Those Who Made My World

May 8 is VE Day, the day in 1945 when the war in Europe was won. I was born six weeks later. I was two weeks old when America incinerated Hiroshima and then Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Three weeks after that, Japan surrendered. So I was born in the middle of the end of the last world war.

I only knew about it from a few family stories and history books. We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and righted the global economy at Breton Woods. I grew up in the sweet suburbs of those victories and the prosperity they ushered in. 

I knew about the Korean War, because my parents told me about their friends who died there. I knew about the Red Scare. I ducked and covered under my desk in grade-school nuclear drills. I didn’t like the war in Viet Nam, but I had been raised on the need to fight communism, and I wasn’t yet wise enough to recognize a far-away country’s internal struggles as being no threat to us and none of our business.

I grew up with American right and might. When we turned our national attention to our racial injustices, it seemed natural and proper that after fighting so many foreign wars to insure our freedom we would take steps to better secure that right for all our citizens.

I don’t idolize the men and women who built my world, but I respect them. I respect their ability to dig in and get the job done when called upon. They had a big bacchanal in the 20s, and a big economic hangover in the 30s, but they sobered up and rolled up their sleeves when it was obvious they had to. Yes, they didn’t do it until then. They didn’t want to get into another world war. Who could blame them? But when it came to them, they did not hesitate or stint. They cranked out bombers and tanks and they bought war bonds. They saved the world that became my world.

Now we are faced with another great war, this time against a deadly virus, both real and metaphorical. The real one is killing us. The metaphorical one is destroying who we are.

In response to the Coronavirus Pearl Harbor, our president has not roused our nation to common purpose and sacrifice, he has said it’s up to the states to tackle this enemy. It’s like saying some of them should make tanks, some fighter planes, some bombers, and they should figure it out and compete with one another for the materials to do their work. If Roosevelt had taken that approach, we’d all be speaking German. Or Japanese. Or, as Philip K. Dick imagined in The Man in the High Castle, both.

Roosevelt exhorted us to pull together. Trump incites us to attack one another. Roosevelt gave us Social Security. Trump is doing his best to kill off the Affordable Care Act.

Can you imagine Roosevelt addressing the nation the way Trump does? Can you imagine Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, the reporters we listened to and trusted to tell us the truth, on Fox News?

The men and women running our national government today are not making a world we want our children to inhabit. Are we going to do anything about it? Or are we going to continue basting in our provincial certitudes and hatreds until the world made for us with such purpose, strength and determination after World War II is gone?