all of us (with few exceptions) choose to unsee.

Steven Frank, miraculously survived incarceration in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, narrowly escaping a hale of bullets ‘fired from a British aircraft’ into his barracks, following on from an intelligence error. ‘And you know, I wasn’t even scratched. It was almost as if there was this invisible shield protecting me.’

It’s not difficult to formulate the opinion, at this point, that Steven was indeed protected – that he was saved for a purpose – that he lives, still, to tell us all what we already know.

‘History is beginning to repeat itself again,’ he says, in reference to the occupation of Minneapolis by Trump’s pack of wolves. ICE, like Hitler’s brown shirts, kidnapping and shooting, venting hatred upon anyone and anything they can label as ‘other’.

I would take exception only to Steven’s tentativeness in his wording. History is not ‘beginning’ to repeat itself.

‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.’ (John Stuart Mill, 1867)

Say nothing.

History is repeating itself.

Jay Cool, 26th January 2026

Image by John Hain from Pixabay