DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 When I was eleven years old, a beloved English teacher suggested I read “Jane Eyre.” When I said that I didn’t like books written by women, she told me that I was “too smart to be prejudiced.”

I looked up the word and contemplated it. I allowed it to change my path in life, a journey that led me from Brontë to Zora Neale Hurston and Sylvia Plath, among so many others, not to even mention James Baldwin.

I think I wasn’t as prejudiced as I was badly programmed.

Now, I’m afraid that we are losing the ability to see progressions in language, vis-à-vis, the journey from unlearned, to badly influenced, to prejudiced, to ethnocentric, to xenophobic, to bigoted, to paranoid, and, finally, to racist.

The labeling of any nuanced action as the unassailable extremity of racism seems, at least to me, to pass over so many lesser manifestations that might possibly be treatable via gentle teaching, thus halting a journey that is bound to end badly. There should be a hole in the prison wall of distrust through which one could escape ere hatred takes hold.

Failure may doom us as a society if we force the young to choose poorly and permanently, via the placing of labels. We begin life so full of wonder. What happens along way?

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 There’s a French term: “L'esprit de l'escalier” or  ”staircase wit” meaning the predicament whereby one thinks of the perfect reply too late, i.e. as when going down the stairs. One for me in 2024 came from overhearing two well-educated young men discussing the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

“I don’t like either candidate,” one said.

“I don’t either,” the other said, leaving the conversation hanging like the Sword of Damocles.

Many times since, I’ve wished I’d said something along the lines of:

Fellers, it’s not a popularity contest.

It’s not a reality-TV show where the principles of theater determine a winner.

It’s not an issue to be regarded as lightly as choosing a coffee shop.

It is the result of a hard-fought battle that allows you to cast a vote for the future of your country.

It requires complex analysis in determining which party, admitting neither meets our beliefs exactly, will leave our country in better shape.

On a planet with probably less than 100 years of sustainable life remaining, it is a chance to choose leaders that may try to lengthen that life.

It is a chance to choose a party that will offer succor to "the least of those among us," for your near ancestors were likely among that group for a time.

It is a change to pay homage to decency in America.

It is complex situation like the Greek myth of Scylla and Charybdis in which a choice must be made between two less than perfect outcomes.

You men will not face the situation I faced in which a faceless Draft Board could send your young bodies to war. But you face your own test of love of country. For goodness sake, treat it with the respect it deserves. Your children and grandchildren demand it of you.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 An acquaintance of mine, formerly a friend, finished a long career recently in the federal government caring for “the least of those among us.”

If that person was still employed, at any moment a 19-year-old thug could walk in, tell them that they were fired, their email was discontinued, and they had only a few minutes to exit the workplace.

The odd thing is the fact that the person is a confirmed MAGAT, dedicated to supporting the dismantling of America government. The only discernable reason is adherence to a set of life-rules set down by anonymous bronze-age scribblers.

Aliens of the future who study the ashes of this planet will shake whatever serves as their heads at findings like this.

DEFEAT FASCISAM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Isn't it odd that the MAGAs never offer a precise date at which America was so great? You know, the time they want to return to.

Seems that they indicate somewhere in the 1950s. Or was it in 1981 when the last recorded lynching took place in America, an affair in the MAGA state of Alabama.

Nah, I don't think MAGAs, particularly in my state, would connote greatness with the end of lynchings.

Should we eliminate the years from 1955 to 1975. That's when young men were being forced to go to war, many, including me, against their will. But wait, that didn't affect most of them, particularly the leaders. So maybe.

Or 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy? Nah, a step in the right direction, but that brought in LBJ and passage of the Civil Rights Act.

I guess it was the Reagan years when we had a stock market crash, increased deficits, and felonious activities emerging from the White House.

At any rate, do they not realize that whatever date they choose, the very safeguards that they are now bent on destroying were then in place?

Wait. Do they mean the 1850s?

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

Real men do things differently than do charlatans. Take, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower. When he was General Eisenhower (five-star) and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in he directed the Allied invasion of France in June 1944.

As author Steve Drummond points out in his engaging book “The Watchdog – How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two” the invasion, despite modern mythology, was far from a certain success.

As a result, General Eisenhower did what real men do. He accepted the possibility of failure and made sure where the blame would lie. In one of the most famous speeches never given, he penned the following and put it in his wallet, just in case.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

Try as we might, we could never, had our imaginations been gifted for a moment with the talents of a Shakespeare, imagine the present goofball, who some call the President of the United States of America, achieving such a pinnacle of manhood.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 What is bothering me today is this question of America’s enemies. My country had me, along with hundreds of thousands of my peers, fighting them during four of the peak years of my life. Now just who was the enemy at the time for me and the others?

They say it was the Vietnamese.

I don’t think so.

Vietnam was the excuse.

The real enemy was Russia. The two countries were fighting it out by proxy. China was on the sidelines, pitching in and hoping both of the others would lose. Sound familiar?

In my opinion, as one who had a vested interest in the affair:

We, including those whose names are on The Wall, were fighting Russia. Now, after more than 50 years, Russia has won.

Will Trump and Musk scrape the names off The Wall?

Or will they just fire the ones responsible for its care?

Either way, betrayal is a hard pill to swallow. Just my opinion. Share yours if you wish.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Some years ago, when my country demanded it of me, I spent four years of my life, one in a war zone, helping protect the world from Russian thugs. To a large extent, and according to general consensus, we failed when the country we defended yielded to Communism.

In a larger context, though, we and our country accomplished much in a global economic sense. The U.S.S.R. supported the country where we fought and that support, accompanied by other efforts at world domination, cost a lot. In short, we bled Russia dry. Our system worked. Hers didn't.

And the wall came tumbling down. A global power saw itself demolished from within.

But wait.

The idea of destruction from within took sprout like a spring seed planted in warm soil.

If guns and cannons didn't work, what might? Could it be money? The lure of wealth and power is much greater than love of country. Why not try it?

We now, therefore, sit seemingly helpless as our country, the beloved one to whom I gave those four years, falls from a rot within. We may be one of the few countries in history that chose its destruction in a fair election. Russia will gloat as she changes the flag I love. I'm too old to care.

But I do.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 I'm not the best or most decent person, so don't take this as so-called "virtue signaling." Back during the Covid 19 crisis, though, when they sent us all money, I was afraid to go out and spend mine. Instead, I sent it to a nonprofit here that I know serves "the least of those among us."

I did profit though. I sat down and got to thinking. I decided there were a lot of people who were, in fact, gonna go out and spend theirs. I started researching retail outlets and made a list of those who were solid but whose stock was temporarily undervalued. I concluded that a little bump in America's spending habits had the potential for making money.

In short, I did some day trading. Made nearly $30,000 ere things started cooling off. We're living comfortably now, partly assisted by that windfall. Periodically I send part of it to that same nonprofit.

How come I trust it? I first saw the man who created it years ago at a festival walking around with a basket attached with a sign asking for money for the poor. Later, I decided that an organization founded by such a man could be trusted.

Now a majority of Americans place that kind of trust in people who inherited their money, not the ones who walked the streets like the Galilean asking us to remember the needy. It has brought America to an ugly place.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Sometimes when Spring is about to break out and the winter sun moderates, I think of one of the two men who influenced my life the most, particularly the one who spent the winter of 1944-45 in the Ardennes fighting the Nazis. I remember some of the things he told over the supper table or while we were tending cattle.

When quietly sitting and watching patches of sunlight break through a tree line. "That always reminds me of seeing those parachutes hanging from the trees."

On artillery barrages: "You just prayed to live one more second, just one more second."

On fear: "The ones who got killed were the new ones who would freeze when they told us to move up."

On karma: "It was during the last couple of days of the war. We were camped at a spa in Germany and the Germans were up in the hills. They would lob a shell over from time to time, just getting rid of their ammunition. One landed near us in the chow line and took the head off of a man just standing there. And he was the shortest guy in the company."

On life: "It's hard to kill a man. It's amazing how much a person can take."

On luck: I was by a window when the shell landed. Shrapnel hit me all over but I survived it. There was an iron stove across the room that was completely destroyed."

On Russians: "They would ask us, after the war, "What you gonna do when we come after you?"

It may be best that he is not alive to see what they are doing to the country he defended.