YouTube Interview with Ron Jones

Ron Jones is often asked to explain The Wave! How did it happen? Is it like the movie? Can you teach me how to do it? He has turned down inquiry from Jim Jones of Peoples Temple to magazine editors, scholars, students, skinheads and evangelists. He is constantly asked to advise on plays about The Wave being produced around the world and respond to a website that claims The Wave never took place.

To depict what really happened – to describe his personal feelings and the role of racism/violence in The Wave – Ron chose to perform The Wave only once before a San Francisco audience of students and Holocaust survivors! He recorded this event as a DVD and hoped it would answer all questions. And only once did he respond to a late night phone call to meet Eva Moses, a child at Auschwitz, and join her in the examination of horror. And once, only once did he take Eva Moses story to Hitler’s private chambers in Nuremberg’s God Room to perform a requested exorcism.

“I’m not proud of The Wave but I can’t escape it! It is like a calling that just gets louder! For me The Wave is a story of ghosts. What we can be. The allure of good and evil. Choices. I’m sorry but in the end I can’t answer your questions about The Wave. I am a gym teacher and grandparent. Confused by today’s events. Worried. Feeling unable to affect change. Content to play basketball with a grandchild, listen to the songs in my head. Spitting the poetry of everyday life in quiet reverence.

I suspect the answers you seek are closer than some distant drum beat. It is the choices you make. The decision to include or exclude people from your life. To walk across the room to meet a stranger. The stranger in you and all of us. To trust yourself and others. To fight for justice and equality in the pulse of your life. To love your children. To be silly. Playful. Organize for a sense of community and better life for all. A life that can’t be given away to any fear or tyrant. A life that can’t be planned or explained, only appreciated.

Yes, there is good and evil in what we do. The good in me yearns for freedom. The evil exists at the edge of road rage or a racial slur waiting to explode into a world of perfection, answers and order. I am capable of either.”

Ron Jones

The documentary Lesson Plan contains an extensive interview with Ron Jones and twelve students that participated in The Wave experiment. Told through the eyes of the students this documentary helps explain “who you might have been” and “what you are capable of doing” during the rise of fascism and the holocaust. Perhaps most frightening of all, Lesson Plan exposes the use of blind obedience to keep people fearful and intolerant of others. Sound familiar?

See this website for additional information about the Wave Musical and the various books, TV, and feature film adaptations of this story.

See the Lesson Plan Movie website for information about the documentary Lesson Plan by students in the original classroom.

You will find more information about the history of The Wave here.