Things are pretty fucked up and the future is uncertain — probably the worst in my lifetime (perhaps excepting 1969 before I can remember). When it’s like that, I like to think about my grandparents and what they faced and got through with the Great Depression and WWII.
/1
/2 There were absolutely no guarantees that everything would be all right. Terrible things were happening and more terrible things were a distinct possibility. But they got through it, relying on the fundamental things they cared about.
/3 I think about Grandma taking a taxi to the hospital to have my mom, forbidding my grandpa’s parents from calling him to let him know — he was on base studying for the supply officer test the next day, and doing well would determine where he was assigned, and maybe whether he’d live or die.
/4 (Grandpa’s parents had a car, but grandma had a flair for drama, I think.)
He did well and went off to be the supply officer on a ship in the Pacific. Went with absolutely no guarantee of coming back. That’s what people did.
/5 So, in terrible circumstances, think what people before you have endured. Think about how you can support and defend folks less able than you to endure. And fight the bastards.
/6 My grandparents didn’t whine about it. Nor, for that matter, did my college classmate who survived as a child in 1970s Cambodia by hiding in a pile of his neighbor’s bodies. So, keep calm and fight.
the thing that makes this feel different than the late 30s/early 40s is the sense of less social cohesion now. it's hard to measure that and it may be an excessively rosy view of the past, but it seems much more challenging now to unite communities together under one cause
Definitely a rosy perspective - 20,000 American Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, a vastly larger group than the Unite the Right rally and twice the size of the crowd on January 6th.
www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/d...
Yes. I think many Americans are blissfully unaware of how very NOT anti Nazi we collectively were until we finally had skin in the game.
also just to prove NYT has always sucked, someone had a headline talking rosily about the Fuhrer in his mountain retreat or some shit
And I only learned very recently--literally the mafia stopped them.
I am very cognizant of what is NOT a good idea to write online, especially now. That said--well. Read history.
I am antifa. I am anti fascist. My grandfather was anti fascist. He literally helped liberate one of the camps.
