Conquering nation’s severe challenges
At no time in my memory has a greater sense of despair enveloped me as my beloved country, the world around us and natural systems seem to be dissolving into chaos.
The United States of America is not united anymore. Divisiveness and polarization reign, smothering our nation’s ability to resolve pressing problems.
In my lifetime, the only threat greater to our democracy was in 1944. A world war was raging with an uncertain outcome. I was an infant as a maniacal tyrant was directing Germany’s massively powerful military war machine threatening to take over much of the world. Adolf Hitler was joined by Benito Mussolini and the Japanese, who had crippled our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.
World War II was the world’s largest and most violent military conflict with battle deaths of 15 million military personnel. Civilian deaths exceeded 38 million, six million of them innocent Jewish women, children and men shot, gassed and incinerated under Hitler’s Final Solution Plan to exterminate Jews.
When I was born, my father was fighting the Nazis as a Navy enlisted man serving on the USS Rodman (DD 456), a destroyer escorting supply ships on the extremely dangerous North Atlantic run to Murmansk. This was to help the Russians break Hitler’s back after he invaded Russia.
The ultimate cost of victory in the Battle of the Atlantic from 1939 to 1945 — 175 Allied warships and 3,500 Allied merchant ships were sunk. About 72,200 Allied naval and merchant seamen lost their lives.
My dad only mentioned his Atlantic service once, when I was 11. Since we were told his parents and siblings were born in Russia, he noted he had been to Russia.
He mentioned matterof-factly, “I went to Murmansk. On the way, we dropped depth charges on a U-Boat, and we thought we got it because of an oil slick and debris we saw but we had to keep moving.” Making his Navy time more perilous, he was Jewish and his capture by the Nazis would not have ended well.
It was not until 10 years ago that I learned my dad’s parents and siblings were born in Ukraine, which then was part of Russia. They emigrated through Ellis Island, New York, and settled in Baltimore, changing the family name from Winogradovsky to Winegrad. Knowing of my Ukrainian ancestry makes my angst burn that much more over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war crimes against its people.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian invasion of Feb. 24, 2022, is the biggest attack on a European country since Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The subsequent invasion of Poland started WWII.
Russia’s invasion constitutes the biggest threat to peace and security in Europe since WWII. The current congressional gridlock over assisting Ukraine to repel this invasion is indicative of the political and moral paralysis affecting our democracy.
Congressional lunacy in blocking aid to Ukraine parallels British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement toward Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia
in signing the Munich Agreement. Chamberlain was forced to resign in disgrace and is seen as a traitor.
We have our own madman pulling the strings of Republican congressmen to block critical aid to Ukraine and aiding Putin’s world vision of reclaiming former USSR states.
Exacerbating this political repugnance, this same U.S. madman encouraged Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country not meeting defense spending guidelines. If re-elected, he would not abide by the collective defense clause at the heart of the NATO alliance.
Another symptom of our dysfunctional disintegrating democracy occurred when the same former U.S. president helped block the passage of a far-reaching bipartisan Senate bill to significantly resolve immigration problems at our southern borders.
Both it and Ukrainian aid were blocked solely to prevent any political benefit for President Joe Biden’s re-election. Our democracy is shattering into its lowest depths since the Civil War as an uncivil war has ignited between the parties and our polarized citizens.
Solutions to most of our nation’s other critically pressing issues are bogged down in partisan warfare as evidenced by the inability of Congress to simply enact a federal budget to fund our nation’s government.
This threatens another government shutdown, the last one (2018-2019) cost taxpayers $5 billion and the economy $11 billion. The budget for the current fiscal year was due by Oct. 1 and here we are five months later facing a shutdown.
The U.S. and its allies succeeded in defeating enemy war machines with vast resources in WWII because we were once the UNITED States. We were a nation united against a common enemy, and now the enemy has become the opposite party or other Americans in an opposing philosophical silo.
Just think if we all worked in a common cause for the betterment of our country how much we could achieve. We could kick Putin out of Ukraine and bolster NATO preventing more territorial invasions. We also could tackle immigration, mass murders and gun violence, hate crimes, domestic terrorism, the opioid crisis, global warming, the eradication of species, the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay and budget deficits, once again balancing the budget as done under former President Bill Clinton.
I know this ability exists in the intelligence, ingenuity and diversity of our 336 million people if we can work together as one nation — E Pluribus Unum. We must double down on American ingenuity and the inherent good in our people to crack the silos and tribalism.
Consider what we have overcome: a rag-tag group of insurrectionists defeating the greatest power on earth in our Revolutionary War; keeping and healing our nation after the Civil War; surviving the Great Depression; complete victory in WWII; curing polio; sending astronauts to the moon; landing spacecraft on Mars; presiding over the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR; and quickly developing COVID19 vaccines that saved millions of lives.
Change is difficult but consider how we acted to end smoking in nearly all indoor spaces and reduce tobacco use per capita by 70% over the last 60 years. Since 1982, we decreased drunk driving fatalities on our roadways by 45% despite huge increases in population, motor vehicles and miles driven. These changes have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Our government worked to prevent the great recession predicted for 2023 and tamed inflation to its lowest level in two years at 3.1%. Remarkably, unemployment was at 3.7%, staying below 4% for two years, which was last achieved in the 1960s.
Surely this great nation and its diverse population that overcame so much in its first 247 years can come together bringing out the Good Angels in us and our elected officials to save our democracy.