Historical Events of the Day

The significance of the first event is due to its impact on the present day, not only from a political standpoint but a cultural and sociological as well. On August 4, 1961, Barack Hussein Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, HI. Both students at the time, his mother from Kansas and his Kenyan father divorced less than three years later. (And as many Republicans would have you believe, the exact moment of Obama's birth, or possibly even before, is when his parents and other family members, hospital officials, the Hawaii state government, the governments of both Kenya and the United States, the Democratic Party, etc. conceived their conspiracy to put Obama into the White House. Because, of course, we all know how racially tolerant the 1960s in America were.) Luckily that theory has been proven to be complete nonsense and the rest, as they say, is history.

The other event from history which occurred on August 4th also had a huge impact on the cultural and sociological world. Acting on a tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captured fifteen-year-old Anne Frank and her family in a sealed off area of a warehouse in Amsterdam. Eluding detection by living in rooms with blacked out windows and never flushing the toilet during the day, the Franks had taken shelter in the warehouse in July 1942 to avoid deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. With her final entry into her now famous diary on August 1st, Anne and her family were arrested just three days later (and after twenty-five months in seclusion). They were transported to a concentration camp in Holland and, in September, Anne and the majority of her family were shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German occupied Poland. And then, in the fall of 1944, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne and her sister Margot were moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Suffering from the deplorable conditions of the camp, both sisters caught typhus and died in March 1945. (The camp was liberated by the British less than two months later.) Her father Otto was the only member to survive and, following the war, he returned to Amsterdam. He was reunited with Miep Gies, one of his former employees who had assisted in sheltering him and his family. Gies handed Anne's diary to him, which Gies had fortunately discovered undisturbed after the Nazi raid. Since its initial publication in 1947, "The Diary of Anne Frank" has been translated into more than fifty languages and serves as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, silenced in the Holocaust.

Despite her and her family's two arduous years in hiding, Anne wrote the following as one of her last diary entries: "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them because, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out." I included this because I feel it is also extremely poignant to the trials and tribulations that President Obama has (and will continue to) experienced during his first six months in office.