I bet you don’t hear this a lot outside of your rural or suburban Fox/NewsMax echo chamber, but you are right. I absolutely despise people like you. My father, an east Kansas farm boy with an accounting degree from a small east Kansas teacher’s college, was commissioned as a Navy lieutenant in 1943. He and five other young men sailed an LST from Virginia Beach to North Africa, then to Italy, and, finally to Normandy, France. He was about as poorly-suited to command a ship as any person alive in 1943. He’d never been in a canoe or more than knee-deep water before stepping foot on to his first LST. I don’t believe he could swim.
He was a shy, introverted, pacifist, Christian man who spent the last 60 years of his life coming to some kind of grips with the horrors he saw fighting people just like you: incompetent, under-achieving, racist, angry, entitled, hateful, small men with poor self-esteem and a love of power and violence. When the US military was mopping up the remains of the German army in North Africa, he and other Americans discovered US-made Bendix (an Indiana company partially owned by General Motors) electrical controls in German vehicles. In Italy, he participated in a landing where he witnessed the results of a fascist controlled country. At Normandy, he watched most of the 200 Marines ,who had crossed the Atlantic with him in that small ship, cut down by German machine gun fire when the bow ramp dropped. He developed a life-long dislike for his own country-of-origin, England, when British LST captains dropped their bow ramps, stopping several hundred yards short of the landing target and forcing US soldiers out and into deep water to drown or be helplessly shot down. So, he and other US LST pilots and sailors humped the que and his crew made two more trips back to the Normandy beaches, to prevent British officers from uselessly and cowardly sacrificing American soldiers. (I’m sure you empathize with the British officers, can’t you? Why should they risk their lives for Jews, liberals, gays, people of color, and other “weak” people who aren’t like you? Hitler and his fellow fascists hated exactly the same people as you.)
After those experiences, his tour of duty was over and he was supposed to ship back home, but every ship he was assigned to was redirected to the Pacific war front. There is a famous picture of the U.S. Petrof Bay narrowly missed by a Japanese Kamikaze pilot. In the background, there are a half-dozen members of an aircraft gun crew looking on helplessly as a Mitsubishi light bomber splashed into the ocean a few yards from their guns. My father is somewhere in that picture. Dad used to, humorously, point out his spot in that crew and point out where he was hiding when the plane missed his ship in a Navy coffee table book that ended up on a bookshelf in my bedroom when I was an adolescent.
He was messed up for the rest of his life from that experience. Always a shy and introverted man, he struggled against his inclination to crawl out of sight and became a high school math teacher and coach. My mother was responsible for a good bit of his drive and success, but she died when she was 34 from cancer and he barely managed not running away and starting over after remarrying and overwhelming himself with three more children and a hysterical, prescription drug addicted second wife.
When he was in his 70s, I’d drive from Denver and, later, Minnesota to west Kansas and chauffeur him to the NCAA Junior College basketball championship tournament in Hutchinson, Kansas every March. His eyesight had failed and he lost his driver’s license due to multiple accidents. We made that trip for about a dozen years before other infirmities made travel impossible for him. Those trips where when he opened up to me about his WWII experiences and the damage those experiences had done. PTSD wasn’t a thing in 1945, when he came back to Kansas to finish his education, start a family, and find his first teaching job.
Mostly, he was an absent father spending the hours from his last class until the rest of us were in bed sleeping “grading papers” by himself. At 9-years-old, I learned how to heat cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli or spaghetti and meatballs, clean the kitchen and dishes after my younger brother and I ate, run the clothes washer and dryer or hang them out to dry in the warm months and fold clothes (badly), vacuum and pick up after the two of us, and be a latch-key kid until he remarried and our lives really went to shit with two, then three, more kids in the house and an angry, hysterical step-mother to try and avoid as much as possible. On one of those basketball trips, Dad told me that he’d often sit in his car in the garage, listening to the screaming and turmoil in the house and imagine what it would be like to “just drive away.” But he didn’t and, instead, I left home between my junior and senior year of high school and lived in a 1-bedroom trailer with a friend and paid my bills with income from our band, odd jobs, and getting by on eggs and chicken our landlord sold wholesale.
There are only two moments that I can remember where Dad actually demonstrated some of what must have kept him going on that LST. Once he stood up to a trio of high school bullies (loosely defined as “high school” because at least two of them have failed so often they were nearly 20) and once when he opposed the teacher’s union. Otherwise that large, fairly fit but overweight, athletic man was as timid and reclusive as anyone I have ever known, if I can claim to have known him at all. From those conversations we had while traveling, I learned how broken WWII had made him. From reading authors like Studs Terkel, William Shirer, William Manchester, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Drury, Tom Clavin, and several others, I know a little more about those experiences and the men who fought to prevent fascism from sprouting its evil wings in the world and, especially, in the United States where people like you desperately wanted to imitate their hero, Adolph Hitler.
And, now, we stand exactly where my father and unwilling soldiers just like him stood in 1941, but we’re on the losing side. Post-WW2 right wing bureaucrat, George Kennan, wrote in 1948, "We have 50 per cent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period…is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality…we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Since Truman, the Republican Party has been devolving into a group of rich men (laughably self-defined as “businessmen”) who have worked to further the goal of preventing “the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Trump voters have finally given them everything they want and, like Hitler’s sponsors, those rich and powerful (mostly) men are now going to do everything they can to destroy the faint echoes of American democracy and put the 99% into servitude and poverty. They have been working toward that goal since long before the Civil War and, in fact, that goal is exactly what the Civil War was fought over.
I don’t use the word “hate” often or casually. I dislike all sorts of people and things, but I reserve “hate” for those that I truly despise. The weak Americans who are terrified of “wokeness,” whose own sexuality is seriously challenged by gays, lesbians, and, especially, transgender citizens, who pretend to be Christians or Muslims while behaving like amoral predators, and the lazy, entitled white men and women who want a “strongman leader” to justify their own failures are despicable and deplorable and, yes, I hate them. It takes that kind of motivation for most of us to get out of our comfortable lives and make the sacrifices necessary to go to battle with evil. Evil is already filled with hate and ready to make victims of everyone outside of the cult. I am not willing to be a victim without a fight.
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