When I was a kid, I hated to hear a grown-up tell me a story that began with, \u2018When I was a kid.\u201d \u00a0Nevertheless, when I was a kid\u2026<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00a0(though I never understood why anyone would think Germany or Japan might bomb Seneca).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I remember standing on a street corner one night and wildly ringing a dinner bell as the grown-ups around me celebrated joyfully.\u00a0 The town\u2019s 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\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
After that I lived in Aiken, future home of the \u201cH-bomb Plant\u201d, from 1945-49 \u2013 age 6-10. My war memories from Aiken are of members of my father\u2019s generation coming home from war.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I can\u2019t speak for Black people because Aiken was so racially segregated then that I barely knew Black people existed.).<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0I also grew up understanding that the slaughter would still be going on if we Americans hadn\u2019t gone over there and helped stop it.\u00a0 Backing up the verity of that understanding is the fact that that generation is known today as the Greatest Generation.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s direct prot\u00e9g\u00e9, his mirror image — to be our president.<\/p>\n
I still cannot understand how we could do that.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 \u00a0It seems almost treasonous that we would ignore our ancestors\u2019 lessons and sacrifices and abandon them like that.\u00a0 But we did.<\/p>\n
More on that later, but first it must be clear in all\u00a0 our minds that Trump is literally a Hitler wannabe.<\/p>\n
During Trump\u2019s first marriage he studied Hitler\u2019s Mein Kampf<\/em> 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 \u2013 and still follows — Hitler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n And that is what has happened.\u00a0 Trump did exactly that, it worked, and he is still doing it.\u00a0 He is even still telling his preposterous \u201eBig Lie\u201c that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and his minions still believe him despite all the overwhelming evidence that proves otherwise.<\/p>\n
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