Brian Greenspun

This is the time of year for reflection. Whether we have been good or bad, kind or not, understanding or callous to the plaint of others, and Americans in spirit and deed or just in the desire to pursue our own dreams at the expense of others.

This is a joyous time of the year. Hallmark’s Christmas movies abound, hot chocolate tastes better, and little kids from all walks of life walk with a bounce in their step and, mostly, a smile on their little faces.

How can you not like Christmastime?

And then, of course, there is Christmastime, 2018, in America. What should be the best place on Earth to be — even in the worst of times it is still better than all the others — seems a bit off.Whether it is the politics of divisiveness that has defined our country for the past couple of years or, worse, the rise of racial hatred, anti-Semitism and the irrational fear of the other that has overtaken our daily lives and waking moments, the United States is today a place where anxiety rules the day and outright fear grips our nights. Citizens turn against each other for no good reasons, and ignorance trumps enlightenment every day — as preached to us over what we call the “news channels” on cable television and other means of media fakery on Facebook, Twitter and the like.

And, oh, what is a lowly citizen to do in the face of such bad tidings? How do we rescue our democracy — the greatest on Earth and what must remain the beacon to the world — from what seems daily to be a spiraling toward, well, something awful?

One place to look for guidance is from a time not long after World War II and during the heyday of the Greatest Generation as it built America into the greatest place on earth.

We all know the attention paid to the words of our 34th president of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower. As he ended his two terms as leader of the free world, he famously warned his fellow citizens to be wary of the military-industrial complex that was poised to consume our country in the 1950s and has succeeded in the short few decades that have followed to do just that. Ike was right!

What most of us haven’t heard, though, is President Eisenhower’s words to a World War II veteran in 1959, which may hold even greater meaning for us today. The story of Ike’s warning is starting to make the rounds, so I thought I should share it.

In those days, people actually wrote letters to one another, so their words were more thoughtful and their penmanship was fully legible. The president answered Robert J. Biggs, a man concerned about something big — the missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union. The idea that the Russians were more powerful than America was causing sleepless