I was supposed to be in Paris this week. The trip was a long-awaited personal pilgrimage to the beaches of Normandy and the massacred town of Oradour-sur-Glane and the secret tunnels in Lyon. It was meant to be a trip to revere those who sacrificed against a tyrant and recognize those who lived the horror, and those they left behind.
The beauty of the hushed and holy beaches on the western coast of France, and the rest of the remains memorialized across Europe, is that in the end, tyrants never win. Tyrants always lose.
What the beaches of Normandy teach us is the depths of human nature in reacting to such tyrants.