“The Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, was a warning of how ruthless the new leaders could be. Yet the Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.
From “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William L. Shirer
Here we are. We are at that point.
There are a few moments as you sit in a history class and you wonder, “what would I have done…how would I have acted if I had been there?” I think about this a lot as far as race relations go. This is because I have been in a interracial marriage (2 of them) for over 36 years and my daughter once told me and my wife, “if you met Mommy when Martin Luther King was alive you wouldn’t like each other.”
Would I not like her if we met back then? Now I had great parents in this regard and I did live when Martin Luther King was alive so I have an idea that I still would like her but what if I was born in the south in 1930?
What if I lived in 1775? Would I support the revolutionaries or the crown?
What about slavery? Would I be an abolitionist or a practitioner?
What if I lived in 1860? Union or Confederate?
And…back to the beginning of this post – what if I was born in 1915 in Berlin, Germany?
I would like to think that I would be on the right side of history every time but, since there are so many factors that determine how one thinks and acts during a particular time how can I know?
However…
I can know now. I am living right now. I feel that this is a huge moment in the future of my life, my wife’s life, my daughter’s lives, the country and the world (not hyperbole) and I have the ability to choose my actions. Actions that my granddaughter and great grandkids can look back on and not wonder “what did Great Granddad Matt do in the mid-2020s” when democracy was slowly dying. They will know.
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