OFF THE CUFF: Writings are eye-openers

— I haven’t heard if any Eagle Observer readers were able to attend the lecture by Elie Wiesel last Wednesday at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville.

I wish I had been able to attend. From the report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the brief clips on area TV stations, the appearance of Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was everything I would have expected it to be.

Wiesel, his mother, sister and father were imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald Nazi concentration camps in 1944. His mother and sister were killed. He and his father were slave laborers. Laterhis father was also killed before the teenage son was liberated at the end of World War II.

His many lectures and writings describing the horror of the Holocaust have earned him the respect that one who saw and suffered so much deserves. It is his words that should resonate with everyone, in America and worldwide, in opposing such tyranny and practices that even now are seen in so many parts of the world.

Several years ago I read his small volume, “Night,” which brought shudders and tears as I read his descriptions of the atrocities, the killing, the burning,the unmentionables which he saw and experienced as a youth, the murders of hundreds of thousands at the hands of hatred.

I wrote a Cuff describing how the book impressed me and the idea that “Night” should be required reading by every high school senior and, of course, in every institute of higher learning. The lessons in that small volume can and would bring the reality of what despotism does to homes and hearts and especially a challenging realism to oppose such.

I sent a copy of the column to the author. I don’t know why. I guess because of the impact of his words and of their importance to mankind.

More than a year later, unexpectedly, a letter from Mr. Wiesel arrived, thanking me for my thoughts. A form letter? Perhaps. But,convincingly, it reinforced my belief in the goodness of the man who, now in his 80s, still labors against the evils that mankind can perpetrate against mankind.

I’m sure the hundreds, standing room only, and the several hundred outside the lecture hall linked with speakers, came away from last Wednesday night’s experience with much thoughtfulness. And if they hadn’t already read “Night,” the small volume will surely be gripped in many hands during the days ahead.

Now, a brief change of direction. I have just completed reading another book, not the real book but a Reader’s Digest condensed version that appeared in 1945.

The title of that volume, “Road to Serfdom,” is eyecatching. Its words are mind grabbing and frightening. The author, Friedrich Hayek, spells outin logical and understandable sentences a possible future of not only America but of civilized people everywhere.

What makes it so mind numbing is to read how Hayek described, in the early 1940s, the path America was destined to travel and how and why it has reached its position as a socialist-type state today.

You don’t believe it? Read the book. At least scan through the condensed version that is available on the Internet under Hayek's name.

How casually we as a people have slipped and continue unwittingly and unintended along a road to Serfdom, while leaving behind what has made our country great: Serfdom’s antithesis, Freedom. And, unfortunately, Hayek postulates it is Freedom itself that can hasten its own destruction.

Dodie Evans is editor emeritus of the Westside Eagle Observer and may be contacted by email at [email protected].

Opinion, Pages 5 on 03/14/2012