Paper Clips- I Feel So Bad For This

I feel incredibly guilty criticizing this film, but they left me a huge opening and I would feel re-missed if I did not give it some very serious and legitimate criticism. Paper Clips is a documentary about a middle school in Tennessee that collected paper clips as a symbol for those that died in the Holocaust. It like one of my favorite children's books, How Much is a Million, except much sadder. As someone who works with very large numbers everyday and spent most of the past decade specifically training to understand them, I can tell you the human mind is really not capable of understanding how much a million actually is. So when the millions of paper clips, each one representing a human soul dead because of hate, are being poured, making a sound I may never forget, into the cattle car memorial at the end, it is a jarring and unsettling image.

The project began with the goal of collecting 6,000,000 paper clips to represent the Jews which died in the Holocaust and the number 6,000,000 is mentioned dozens of times during the film. Where this movie deserves to be criticized, is its single mention of 11,000,000, the total number of victims of the Holocaust. And when this single mention occurs it sounds like, "We collected 29,000,000 paper clips, but 29,000,000 doesn't have anything to do with the Holocaust. Let's use 11,000,000. That has some meaning." For a film primarily focused on tolerance and acceptance for people who are different, this single passing mention of the 5,000,000 non-Jewish Holocaust victims seems extremely disrespectful.

Now that the serious criticism is over, some dark humor:
-Collecting all those paper clips (human souls) required a lot of meticulous record keeping.
-At one point, the principal said the students were "very selective" about which paper clips (human souls) they rounded-up and put into a cattle car where they will rest stacked high on top of one another for all eternity.

One unanswered question:
What happened to the 18,000,000 paper clips that weren't included in the memorial? Have they been released into the wild? Have I been using office supplies with a human soul bonded to them like their an Elric brother?

For the record: I never made fun of the Holocaust or any of it's victims. I just made fun of some kids making a Holocaust memorial.

Nope, still feel like a bastard.