The one day of the year I absolutely hate living on the American continent is the Monday after Superbowl. Sunday of the actual event is fine, because of our asynchronous living style, restraint social circle and lack of access to the television. In the worst case scenario, some Superbowl echoes will catch up with me on the social media, but in a distorted way. Whatever happens at Superbowl, all I’m gonna hear about is the racial and gender analysis. Last year it was Rihanna. This year it was the irony of our show must go on during the genocide.

It’s Monday that makes me suffer, because a) everyone but me spent their precious Sunday watching Superbowl, b) everyone seems to really care about which team with an offensive and culturally inapropriate name won in this game that only North Americans seem to understand, c) the Europeans who don’t understand the game and, I know for fact, don’t care about it, pretend to care to blend in, which qualifies them as traitors, d) nobody gives a damn of wants to talk about anything else. Sometimes, the Monday excitement spills over to Tuesday, so I am legitimately worried about surviving for straight seven hours in the office.

I remember reading a story, I don’t know if it was true or fictional, about a small German town adjacent to a nazi concentration camp. At the end of the war, when the camp was liberated, the residents of the town told the journalists, or maybe to the allied soldiers, that they had had no idea of what was happening in the camp. The journalists wondered, how it was possible, hadn’t they seen the thick smoke rising from the crematorium chimneys. To which, the residents replied that when the smoke was blowing their way, they turned their heads and looked the other way.

By some weird association, I am thinking about another story, about a ship named Saint-Louis, filled with the Jewish children and women, that was circling the Atlantic ocean, from one port to another, getting rejection after rejection, because no one wanted these Jewish refugees. In the end, the ship sailed back to Belgium and most of its passengers ended up in the concentration camps.

I am thinking about these phantom chimneys and phantom ships and how diligently we are looking the other way. I am not pointing fingers, as I recognize myself in the crowd. I wonder if we are caught in one of those cautionary tales, where people are condemned to relive some terrifying experience over and over, until they learn a lesson from it. In which case, we have failed again. In which case, I am sorry.