Be Thou Not Afraid

Sometimes I think things happen because they are planned. Sometimes I think they happened by accident. Sometimes I even wonder about divide intervention.

Last evening, one of those occurred. Brenda was in the kitchen. I was doing my part to help with supper by reclining and selecting a film to watch with the meal, teamwork at its best.

A black and white trailer appeared announcing the film Good Night and Good Luck. I recognized it immediately as the film about legendary TV pioneer Edward R. Murrow. The film, I knew, dealt with his courageous stand against Joe McCarthy and his evil henchman Roy Cohn. I knew the film was about the time we almost lost America.

The trailer read, “America was afraid.” I can remember those times. A country we had once befriended had turned into our worst enemy. It threatened our national security, our lives, our homes, and our way of life. We were afraid, very afraid. Those in power, and those who claimed to speak for them, made us so. We were made to contemplate the most primal of fears by hiding under our desks at school.

We had learned about the causes there. Russia had sat out WWII until America had carried the brunt and had been bled white. Then, when victory had been assured, Russia and Great Britain had jumped in and taken some credit for the final victory.

Well, that’s not exactly the way it happened. That’s what we had been taught in school. I had to find out, much later and on my own, what had really happened. At the time, we only knew that Russia hated us and that a Communist was worse than the Antichrist. The faintest, most specious, most fragile connection to one was cause for “social death.”

Editors note: It’s different now. Much more different. One of the current “soldiers of darkness,” a Franklin Graham, told us when he visited our state, “Humanists are worse than communists." Oops, that took me in, despite my country's having made me spend a year of my life fighting communists.

Back then, though. with the specter of dark Armageddon hanging over our heads and promoted by the communists, we went about our business because we weren’t one. But, when I was around ten or eleven, national affairs entered my life. Oh, I had lived through the horror of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election. My sister had assured me that, if a Republican got elected as president again, we would have another “depression.” “What’s that?” I had asked.

“That’s when the communists will take our house and our store and we will have to live in tents out in the woods.”

Oh, that kind of a depression.

School ended without a depression, though I had hidden my Boy Scout compass and a couple of other items I won’t mention (mainly reading material) in a dark corner of my daddy’s barn. The summer of 1954 came.

Summers were hot in Arkansas. Still are. We played outdoors anyway, mostly. There was this new thing, though.

Television.

During the day, shows mainly consisted of filmed plays where adults said silly things to one another. Sometime during the day, though, on the one channel we had, they played a cowboy show. That summer, it was different. Instead of the cowboy show, there were just a bunch of old men, some in uniforms, arguing with one another, mentioning the communists a lot. We watched as much as we could bear, then went and made a cowboy show of our own, practicing living in the woods in tents.

Yep, it was the result of when Joe McCarthy made the cosmic mistake of taking on the United States Army. It almost makes me cry to think I may have actually watched Joseph Welch live when he destroyed the Monster with “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

We cleansed America of the evil of McCarthyism, almost treating is a joke as time went by. You can’t imagine the surprise to those like me who are watching it arise again like some 1950s monster liberated by nuclear testing. Just substitute ‘immigrants” for “communists.”

I fear, and this is only my opinion, that our country is afraid again. Yes, I think, afraid. We’re afraid on the one hand that our country has lost its bearings and is adrift in a fickle sea buffeted by angry waves, with our anchors ripped away by social media and Fox “news.” We’re afraid because some of our dearest friends seem to have awakened from an alien pod of hate, bigotry, and mendacity fostered by a pro-wrestling promoter and his cadre of faux “Christians.”

We need, I believe, another cleansing.

If I offend. I’m not sorry. America is too great a country for silence in the face of evil. If only we could ask Joe Welch.

Oh, and the high point of the movie I mentioned was when then U.S. Senator from Arkansas, John McClellan, became a large hero by attacking Roy Cohn in a way that only old, articulate, brave Senators from our state once would do.