I Wasn’t There

I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even here. But as the years and decades roll by, I see that my children and their children are oblivious to the most horrendous manmade catastrophe in World History, World War II. We cannot, we must not let it pass from active memory.,

I watched a documentary about the English Blitz, the savage bombing and endless fires, the death and destruction of the normal citizens, men, women, children, families in Great Britain. I could feel the sense of hope and despair, the desperate rush for love and wartime romances, the big sister who shielded her little brother in an air raid, which allowed him to survive without her. Even in his old age, he cried as he shared the memory. Real stories of real people. In subway tunnels, the English wrapped themselves in quilts hurriedly torn from their beds, huddled together with hundreds of neighbors and strangers, they sang Christmas carols. They celebrated their faith and dedication to a God whom it was too easy to believe had deserted them. They looked to the miraculously spared Saint Paul’s Cathedral, surrounded by the rubble of all the neighboring buildings, as a sign of God’s grace. They were terrified, cold, dirty, bleeding, many suddenly homeless, but holding strong to their faith in God the Creator. Whether Christian or Jewish, they prayed together to the same God. Their faith held them together, carried their society, and their country together.

This didn’t happen here, except at Pearl Harbor and decades later at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in the skies over Pennsylvania. We, the civilians, were spared the immediate horrors of war, even though our fathers were called into it and fought overseas to prevent it from coming here. From 1939 through much of 1945, Europe and the South Pacific groaned and bled as collateral damage to the egomaniacal grab for power and total dominion of evil. Yes EVIL! These were not just naughty or bad men. Such destruction is not the idea of men unpossessed by an evil spirit.

Dad went off to war again, in Korea, and I was never told why.

I think how blessed my life has been. I wasn’t born until 1952, and had my father not survived his early twenties chasing Japanese Zeros in the skies, my brother, sister, and I would never have been conceived. I’ve been blessed with a life of joy and sorrows, largely of my own creation, safely away from falling incendiary bombs. I grew up playing in happily populated new neighborhoods. Hordes of children played in streets that had never been scraped clean and rebuilt by tearful parents. I played in the sunshine and splashed in the rain puddles. Band-Aids and peroxide, broken bones and stitches were earned not on battlefields or blown-apart city rubble, but from falling out of trees, off of bicycles, being stomped and pushed down playing basketball, sledding under a parked car at the base of a hill. These were temporary badges of courage for reckless deeds of daring fun.

Dad flew off to war again in Southeast Asia while I went to Junior High and played in California. I asked him why, and he answered with a question. “If your neighbor has sworn to come into your yard, burn your house and kill you, wouldn’t you prefer to have the battle in HIS yard before he brings it to yours?”

For so much of my life, I’ve been able to live a blissfully clueless existence, and so have my children. But there is a sign hanging in a back window of my business that reads, “If you can read, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English (instead of German), thank a soldier.” It really does come down to that.

Blissfully ignorant. Blissfully complacent and argumentative, we have lost sight of what is always at stake. When we feel no imminent danger, we feel no need to believe in a protective God, we feel sufficient unto ourselves, and we do not bond together with the strength of the desperate. Society forgets itself and falls apart because we do not feel needful.

I fear for my grandchildren because I see today another even more insidious war taking place in Europe, in America, all across Western civilization. It’s a war not as much of bombs and bullets (although they are also part of it), but of invasion of jihadist Islamic terrorism blanketing the areas numbed by loss of historic memory, by loss of faith, by loss of knowledge and trust in a Godly plan for us. This is an ideology not of love, building, and inclusion, but of hatred and tearing down, of celebrated murder. It enslaves women, stripping them of all rights, and savagely disfigures or kills anyone who would challenge its authority. It is a darkness trying to extinguish the divine light. Will we let it happen in the misguided name of fairness, or will we wake up in time to understand that fairness works only when it is flowing in both directions?

I wasn’t there then, but I am here now, and my only weapons are my words. Will anyone hear them? Will anyone sing with me?