Stories about my Father 16

During the first year of the pandemic, Governor Cuomo of New York could probably have been elected President. Right after 9/11, Mayor Giuliani could also probably have won a national election. It wasn’t until later when we’d collected all the pieces of information that we hadn’t even been aware existed at the time, that we realized we’d dodged a bullet.

How do people like Hitler and Mussolini come to power? In the middle of a crisis, they have a way forward. It doesn’t matter if it’s practical, sensible, or even morally right. It’s a way out. They radiate strength and when tumultuous events make everyone feel helpless and weak, people grab onto them like a life preserver. When our last President was elected, his supporters felt like they were in crisis. Right or wrong, they felt that their way of life was being threatened. A black man had been President of the United States for eight years. Women and homosexuals were running for office and becoming accepted as members of society. The people who voted for the last guy saw in him somebody who would stop all that from happening. He was going to reestablish the country so that it looked like what generations of prejudice and a steady erosion of the educational system had taught them was how it should look. Those of us on the other side can look at them all and think that they are delusional but given how that chunk of the population has been wired, that crisis, however absurd it may seem, was very real to all of them. They elected that last guy to save them.

Then a real crisis struck. COVID-19 took over and the man who was going to make the country great again had not the slightest idea what to do. Instead of trying to fix the possibly unfixable, he, instead, told everyone that it wasn’t happening. It was an illusion. Nothing to see here, ignore it all and keep moving. As of this morning, there are 6,488,072 dead from COVID worldwide.

I am writing this to understand my father better, not to try and write another history of World War II. There is plenty of historical material relating to the war already out there - far more than a whole team of people could absorb in multiple lifetimes. At the end of the day, though, World War II was just two years out of my father’s 88-year life. Even so, those two years probably shaped him and changed him more than anything else that happened to him. Why?

An overwhelming amount of World War II history is presented as a glorified adventure story. Innocent young men and women are thrown into extreme circumstances, they struggle through unspeakable hardships only to emerge victorious having been forged and tempered as heroic ideals. The people who didn’t make it, who died or suffered mental collapses, are the red-shirted members of the USS Enterprise’s landing parties. Oh well. We won and the heroes made it. Let’s bow our heads for a moment for all of those who didn’t. Great.

President Roosevelt was elected during a crisis. The Great Depression happened in the middle of President Hoover’s first term in office, and he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. Roosevelt came along and with all the bravado of any of the guys in history who turned out to be so terrible, told everybody that he could fix it. The country breathed a sigh of relief. This guy can fix it, let’s choose him. And over 60% of the country put Roosevelt in office.

Roosevelt’s solutions, which were far from universally accepted, worked. After two terms, it was clear that the crisis was getting better - so much better - even though it wasn’t over yet, that everyone elected him for a third time. Then another crisis began brewing.

As a species, we human beings don’t seem to respond to a brewing crisis, we tend to wait to respond until it boils over. Despite all the evidence that we are heading towards a climate crisis, we are not mobilizing to try and stop it. It isn’t convenient now to stop using fossil fuels, so let’s just wait and see. There will need to be a cataclysmic weather event that destroys a first-world city before we unify behind the push. That might not even do it, but something will happen that directly impacts everybody, and only then will attitudes change. For the moment, we can just turn on the AC or the heat.

It was apparent to anyone who was paying attention that what Hitler was doing in Europe was not going to end well. Even so, it was not our problem. It was theirs. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland.  England and France declared war on Germany. We didn’t do anything. In 1940, Germany took over France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Then they started bombing England. Still not our problem.

Roosevelt could see where this was going. We were not ready for war. It had been twenty years since the end of World War I and the new generation of potential recruits were not in any way trained to fight. In many ways, it is like that now. I was trying to picture what it would be like if we were suddenly thrust into another conflict and had to draft the Gen Z kids and send them off to war. Oh, but that will never happen. That’s what everyone in the late 1930s thought, too. My father’s generation was no more prepared to fight than the Gen Z generation is now.

Roosevelt started putting together a proposal to institute a peacetime draft. He wanted to be able to mobilize an army for what he was sure was coming. People took to the streets in protest all over the country. Martin Sweeny, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, and Beverly Vincent a Democrat congressman from Kentucky got into a fist fight on the Congressional floor over it. Against this torrent of opposition, Roosevelt was finally able to pass the Selective Training and Service Act in September of 1940. You can see by the title alone, how much opposition there was to the idea of a draft. Nowhere does the word “draft” appear. The Act required all men between the ages of 21 and 35 just to register for potential service.

The in-fighting continued for a few more weeks until December 7, 1941, and then it simply stopped. The Japanese attack on Pearly Harbor was the event that was needed to unify the country and unify it, it did. Once we were officially at war the next day, most opposition to wartime plans evaporated.

Why do we fight wars? We fight wars because we choose the wrong people to lead us. Hitlers and Napoleons, and Mussolinis and Trumps don’t just spring out of nowhere and barge in. We invite them in. We open the doors and beg them to lead us out of whatever crisis, real or imagined, we are in. Once they are in, as long as we don’t have to think about it ourselves, we let them do whatever they want. When they’ve gone too far, it’s too late. We then sacrifice an entire generation of young people trying to get rid of them.

Democracy requires constant vigilance. It must have an informed voting block or else it leads to catastrophe. The checks and balances in our government are there for a reason and they must be upheld and strictly followed. Attention must be paid. Always.

Hitler can seem like nothing more than a black and white logo from the distant past. That he was a full-color flesh and blood opportunist like our last President is something very easy to forget. God bless all the lawmakers in Washington who are doing their best with the hearings about the January 6th coup attempt to make what happened then seem real and important and unspeakably dangerous to a whole country of people who aren’t paying enough attention to it. If we let this guy off the hook, or worse, let him slide back into power then we truly have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Tyrants and dictators aren’t created by acts of God, they are created by ordinary working people who want an easy way out. War is avoidable because tyrants and dictators are avoidable.

My father had to fight in World War II because the German people hoped that the short Austrian guy with the funny mustache would solve all their problems. That we are in danger of doing the same thing that they did nearly eighty years later, beggars belief.

All we need to do to break this cycle that mankind has been in for uncountable millennia is to wake up. It truly is that simple.

Wake up.