How
Did We Let This Happen?
By David Truskoff
16 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Standing
in front of the train ticket window, my sea bags on my shoulder and
still in uniform with my ribbons for all to see, I was about to buy
a ticket home and begin civilian life. A Trainman came by and asked
me where I was going. I told him and he waved for me to follow him.
I told him I didn’t have a ticket but he put me on the train.
Later I had to take a bus from the train station to my home. The driver
put his hand over the coin collector and again I rode free.
At home I had my mustering
out pay, a ten thousand dollar GI mortgage guarantee, free college tuition
with a stipend of $50 a month if I attended and the twenty dollars a
week for fifty two weeks to hold me over. I was also assured of health
benefits at Veterans hospitals. That was the mid forties. That was my
America. Today the Bush administration is cutting the Veterans hospital
budgets to the bone and he is making more patients every day.
The treatment of our veterans
today is a national disgrace.
The question all aging Americans
want answered is how did we let our America get away from us?
We thought our America was
really a democracy with a government of by and for the people.
As I write this two candidates for the Democratic nomination for the
US Senate in Connecticut have already spent about ten million each and
that is only for the party nomination. How much will they spend on the
election campaign itself?
Michael Bloomberg spent about
$73 million of his own money to win the mayor's seat in New York City.
One wonders how much more was contributed. He bought the Mayor’s
office.
If you have enough money, say around one hundred million, you can yank
a duly elected governor, who criticized the utility companies, out of
office and stick in a muscle-bound two bit actor with absolutely no
credentials to govern a large state. Of course the actor had to promise
big contributors that the first thing he would do is deregulate the
energy industry in California and that is what he did.
They did the same thing with
Ronald Reagan who soon became known as the de-regulation President.
As a Realist I can see that
this is not only happening in America, but around the world. In Moscow
I heard Russians use the old expression of money talks when speaking
of politics and the election of the boorish drunk Yeltsin and his successor
Putin. American Dollars put them both in Power.
In Tel A Viv I heard the
same thing said about the election of Begin, and Sharon. Even when speaking
to a Chinese journalist at the Book Expo in New York she told me how
upset she was that American dollars are at work in Chinese politics
and Chinese media. As I grow older and watch history repeat itself I
become very angry.
How did we let this happen?
What was it Eugene O’Niel said, There is no tomorrow or today,
just yesterday, again and again and now.
On November 10,1939 Nazi
storm troopers smashed windows of Jewish storefronts, burned synagogues
and created mayhem. A total of 110 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500
Jewish businesses were smashed, 26,000 Jews were arrested and physically
beaten, and 91 died. Later Goering and his henchmen joked about it and
called it Kristallnacht. I remember my mother’s tears.
Last night I had tears of
my own as I watched Israeli soldiers (be careful not to call them Jews;
my mother would be offended) smashing walls and windows of the homes
of terrified Palestinians.
Goering’s excuse was
that a 17-year-old boy named Herschel Grynszpan had killed Nazi Third
Secretary Ernst Von Rath after the Nazis had destroyed his father’s
business. Can any honest person not see a parallel today?
In 1966 I stood in front of Martin Luther King at the base of Enid Dam
in Mississippi. An exasperated King looked up at the gun-carrying possemen
on top of the dam and then stared at the militants in our group screaming
for Black power. King said, "I am not interested in white power,
green power or black power. I am only interested in moral power, the
most powerful force on earth."
Israel was created on moral
power, but as the right wing, blind-faith fanatics gained control the
moral power diminished. Now there are anti-Israel demonstrations everywhere.
These are not anti-Semites who are demonstrating; many are Jews like
me.
The Jewish Federation, who
ran ads stating, " we stand with Israel" and those members
who belong, must decide if they are standing with the thousands of Jewish
anti-war demonstrators in Israel and all over the world who are trying
to restore the moral power, or if they are with the Kristallnacht troops
who have destroyed it and may therefor destroy the state. Older Jews
must also be asking How did we let Israel get away from us.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear