When I graduated Queens College in ’66, I was working at NBC as a page, a glorified usher working on the Tonight Show, amongst others. I hadn’t saved much money, but wanted to buy a car very badly. One of the least expensive was the Volkswagen Beetle, which I think was around $1,800. I needed to borrow some money and my mother was extremely unhappy with my choice, because it was a German car.
After WW II, to say Germans were not popular with Jews, would be a definition of understatement. The country and its people were blamed for the atrocities perpetrated on my people and millions of others, because of their religions, ethnicities, sexual preferences and emotional challenges. At the time, I am not sure anybody bothered to step back in an attempt to understand how this could have happened and why.
Man, I wanted that red VW very badly and even then, it seemed strange to me to vilify a people, like they had some kind of genetically transmitted, character deficiency, predisposing them to follow a lunatic and commit heinous crimes against all humanity.
I believe extreme circumstances force people to act in an extreme manner. On the right, we have fascism and on the left, communism. They both have in common the rule of the few over the many. In the middle is the nebulous state of freedom, where the single individual is the fulcrum, the place of balance, the Middle Path.
I am not too sure how communism happens, unless by brute force, absent any subtleties whatsoever. The State takes ownership of everything and I just don’t see how you can mask it for anything other than a brutal takeover of all aspects of a society. The aggregation of power in the hands of a few turns ugly quickly, too intoxicating to withstand.
Fascism happens when the public and private sectors marry and the offspring is a true bastard. It takes maximum advantage of a population that is feeling impotent, victimized by their circumstances. The Germans got their asses kicked in WWI and they were humiliated. Politically, they were the proverbial accident waiting to happen. Hitler was hatched in this hothouse of hatred and his insanity was terribly infectious. He fostered a culture that appealed to the darkness that lurks in the hearts of far too many of us. He had a personal agenda and nothing or no one else mattered as much as his demented vision of having Germany get even with all those who contributed to its demise.
The politics of these extremes always begins with the rhetoric, creating public anthems, molding a lock step of sentiment. Victims are crucial, because it is vital to have targets for the blame and hatred, the impure.
All of us have allowed America to become a mess. We have been and continue to be manipulated by money. It elects our politicians and writes the rules we live under. We are spiraling toward fascism, the marriage of money and politics, the rights of the individual getting crushed between these two bastard children called greed and power.
So many of us are blinded by anger and we will all by victimized by it. The button that is easily pushed is fear and our brains seem to go numb, embracing stupidity. Taking away the freedom of some, threatens the freedom of us all and I’m not sure why that’s such a tricky concept. There are no Aryans here, just Americans. The mistakes we make protecting the rights of the many, pale in comparison to the damage done by ignoring the rights of the few.
We all live in the Middle, Right and Left being terms of convenience by the manipulators. We need to take care of each other and our differences are what we have in common. We need to find our hearts and the hearts of our neighbors. Please, we all have to ignore the cowardice that lives behind the voice of fear. We are better than that.