If you allow it to, the world will break your heart every single day of your life.

But what is even worse is that sometimes, it seems as though the only way to avoid heartbreak is to harden your heart and no matter how terrible the news you hear, just tell yourself that it doesn't affect you or your family.

I grew up hating a major part of my own heritage -- the German part -- because of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. It took me a lot of years, and two years living in Austria in the '70s, before I was able to see that people aren't really that different in different parts of the world. Put them in a position where they're afraid and they'll react badly.

[caption id="attachment_916" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Vienna"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/1970165.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-916" title="1970165" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/1970165-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

But I don't know if there was a day during the time I lived in Vienna that I didn't remember that Austria was the country that gave the world Hitler.

I'm not Jewish, but I have Jewish relatives on my father's side and I have read extensively about the Holocaust. And let's be honest. It really wasn't possible to grow up during the baby boom years and not be aware of what Hitler did to the six million (and a few million others who weren't Jews).

But you know what? Growing up on the East Coast in the '50s and '60s, I never heard one word about the Armenian genocide, and even though I had heard bits and pieces about it, it has only been recently that I've bothered to find out more. I haven't known many Armenian-Americans in my lifetime (although one or two more than I realized at the time), so it just wasn't something that was on my radar.

[caption id="attachment_918" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Armenian genocide memorial"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/armenia_genocide_memorial.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-918" title="armenia_genocide_memorial" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/armenia_genocide_memorial-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

But just as I started discovering a lot of wonderful music through Charles Aznavour, when I noticed that he was of Armenian descent and had written and performed several songs about what happened from 1915-23, I started looking into it.

Did you know that Armenia was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion (in the fourth century)? And did you know that the genocide was almost certainly about religion, with a Muslim government in the Ottoman Empire deciding to get rid of a Christian minority?

Reading about it has made me ineffably sad.

But there are so many horrific stories like that in the world, throughout the centuries. What we did to the American Indians under the name of manifest destiny in the 18th and 19th centuries is horrifying too.

It's funny. I remember studying history in school and when we heard the term "manifest destiny," it was said in a very positive way, as if we were doing God's work in settling the continent.

But let's be honest. We weren't any worse than the Turks ... or the Germans ... or dozens of other dominant populations who did their best to exterminate subservient ones.

It's why we're told in Psalm 146, "Put not your trust in princes."

Everybody knows that line, but the ones that follow are important too:

<em>"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man in whom there is no help. When his breath departs he returns to his earth; on that very day his plans perish."</em>

People will break your heart every time if you let them.

That's why it's important to remember that for every person who has disappointed us, there is probably someone we have disappointed. We can't be smug or self-satisfied. We ought to do two things every day of our lives -- stay sensitive enough to be touched by the injustices of the world, but be strong enough to strive to be better than we were the day before.