We’re In This Together

When I was a kid, I hated to hear a grown-up tell me a story that began with, ‘When I was a kid.”  Nevertheless, when I was a kid…

I spent my first six years of life in the then-little town of Seneca, S.C., in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from 1939-1945, and some of my memories from there involve World War II.

I remember the tops of headlights being painted black to make it hard for German or Japanese pilots to see the cars should they bomb Seneca  (though I never understood why anyone would think Germany or Japan might bomb Seneca).

I remember my mother cutting both ends off tin cans in the kitchen, then flattening the cans and putting them outside my bedroom window so a truck could come by occasionally and collect them to be melted down and converted into ammunition.

I remember standing on a street corner one night and wildly ringing a dinner bell as the grown-ups around me celebrated joyfully.  The town’s fire truck, siren blaring, townsfolks hanging onto its sides and waving exuberantly, plowed its way back and forth through the crowd. They were celebrating the war’s end.

After that I lived in Aiken, future home of the “H-bomb Plant”, from 1945-49 – age 6-10. My war memories from Aiken are of members of my father’s generation coming home from war.  More than 400,000 of them had given their lives on the battlefields to stop the spread of fascism, but our side had won and the survivors came home as heroes. Everybody was happy (white people were, anyway.  I can’t speak for Black people because Aiken was so racially segregated then that I barely knew Black people existed.).

So, World War II was in my immediate rear-view mirror as I grew up, and therefore stories of how this Nazi Adolf Hitler person had murdered millions of innocent people were fresh, frightening and very real in my mind.  I also grew up understanding that the slaughter would still be going on if we Americans hadn’t gone over there and helped stop it.  Backing up the verity of that understanding is the fact that that generation is known today as the Greatest Generation.

And then, last November, we Americans deserted our parents and grandparents and elected the very thing they went to war to protect us from, a person like Donald Trump — Hitler’s direct protégé, his mirror image — to be our president.

I still cannot understand how we could do that.  How is it possible that we could turn our backs on the more than 16 million Americans who risked their lives, 400,000 of whom lost their lives, to protect us from that very person and his ideas, and elect Donald Trump president?   It seems almost treasonous that we would ignore our ancestors’ lessons and sacrifices and abandon them like that.  But we did.

More on that later, but first it must be clear in all  our minds that Trump is literally a Hitler wannabe.

During Trump’s first marriage he studied Hitler’s Mein Kampf religiously and intently, every night, and during his life as a politician he has used those teachings just as religiously and just as intently. He even followed – and still follows — Hitler’s incredible instruction to dictator wannabes to lie, lie big, and never admit to a lie even if you are proven wrong beyond any shadow of a doubt, because enough people will believe you anyway to make it worth your while.

And that is what has happened.  Trump did exactly that, it worked, and he is still doing it.  He is even still telling his preposterous „Big Lie“ that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and his minions still believe him despite all the overwhelming evidence that proves otherwise.

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His lies led American voters to elect him president last year, he still lies, and it still works.  His sycophants still support him as he leads us down a rabbit hole toward our democracy’s destruction.

Trump hasn’t dispatched innocent people to gas chambers like Hitler did, but he has deported and he does deport suspected criminals who’ve been denied their Constitutional rights to be heard, people who don’t look like him, to an El Salvadoran prison that is known to be a torture chamber, even an “extermination camp”.  And he wants more prisons built like it so he can disappear even more people, including “homegrown” people he doesn’t like.

Trump’s desire is to destroy anything that challenges his power, and his policy is cruelty.   His thoughts on the economy have caused some Wall Streeters to wonder aloud if he is insane.

All that is enough to make me despise him and everything he stands for, but so many Americans don’t.  Instead they praise him, and I can only suppose that one reason for that is that Hitler’s murder of millions of people is a living horror for me, but for people who are further removed from Hitler it is just a statistic.

I also suppose our waning awareness of Hitler‘s and fascism’s record at least partly explains why it was mostly middle-aged and older people who turned out for the nationwide Hands Off rally last April 5.  Perhaps young people just don‘t feel the horror of living under a dictator that older people do.  Someone – I dont know who – once said that the only people who think that living under a dictator is good are people  who  have never lived under one.

Another reason for the light youth turnout may be they have lost hope.  If so, that is truly, truly sad.

But whatever the reason, it is hard to understand because it is their lives we are talking about.  The future belongs to  them, and I  can only  hope they will join us in the fight to keep democracy alive. For their sakes.

Another important segment of our society that mostly stayed home were Black people.

I do not know why they did, but before the rally I read an article by a Black woman who said she was going to sit this one out.  She said she’d sit home with her feet propped up, but no way would she  lift a finger to support the rally.

She believed in the rally, but her point was that Black people have been there and done that.  They fought virtually alone for their rights as human beings, especially during the 1960s, so now it’s time for someone else to pick up the baton and run with it.

That’s sad, and I hope it’s not the prevailing thought among Black people during these stressful times because Black people have more to lose than anyone at the hands of the super-bigot Trump and his ilk.  Black people haven’t faced such a racist bigot as Trump since the days of Ross Burnett, George Wallace and Bull Connor.  Just the fact that Trump’s administration tried to erase the Tuskegee Fliers and Jackie Robinson from history, and his purely racist attack on DEI programs everywhere, should say something.  And in this fight, unlike the 1960s, Black people have the majority of white people on their side, proving it by showing up regularly.

Among Black people who did not vote, leading the way were Black people who earn less than $55,000 a year, and the main reason given was that they felt they would be poorly treated no matter who won.

I hope this pattern changes soon because we’re all needed in this fight now.  No exceptions.  As the legal writer Joyce Vance always ends her posts, “We’re in this together.“