We Are A Cruel Nation
My Parents Would Demand To Know Why
Allow me to write from the heart today. I’m so relieved my Mom and Dad left this world long before they’d be forced to hear “President Trump” and “MAGA” 25 hours a day, eight days a week.
From World War II until their deaths in 2014 and 2016, both worked hard and sacrificed much to build a nation where dictators wouldn’t rule. The nation they constructed, the let freedom ring one, is most certainly on life support.
Mom and Dad were Democrats. And, along with a lot of Republicans in our town and family, elected many flawed presidents with diverse views of what would make and keep America free. FDR and Truman. Eisenhower and Nixon. Kennedy and LBJ. Carter and Reagan. Clinton and Bush (1 and 2) and Obama.
I think anyone with an ego big enough to run for president understands the temptaion of all that power. Yet, FDR haters may disagree, only Nixon got us close to where the White House is today. Nixon got the boot. Republican. Democrat. Didn’t matter. Mom and Dad’s America understood how thoroughly power corrupts.
I don’t think this America, our America, truly grasps the damage done November 5th
Trump Got A Hand Up
Less than HALF the country put ALL our lives in the cross hairs of a convicted felon, rapist, grifter, seditionist, traitor, half-wit, racist, twice impeached, money obsessed, narcissistic, psychopath. Not acting like a dictator “except for day one” has lasted eight days now with no end in sight (I’m writing this on January 28th).
He’s doing exactly what he promised: unleashing chaos, burning down our institutions, trashing our norms, cleaving his enemies, setting his family and himself up for Peron-like rule.
The language in his orgy of so-called “executive orders” is straight out of the Nazi/Stalin/Mussolini playbook. It’s vicious and meant to intimidate. Its ignorant and merciless. It elevates and celebrates cruelty. The U.S. Constitution, rule of law, and human rights are torched. The Mad King and those who voted for him are the arsonists.
My Dad Didn’t Fight Nazis For This America
Dad had just started as a carpenter at the United States Steel Clairton Works when the draft board called. His Dad worked “in the mill” for over 50 years. Being a carpenter meant he might do the same. That would have to wait. He reported for boot camp in New Jersey in February 1943 for the adventure of his life.
Before it was over, Dad had landed on Utah Beach and with his ammo company, supplied the invasion throughout the Cotentin Peninsula then east toward Belgium. He spent his 22nd birthday, Christmas Eve 1944, pulling together men and materiel around Soissons, France for the counter attack at the Battle of the Bulge.
It was a dark moment. Hitler’s last gasp killed hundreds of GI’s. Dad thought for certain he wouldn’t make it to age 23.
He did, returning home in November of 1945 as a victor, one of the millions who saved the world from true evil. To find it in the White House in 2025 would crush him.
My Mom Didn’t Lose Her Brother For This America
Mom was a sophomore in high school when her brother Billy joined the Army Air Corps. She was the youngest and adored him, the middle son, who shielded her from her eldest brother’s bullying and her widowed mother’s negligence. No one wanted Billy to go to war, but Mom saw many of her classmates joining the fight and accepted the inevitable.
In November of 1942, during his last training flight prior to deployment, Billy’s B-26 Marauder disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never recovered. The plane remained lost until 2008 when treasure hunters identified debris from his bomber scatters on the ocean floor 60 feet below the Gulf’s surface.
For 62 years Mom had carried the mystery and burden of an MIA brother, lost in a war to save us from people like the guy half the country thinks is OK. She rarely cursed, but today, I’d bet a lot she’d be hurling some fine language at her TV (always locked on MSNBC).
They Set A Standard
My generation, the baby boomers, were fortunate to grow up around so many people who saved the world from evil. We heard their stories. Learned how they made it through alive while so many didn’t. Regular folks. Democrats and Republicans. They went off to serve their country, then came home and built the American Century. Real patriots. We benefitted immensely from their experience.
We had Jewish friends whose aunts and uncles survived the camps and came to the U.S. to be forever free of dictators and genocide. They viscerally understood what had happened and what must never happen again. At all costs, keep fascist dictators out!
These folks were by no means perfect. Their views on race and women’s rights were of their age. There was some awful language at times. Among them, were white supremacists and what we now know to be Christian Nationalists. Toxic inequity (someone dial up some DEI training, please) permeated their America so long it washed into ours.
But, while they may have marched on the Capitol, they didn’t storm it and threaten to hang the Speaker and Vice President. While they were sure dead Democratic voters in Chicago stole the 1960 election, they didn’t block JFK from office. Ditto for Bush v. Gore.
They hated and feared communism, but refused to out their neighbors and help Joe McCarthy. They disliked protests and draft dodgers but tolerated them. They knew the difference between the so-called “Good War” and the loss of a generation in Vietnam.
Knowing the world regularly produced horrible people like Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito and Stalin, they never stopped paying attention, never put down their guard.
Mom worked the phones in 2008 for Hillary Clinton. Dad was obsessed with, even gave money to, Barak Obama’s campaigns. He wrote many letters to the editor condemning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and warning of government for sale to oligarchs. The constant wars in the Middle East bothered them both greatly.
Now This. Thankfully, They Are Gone
If my Dad somehow appeared to me right now, he’d be using some choice language to demand “Goddammit. What the f**k did you guys do? You have s**t for brains?”
Mom, standing next to him, would be shaking her head. “You don’t have to swear Fred,” she’d scold.
Then to me: “How the hell did you let this happen?”
Indeed. How? We should all be ashamed.