Sitting on the couch watching Rachel Maddow post chart after chart about the progression of the Covid-19 virus, the memory hole sent me spiraling. It was not a good feeling at all.
In a flash of Déjà vu, events of long ago winters came rushing back. Not an intellectual exercise, but an emotional one. An experiential punch to the gut.
How I got to this place and time is a long story….
I was born during the Great Depression, but remember little of it. I do remember the afternoon of December 7, 1941. It was Sunday, and my dad was at work. His work was next to our house and I often dropped in. Everyone was gathered around the polished walnut cabinet of the huge Stromberg-Carlson radio console. I sat on the floor in front of the big radio. The breathless announcer kept repeating, “They stabbed our boys in the back!”
We were at war. A few weeks before, on October 1, 1941, a German submarine had sunk the American destroyer Reuben James. They got away with that cold blooded murder by attributing it to an “accident and mistaken identity.”
There was no way to ignore the Pearl Harbor attack. America was at War.
The war had a head start in Europe and Asia as the Japanese and Germans expanded their empires. We had managed to stay out of it so far, but isolationism ended with a gigantic crash that Sunday in December.
In the ensuing days, the news was non-stop. Patriotic songs were written and sung. There were long lines at the Army and Navy recruitment offices.
President Franklin Roosevelt talked to the nation in what he called Fireside Chats. They really were that. He had a soothing way of speaking; gentle, but still firm and fatherly. He told the nation what we needed to hear, calling all able-bodied citizens to participate in the war effort, to the extent of our abilities.
I was no exception.
I walked all over town, talking people out of their old pots and pans. Aluminum was prized. Rubber as well. The photo at the right could very well have been me, lugging old tires and inner tubes to the collection place.
We started buying war bond stamps and pasting them into little booklets. It was all a kid could do. There was no school cafeteria, so I could not contribute lunch money. We took our own sandwiches in bags. Our brown paper lunch sacks were folded carefully and brought home each day so they could be reused until they were worn out. Then they were placed in a bigger sack to be taken to a paper collection place once the large bag was full of waste paper.
Those early days of the war, it was not at all clear whether America had a chance to win it. Much of our Navy rested at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The Army Air Corps was a shambles at the time with obsolete and obsolescent planes. Our best fighters were hardly a match for the deadly Japanese Zero and German Messerschmitt fighters. Something had to be done, but we were starting from very near scratch.
Those were dark days. The London Blitz was in every news report. The fall of Poland and France had happened already. Ships were being sunk by the dozens in the North Atlantic. I recall the blackouts and air raid drills. We knew the Germans were working on long range bombers that could reach New York and Washington DC. The Japanese managed to send bomb-carrying balloons which reached the US mainland. We also thought the Japanese had plans to invade the US west coast, just as they had invaded China and the Philippines. That they had designs on New Zealand and Australia was public knowledge.
We would be next.
Not all newsmen could paint a word picture like Edward R. Murrow, but all those news reporters took their lives in their own hands. Not all survived. That is why I have such respect for reporters like Richard Engel.
This short video is audio only. Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from a rooftop in London. This was the kind of newscast we heard every day, and which helped shape who I am today.
I remember the feeling of despair and helplessness I had as I trudged off to school. I could picture in my minds eye how it might be to live under enemy occupation should our defenses fail.
We had blackout drills, mostly in 1942 and 1943. I helped tack dark cloth over windows at night. We turned all light down low, just one bulb. Much of 1942, we lived in a rented house with no electricity. We conserved energy, so the only light came from a single kerosene lamp. Kerosene was rationed just like gasoline, so conservation was practiced religiously. We did have abundant coal, so that is what fired the cast iron kitchen stove and the pot-bellied stove in the living room. Much of the time our living room was lit only by the amber glow coming from the the little mica window in the door of the stove. When one went outside, the darkness was eerie. There was no light coming from anywhere in our town.
All the while was this terrible dread as we listened to the news broadcasts coming from London and what little news was available from the Pacific. At school, I spent a lot of time examining the world globe in the corner of my classroom. I wanted to know just where the Germans and Japanese were, and how close they were to where we lived.
I watch Rachel Maddow post animated charts showing the spread of the pandemic across the globe.
Like a fungus, an all-too-familiar blood-red expansion grows across the planet. That same feeling of impending doom creeps in and pervades my senses this week. No one born after 1945 can possibly relate to the feeling one gets watching the expanding horror that is growing and growing.
When I watched the current President of the United States appear almost daily with two-hour harangues, insulting reporters present, preening, bragging, saying he alone is #1 who can solve all our problems, while we know all along he is dithering, uncertain, lacking the ability to see beyond TV ratings, trying to figure out how he can turn a profit out of a crisis where Americans are dying by the thousands.
There is no way I can avoid remembering what a REAL President sounds like during such a time. This speech was given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I remember listening to this speech live, as he spoke back on December 9, 1941—these words were burned into my brain back then, and there they remain to this day. I hope anyone who has not listened to any of FDR’s Fireside Chats, takes the time to listen to this archived recording in its entirety.
Listening to these words, spoken so many years ago, may help highlight just how much pain I feel when the current Occupant of the West Wing comes on TV to brag on himself, totally oblivious and lacking any kind of empathy for the suffering of the American people.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States:”
I remember rationing, when we had to watch even small things. Don’t eat too much breakfast cereal, because wheat for flour is needed for the war effort. Can’t go driving in our Model A car, because gasoline is a precious commodity. Black pepper? Forget it. None available because most spices are imported from countries under occupation.
Can’t buy paint or potting soil? Give me an effing break.
Oh yeah, the latest thing is to create a traffic gridlock around government offices and hospitals so emergency vehicles can’t get through.
I have zero sympathy for that level of density and callousness when the local Emergency Department is full to capacity with people gasping their last breaths, even if they are lucky enough to get a ventilator.
Tell all that to my friend Kirby, who survived Buchenwald. He and one other soldier had one half-rotten potato a day between them. One thin blanket and no shoes for two men who had to sleep on the ground...in late fall.
What have we become? Selfishness has become like a religion to nearly half the population.
No one will be left untouched. No one.
I despair for our country. I grieve with the families who have lost loved ones, because I have walked in their shoes. Actually from the time I was a kid, when gold star flags appeared in the windows of almost every home on our street.
That Gold Star does not represent military rank. It represents one dead soldier.
Just like now, it may have been a son, daughter, brother, father, uncle, or even a best friend. Just like now, that star represents a failure of humankind. Our failure as a society to get along with one another in peace.
The last thing we need is lack of leadership. Or even worse, purported leaders who spend more time fomenting division and even riots than reassuring our people—all of us—that we will get through this crisis with minimal loss of life.
Wartime president? Not even the faint shadow of a wartime President. I remember what it was like to have a true wartime President. We literally don’t have a President. We have a crude, sexist, racist, foul-mouthed TV host who pretends to be a President.
Or would if he knew how.
So yes, I sit here with the TV on in the background, knowing we have still darker days ahead of us before the sunlight comes. If it does. Do we know what our society and culture will be like a year or two from now? How many reading this will be alive a year from now? This coronavirus is more contagious and deadly than anything I can recall since the Black Death pandemic.
I am not optimistic, but cannot allow myself to give up hope. The only thing that does give me hope is that more than half the population is fed up. The question now is whether there is a sufficient number of fed up people to overcome the probable outside attacks on our voting and electoral system. We know it is coming, so preparation is everything. In the meantime, the dark cloud of uncertainty hangs over all of us like an impending thunderstorm.
It is important to prevent the despair we feel to result in inaction. Depression tends to cause psychic paralysis. We can’t let that take over our souls, any more than we let WW2 paralyze us. We fought back.
Angry? Hell yes!
“Remember Pearl Harbor,” spoken through a gritted teeth anger was as much a rallying cry as, “Remember the Alamo,” to previous generations.
Seventy years ago, what did that rallying cry mean? The Pentagon was built in 18 months. Ford Motor Company built a factory at Willow Run, Michigan. That Willow Run factory turned out a four-engine B-24 bomber every 64 minutes.
The Kaiser shipyards in San Francisco built an average of three (!) cargo/troop-carrying Liberty Ships every day. That is three a day once production got up to speed.
I daresay that a ventilator for an Emergency Department or ICU is far less complicated than a 4-engine heavy bomber. Or a 450’ long Liberty Ship freighter.
Not to mention all those 0.35 ounce N-95 safety masks. If we can build a 4-engine heavy bomber weighing 50,000 pounds, or a 14,250 ton freighter in a matter of hours, how come safety masks cannot be turned out quickly in large numbers? You know the answer to that one.
We need our own rallying cry, and we need it now.
We have our own Nero, fiddling while everything is on fire. What shall it be? Let the house burn down, or get busy getting out the fire hoses? In modern parlance, that translates into getting out the vote in record numbers.
Because if you, me, and everyone does not give our full effort to GOTV, we are facing a continuing crumbling of civilized society and culture as we know it.
We not only CAN do better, we MUST do better.
UPDATE:
All the wonderful comments are touching in their eloquence and heartfelt poignancy. I am touched deeply by the comments. I want to hug all of you who responded. As it is, I feel as if we had a big interactive fireside chat ourselves. Not like the chat by a wonderful leader as FDR, but more like swapping personal tales sitting around a campfire.
I love you all and am grateful for the support and encouragement. Heaven knows, we all need encouragement to get the stories out, because they are so personal and painful to relive. Times long ago are relevant for today. It is indeed true that we must remember and learn from history, lest we repeat mistakes of the past.
About to take a break and a nap now. Will be back later.
UPDATE #2
Thanks to everyone who contributed so many personal stories and vignettes. I only started this tale, but it is the wonderful compassionate community here that fleshed it out.
I urge anyone reading this to read the comments in this diary as well. Your time will not be wasted.
Thank you again, one and all.
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