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The Thinking Behind My Flier [1]

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Date: 2022-09-05

As reflected by my DKos moniker, I first discovered this website in 2003. Since then, depending on the state of current events, I have more often than not visited this website multiple times a day, mainly in order to keep myself abreast of those events. It’s not often that I post comments, and this is first time in 20 years that I’ve ever written a diary, but I have benefited tremendously from reading stories and comments posted by many other people here over the years.

Earlier today, when I should have been doing other things, I felt inspired to spend several hours putting together a flier (above) that I posted earlier this evening in a discussion thread. I’m writing this diary so share some of the thoughts that prompted me to create this flier at this particular time.

Lately I have found myself wondering whether there is some kind of causal connection between the rise of Trumpism and the disappearance over the last decade or so of many of the members of the generation of Americans who lived through the Second World War. That was the generation of my Great Uncle Ray, who joined the Navy at the age of 18 and narrowly survived a typhoon at sea in the South Pacific. It was also the generation of my grandmother’s second husband, Fred, who served as a medic in the Marines at Okinawa. I still remember the ashen look on his typically jovial face one time when we sat on the couch together sometime in the 1970s watching the WW2 combat footage that they used to show on Sundays when there were no good cartoons on TV (I could never get into claymation Davey & his dog, Goliath).

I was born in 1967, and my childhood was filled with endless re-runs of World War Two movies, including ones starring Audie Murphy, where the American GI’s were always the good guys and the “Krauts” were the bad guys. I think it was my thorough inculcation in this twentieth-century American myth that partially accounts for the sense of outrage I experienced when I went to college during the early Reagan years only to discover that our government had been involved in the clandestine overthrow of several democratically elected governments in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the replacement of those governments with military dictatorships in places like Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; and that we were continuing to support the Contras in Nicaragua at the time.

The sense of moral indignation that motivated me as a student activist during that period was due to my outrage at having been lied to, and deceived about, the righteousness of our cause, and my inability to believe that the American people would approve of what was being done in their name if the truth were only known to them.

I’m not exactly sure what’s happening in this country right now, but the fact that I now identify myself—alongside Liz Cheney, of all people—as a defender of the very same American institutions of which I was so critical in my youth is an indication to me that the tide of history is changing before our eyes, and that this is a pivotal historical juncture of some kind, perhaps as consequential as the one I experienced in 1980.

I think it’s a matter of good political strategy for Democrats to lay claim at this juncture to such American symbols as the Marine Corps War Memorial that commemorates the Battle of Okinawa, and to let it be known loud and clear that we are not the ones who have broken faith with our forebears by dishonoring their sacrifices and exchanging our birthright for a bowl of authoritarian porridge.

I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter. Thanks for reading!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/5/2121024/-The-Thinking-Behind-My-Flier

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