Our granddaughter attends a high school in a town with a population of roughly seven thousand people.  The town's high schools are rated quite highly for level of academic performance.  At that high school there is one history teacher in particular who has been responsible over the years for inviting Holocaust survivors to speak to the school's students to ensure they are aware of the realities surrounding that dread episode of fairly modern history.

Other subjects of more current social studies are broached among the students in various of their classes.  Our granddaughter is taking a World Religions course this year.  In some of those classes, not necessarily that one, students have been exposed to various scenarios, and their opinions elicited with respect to their perceptions surrounding those social conventions.

There was the debate over whether or not they felt it was right for people bearing signs identifying a foetus as a living child and abortion representing infanticide.  There was another on protests against same-sex marriage and the rights of alter-gendered people within society.  There was one recently on what the Grade 11 students felt personally about a video showing a woman handing out Holocaust-denial literature on the street.

Opinion coming from the students is always mixed.  But it tends to reflect the values of a rural community.  Invariably, our granddaughter comes away from these exchanges upset at what she calls the utter stupidity of people, their unwillingness to let others live in peace.  Enough so that she scorns Canada's pride in its homogeneous equality provisions, and its vaunted multiculturalism.  Bigotry, as far as she is concerned is rampant.

She feels that someone handing out such literature as Holocaust denial should simply be allowed to do whatever they're doing, feeling personally assured that reason will always prevail.  That reasonably intelligent people will simply ignore the message and go about their business, deflating the purpose of the Holocaust denier. 

On the other hand, she is livid with fury over one of her classmates who blithely stated his smugly opinionated position that there is no need to be concerned over the Holocaust, over denials of its having existed as a reality "because it doesn't have anything to do with us, anyway".