Make America “Great” Again
I’m sorry, but what exactly about war is great for anyone?
Maybe I give the man too much credit. (Considering, I don’t give him any, and think he is scum, I still think this.) But perhaps Trump is proving my point.
Lately, I’ve been tell anyone who will listen that no one cares about WWII anymore (in the US). It’s just something that happened to our dead grandfathers. Even as a person approaching middle age, my parents are detached from it. My mom’s mom was a teenager, and my dad’s father was in the Navy, but he is no longer with us. It is just something we learn about in history class, like the civil and revolutionary wars.
I’m not saying this out of malice. I am saying it because we are finding ourselves in the position of rising global, religious, and racial tensions. History repeats for a reason, and this is it: People forget. They become detached.
Trump blames Germany for not participating in “saving’ the world, and all the idiots hop on the bandwagon. They have no idea as to why, just that Trump is right.
They don’t realize that Germany doesn’t have an army that can go anywhere. That Japan doesn’t. I’m sure there are others, but Trump likes to blame these two in particular for being a world power without power. (I guess that is what he’s trying to do. I don’t understand moron fully.)
That is not me saying Germany should continue to pay for eternity for the sins of their grandfathers, just that people are so far removed from these sins that global laws are now completely forgotten to justify new “sins”. IE US footing the bills for global policing. (Again, I don’t fully understand why we think we need to do this, and then, think everyone else should pay for it. I don’t know.)
These are some rough "truths” (alternative facts if you will) on the subject of WWII:
Doesn’t matter that over 60 million people were killed. Most people who remember those people are dead themselves. (Here, you go look at the wiki, I currently don’t have the time to go through their 628 sources line by line.)
Anne Frank is a teenager who wrote a diary.
Pearl Harbor is a Ben Affleck movie.
“Keep Calm and ...” is a meme.
Dropping the atomic bomb ended the war.
It’s a brow beaten subject no longer worth spending your college time on like The Great Gatsby. (Yes, I was told this.)
I can go on, so many things happened during that time that people have no idea about now, or more importantly, don’t care.
So my question is how do we end up reflecting on what was the worst modern period of human existence as the time we were great?
While there were many everyday people, military and civilian, who did brave things, who were great, how does one not stop to think how the hell we all got there in the first place?
Things people don’t remember, but should:
This planet contains mass, unmarked graves where millions are buried for being “wrong” in some way to a mad man.
The USS Arizona is a tomb for over a 1100 people.
Japan is still adding names to the memorials of those affected by the atomic bombs.
We created a weapon that can ruin the whole planet and continue to fight for it’s control.
Keep Calm and Carry On was a slogan for the British as they prepared for air raids on their cities.
The US was in a economic depression. There was no where to go but up or in the ground (Literally dead; starved to death and buried.)
That the brave actions of everyday people doing as they must in terrible times shouldn’t bolster government ideologies.
Again, there are so many things to remember from that, but the whole point is you cannot have the good of that time without the absolutely fucking terrible. Stop trying to remember it that way. Old men aren’t crying about it with tears of joy for times gone by. It sucked.
I believe that little by little, we are learning from our mistakes, and I hope for a time when we are all there at once, but we get there by remembering why it was bad not why it was good. Why it was a mistake, and maybe that’s what history classes are doing wrong. Stop teaching a victory of war as a good thing. War isn’t good. Nothing about it is. (Of course that doesn’t even hit on all the soldiers Trump supporters and everyone else are calling losers now that he declared all of our “defeats.” I mean a POW is a loser to this man... I digress.)
War is war. Sometimes it is necessary. I didn’t join the Marines because I believed otherwise. I was, and still am, very willing to protect what I believe my country to be, but we don’t learn from it by equating it to a football game in wins or loses. We learn from it by figuring out how we got there in the first place and not going there again.
So stop trying to take us back.
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