Morning Thoughts: January 14,

At the risk of belaboring the point, I think there is something else that bothers me about using intemperate language toward other countries.

My father’s family immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s. They came despite the fact that our country had recently suffered over 600,000 deaths in a fight over whether to allow the enslavement of one race of humans by another. Immigrants evidently saw promise in the new land instead of a tragic and incoherent history.

My father attended a one-room school in rural Arkansas. His grandfather barely spoke English and still owned a pair of wooden shoes he had brought over from Germany. His father had been subjected, as a youth, to indentured servitude. Ties to the old country were strong.

Daddy would have been five or six when America entered the First World War. His schoolmates echoed the opinions of many important members of our government toward the country of our ancestry. I’m not sure they whether they called it a “shithole” country or not. But the children called my father a “Dirty Hun,” despite the fact that one of his uncles wore our county’s uniform.

Later, as the second of the world wars initiated by our ancestral country and its allies raged, America was fairly certain of who our friends and enemies were. But history is fluid and its meanderings unpredictable. The enemies of today may be the friends of tomorrow. Hatred is a weak anchor with which to moor our ship of values. Americans should have realized that by now.

Some have. Some haven’t. Many of our mothers and fathers, coming out of America’s greatest economic depression, watched, in horror, the results of a nation’s people slowly allowing themselves to be led and governed by men who loathed and abominated minorities. The resulting millions of dead cry out to us from the pits of history, pleading for us not to repeat the mistake.

Will we? My reading of history tells me that the seeds of World War Two didn’t instantly produce full-grown plants from a once-dead land. They sprouted first as an identification of scapegoats on which to blame current problems. They flourished as minorities suffered demonization and good people watched in silence. They grew limbs and leaves as minorities lost the right to human decency and their friends and neighbors went about their business.

Then the orators took over. Intemperate language became acceptable, even lauded. Hatred became the norm. War became the solution of choice. Isolation of the educated and ghettoization of the powerless went unchecked. Eventually, the ovens appeared, next, the smoke columns.

Maybe the crops of that war all germinated the day a young boy called a classmate a “dirty Jew.”

Maybe the fruits of those crops blossomed the day the Fuhrer denounced an entire race as vermin.

Maybe those crops fed the troops who invaded country, after country, that the Fuhrer had denounced in intemperate terms.

Too often, our mouth is the gateway to our heart. Let us hope that one person’s mouth is not the gateway to our nation’s heart.