Is this who we are?
My parents had a friend who was born in Germany in the mid-1920s. One day, very unexpectedly, she began talking about her experience as a Dachau prisoner from 1937 until its 1945 liberation. Her parents, “. . . for quite a while, had been worried about the direction the government was going. They were very upset and afraid. . .” When she was 8 or 9 years old, a nearby factory was turned into a concentration camp. It was unbelievable; it was frightening to think this could happen in their neighborhood. Being educated Jews made her parents enemies of the state, so their home was ransacked, they were forced to wear yellow stars-ofDavid, and were all arrested and imprisoned in this camp.
In Dachau she was forced to watch “doctors” experiment on her mother, though she wouldn’t tell us how. She never mentioned children in cages, but did describe the camp’s harsh environment, cruel treatment, and squalor, in retrospect, prophetic of the hundreds or thousands of such facilities to later appear in our troubled world, including the United States.
It was the early 1960s and I was in college when she told her story. I commented that, “Nothing like that could ever happen in America.” She replied stoically that, “. . . if a government can make people afraid and angry enough, anything can happen. Don’t ever say never. They can use fear and anger to convince people that it’s OK to do terrible things. Unthinkable things. I saw it happen; I lived through it.”
Fast forward, now, 55 years to President Donald Trump and hate-filled rallies; attacks on a free press; “alternate” truths; “locking up” political opponents; degrading and condemning dissenters; blatant lying; demonizing minorities on religious, racial, or ethnic grounds; turning away immigrants fleeing unspeakable violence, hardship, and chaos; separating and imprisoning families of “undesirables;” by inaction, approving of white supremacy and Nazism; unabashed, adulation of fascist dictators, and not standing up to them in our defense; intentionally alienating loyal allies and praising adversaries. The list could go on.
Does this ill-willed, cowardly, uncompassionate, incompetent, misogynistic, ignorant, racist, hateful, man, President Donald John Trump, really represent what YOU stand for? YOU reading this? Does he really reflect who WE are? We kind, fair-minded, tolerant, patriotic, proud Americans? Have we allowed ourselves to become so possessed with fear, anger, insecurity, and suspicion that we approve of this deranged president and all he stands for, says, and does?
If what’s happening in our country is truly what we as a nation approve of and want — then shame. Shame on you. Shame on me. Shame on us. Shame on the United States. History yet to be written by our children and grandchildren will be critical, harsh, and condemning. You and I will have earned it and deserved it.