For many years, my Sunday afternoon ritual has been watching documentaries or films of an historic nature. Today, it was an extraordinary film (not new) that I recommend heartily: "Denial" It inspired my random thoughts below. In 1998, I realized a child-hood dream: working my way around the world aboard ship. The effort had a cherry on top, as when I returned, I met, fell in love and married Alfredo. Through him and his family, I experienced the Occident's tortured history, not as I had through books, but through talks around the table: over cards, during late-night Spanish dinners, in family cemeteries. Europe isn't perfect (Earth doesn't do "perfect"), but it has lived through two World Wars, countless atrocities including the Spanish Civil War, and knows a thing or three thousand about losing tens of millions of civilians to conflict. When right wingers say "we're becoming too European" I say bravo: perhaps we will accumulate their historical memory. There are, and I have met many, people in Spain and Italy who remember the horrors of the 1930s and '40s. Perhaps if we still had people who remembered the American Civil War, we would take those lessons to heart. But, of course, we do. We have the entire population of peoples of color whose legacy of oppression has yet to be healed. When I worked aboard ship, I visited Greece. I'll never forget a trip I took to the Hellenic Museum of History in Athens. There, I practiced my (very) limited Greek to ask a question when confronted with a wall-size mural of Grecian history. There, from Zeus onward was a chronological lineage of that country's journey, except for a gap not labeled: 1967 - 1974. "What happened then?" I asked the curator. "Oh," she said in hushed tones. "That was the junta. We do not speak of it." Next year, we are planning a return to Europe, when COVID protocols allow. All of my life, I have known that one day I would visit sites of the Holocaust. Having been to Europe numerous times over the last 40 years, there always seems to have been a reason not to make the hegira. However, after the bullet we just dodged -- and may yet have to dodge again -- and having lived through the year of 2020 when all "bucket list items" seem suddenly to have achieved a new urgency, I know this: in 2021, I will visit Auschwitz. There will never be enough witnesses. There will never be enough of us to say "not here, not now, not ever, never again" Then, I will speak of it. Just as we should not forget nor avoid to speak of 2016 - 2021, the Trump Era. If we do not, someone more talented than Donald Trump will try again. That would be the ultimate denial.