Review – Paper Clips

This starts out as the heart of a good idea: middle school students in a small town in Tennessee attempt to fathom the magnitude of the Holocaust by collecting six million paper clips. But several problems soon arise, ranging from the simple difficulty of coming by six million of anything – let alone paperclips – and ending up with the dilemma of what to do with 25 million of them after an NBC news report sparks international interest in the project. The scheme is well-intentioned, but somewhere something started nagging at me. Maybe it was when they brought Holocaust survivors in to speak at the local Methodist church. Maybe it was when some of the more obsessive personalities involved managed to import a WW2-era cattle car all the way from Germany just to house the clips. In any event, the thing that bugged me was that so much time and effort was being expended to teach about one particular bit of inhumanity. Certainly we face an ever-present danger of forgetting one of history’s biggest lessons about prejudice; Mel Gibson’s continuing career proves that it’s all too easy to ignore the suffering caused by anti-Semitism. But aren’t there other lessons – slavery comes immediately to mind – that might be a bit more immediately relevant to Americans in general and kids in the rural South in particular? Well, maybe one step at a time. Mildly amusing