Viewpoint: Why desecrate the past and vote for Trump?
Marshall Myer
I’m a boomer, a son of parents from the Greatest Generation. What I can’t comprehend, the more today’s bad news metastasizes, is how so many people of my generation have desecrated the legacy of their parents’ generation by voting for and supporting Trump.
My dad was born the year Herbert Hoover (both from Iowa) was appointed Secretary of Commerce for Republican Presidents Warren G. Harding and then Calvin Coolidge. In due course, President Hoover ushered in the Great Depression, and my dad’s family migrated to Detroit to find work in the auto industry, only to return home empty handed to work in Iowa’s coal mines. My dad graduated high school and turned a summer job of cleaning up in a slaughterhouse into a year round job cleaning up in a slaughterhouse.
By the time my father was old enough to serve, he and his best friend enlisted to fight fascism in World War II. He had good enough eyesight to serve in the Army Air Corps, where he flew 67 missions in Europe—by himself—in a P-47 fighter (nicknamed “Nell,” it could have been “This Machine Kills Fascists’). On his last mission, 80 years ago, he was shot down over northern Italy, was marched to Germany on a broken ankle, and served the last few months of the war in a POW camp.
When he was finally liberated, he was down to about half his healthy body weight, had contracted pneumonia, and lived only because he got injections of penicillin in what became the first mass usage of the patent-free drug to treat war injuries.
And here I am. In my dad’s memory, I fight fascism, too.
My dad, upon returning from the war, started a family, went to college to become a doctor on the GI Bill (he got a free education because he was a white male veteran), and became an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist for nearly 35 years. He retired as soon as he could collect social security because he could not stand how big money had corrupted medicine during his practice. The final straw was when he was paying more in medical malpractice insurance than he was putting into his own bank account—and he had never been sued!
Like many others, my dad did not say much about his experience in the war, even when asked. Rather, he focussed on his present: his family and his practice, and doing what was right for both. He lived a good long life and made the same possible for his family and patients. Like he did, I count myself to be among the luckiest people to have ever lived, based on the pure accident of my being born to the Greatest Generation.
I can only image what my dad would be saying today about my generation (and our progeny) voting in large enough numbers to elect an actual fascist to be our president. May my generation’s children and grandchildren live to be proud of what we do today.
Marshall Mayer is organizing for Indivisible Helena’s No Kings Rally at noon on Flag Day, June 14, at the state capitol.