To honor our heroes
Dear friend,
June 6 has come and gone.
But this year it came back.
D Day has come back to me
in these dark days since January.
I hear our heroes asking:
Do you remember us?
I look in the mirror
and I ask.
Our men
Above we see one of the beaches
where our courageous men landed.
I recently read an article in The Atlantic
that described the landing on Omaha Beach.
It was way worse than we thought.
Newly available eye witness accounts
have revealed the excruciating reality.
I lost sleep after I read it.
Some time
when you are willing
to experience it
here it is:
Our young men
suffered horribly.
Thousands drowned
or were blown to pieces
before they even
got to the beach.
Led by one invincible soldier
the surviving men
made it to the cliff
and climbed.
They took out
the German machine gunners.
Then they fought their way
into France.
These heroes succeeded
in launching the beginning
of the end of Hitler.
Why did they fight?
Why did these brave young men
give all they had to their mission?
They gave their blood
their guts
their souls.
Why?
It must have been love.
No force but love
has the power
to give men such courage.
They loved their families.
They loved their country.
They loved freedom
and mercy.
These men fought
and gave their lives
to save their fellow human beings
from being crushed and destroyed
by a sadistic dictator.
If our heroes
had not stormed those beaches
you and I would be living
under Nazi rule today.
Just a little notice of a meeting
When I read about our men on D Day
I ask myself:
How did it come to this?
What caused this terrible suffering?
How did it all begin?
Answering that question
takes me to the rise of Hitler.
I have spent a lot of time
looking into how
the Nazi movement developed.
A few years ago
I came across a page
of a small town German newspaper
from the 1920’s
that had been translated into English.
It was just a page of little ads
and notices of current things
going on in the neighborhood.
Just like any such ordinary page
of a small town American newspaper.
But there
nestled between bingo night
and the antique auction
was a small notice
of a meeting to be held
that Friday evening
in the community hall.
At the bottom of the invitation
was “National Socialist Party.”
That is how it all began
Just a little meeting.
A small gathering
where the murderous idea:
”Jews are our evil impure Enemy”
was promoted to the town folk.
Just one cancer cell
of an idea…
But nobody stopped it.
Instead the idea metastasized
into a fascist movement
and into a sadistic dictatorship
under which millions of Jews
and other innocents
were tortured and murdered.
It then took millions
of freedom loving heroes
to defeat it.
How is a malignant idea stopped?
To stop a malignant idea
we first have to recognize it.
A malignant idea
is always fear-based.
A paranoid lie
based in black and white thinking.
Extreme.
Not moderate.
Not centrist in any way.
To the extreme thinker
there IS no common ground.
Everything is
the way I SEE IT
or it is WRONG.
Extreme thinkers love to hurl
their angry negative judgments
against other people
and their views.
It makes them feel
strong and superior.
Extreme thinkers
are drawn to each other.
They band together
in echo chambers
where they declare:
WE are The Ones
who are Pure and Correct.
Those Others
are the Sinister Force.
They are Incorrect.
And they are EVIL.
Malignancy of right and left
On the far right:
Hitler and the Nazi Party
seduced the German people
with the malignant racist idea
that they are Pure!
He convinced them
to see Jews
as evil bloodsucking vermin
who must be destroyed
because they were poisoning
the purity of The German Race.
On the far left:
Lenin and the Communist Party
seduced the Russian people
with the malignant Marxist idea
that The Glorious Workers of the World
are Pure!
And the owners of businesses
are evil capitalist bloodsuckers
who must be destroyed.
Malignancy of right and left
are both made of lies
and extreme judgment.
It is all paranoid horse manure.
Submission to malignant ideas
The great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
saw the reality of evil
when he was a prisoner in the gulag.
He traces it
to the heart.
He sees a line
in the heart
separating good and evil.
I see it differently.
I don’t think the line
is in the heart.
My therapeutic work
with murderers and psychopaths
points to the line
being in the mind.
The line shifts
between constructive and destructive
ideas and actions
based on the balance of power
between the healthy ego
and the sadistic superego.
This line shifts
in all of us.
The underlying balance of power
can be shifted
through analytic psychotherapy.
The healthy ego must be challenged
to stand up to the sadistic superego.
Destructive ideas and destructive ideologies
are imposed upon us
via lies and propaganda
promulgated by fascist leaders.
The fascist leader
has a personality in which
the sadistic superego holds the power.
Fascist propaganda
is crafted to appeal
to the sadist and the victim
in all of us.
No one is entirely immune
to malignant ideas
but once we recognize them
we must refuse to submit.
Our healthy ego
must rise and dismantle them.
How we rise
We look in the mirror.
We ask ourselves:
Do we remember
our heroes?
Do we remember the men
who refused to submit
to malignancy?
Do we remember the brave men
who landed on D Day
who saved our Republic
and saved the free world?
When we look ourselves in the eyes
we who love America
we see
that as citizens
we have fallen short.
We have not defended freedom.
We have passively allowed
malignant ideas
to take hold in our country.
We have allowed
malignant leaders
to take power.
Alas, we are late to wake up
We have awakened
to a nightmare.
We are in shock
that the nightmare is real.
Those of us who can bear
to face it
realize there is no one
coming to save us.
It is up to us.
It is up to us
to stand up
to restore
protect and defend
our precious freedom.
Who we are
We are Americans.
We will honor our heroes
by refusing to be ruled
by a dictator.
We will never submit
to dark minds
and dark ideologies.
We will never
join any crowd yelling
”Crucify them!“
We will think for ourselves.
Develop our own perspectives.
Stay open to gaining new insight
from those who think differently.
We will join ranks
with all those voters
who belatedly realize
they have been betrayed
and who now seek
to build and restore
our democracy.
We will unite
in vowing
to never turn our brain over
to any leader
of any party.
All political leaders
have strengths and weaknesses.
We will unite in supporting
the constructive ideas and actions
of freedom loving leaders
and in objecting loudly and strongly
and refusing to support
the destructive ideas
of freedom despising leaders.
No leader
Republican or Democrat
gets a pass
just because we belong to that party.
ALL leaders of ALL Parties
must uphold our Constitution.
That is the bottom line
My friend,
you and I will stand together
from coast to coast
with all our freedom loving
brothers and sisters!
And with all our freedom loving
governors
senators
representatives
and community shepherds
to make SURE
all our leaders
uphold our Constitution.
THIS is how we honor our heroes
This is how we honor
each courageous person
who fought and died
for our Republic
since the days of the Revolution.
Our heroes
have passed the torch
to you and me.
We are the light.
Each one of us
IS the Republic.
We never give up on America.
We never turn our back on her.
We climb the cliff.
MARGRATEN
On a rise, monuments.
Beneath, a sea of green.
On that sea, a fleet of white.
Like sails on the sea.
Among them families
of the fallen wander,
searching for their own.
Nederlanders pull weeds,
groom grass.
Caring for the graves of
“The boys who saved us
from the Nazis”.
On the monument above,
these words:
“In Memory of the Valor
and the Sacrifices
which Hallow this Soil.”
Remembered almost 80 years
after Operation Market Garden.
I usually delete political posts, but this is beyond politics and goes to the hearts of people. Everyone is going to have to look in the mirror and ask, who am I, what do I stand for, and what will I do to insure that I remain whole?