AUGUST 17, 2020 – As I kayak along the shoreline, I admire the big pine that were much smaller when my grandparents were alive. I reflect on all that has occurred in the world since they bought this property in the fall of 1939. World War II had just begun with Germany’s Blitzkreig against Poland. By then my grandparents were in their late 40s; they’d already seen quite a lot of disruption in the world.
I sometimes imagine conversations with them about the current state of the world. I tell about the buffoon who occupies the White House; how the party of Eisenhower became irretrievably beholden to a man devoid of a single redeeming quality; of his demand for total personal loyalty; how he uses his position to line family’s coffers and feather the nests of “friends”—shameless associates intent on using him for their own personal gain; his appalling ignorance of the world—the result of zero curiosity; his infatuation with self at the expense of all other people; blatant abuse of power to advance his sole agenda—unknowing, thoughtless applause among his base; appointment of cronies to undermine the foundations of American democracy, assuring that he remains in office and . . . out of prison.
But there’s another side to my imaginary conversations. When I despair, I hear my grandfather, a veteran, tell of the horrors of The Great War, and how the slaughter of unimaginable scale and savagery became an endless reality; how the peace that followed was merely a formula for further conflict of yet larger proportions, culminating with not one but two nuclear bombs being dropped on large urban populations—but not before a worldwide economic depression caused untold suffering and privation. And how WWII a generation after “the war to end all wars” produced the Cold War, the conflict in Korea, the disaster in Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis—the very precipice of all-out thermonuclear war.
In response to my fears of Covid-19 and the ineptitude with which Monster Man has responded, I hear my grandparents tell about the Influenza of 1918. They inform me that the president at that time, the venerable Woodrow Wilson, never once gave public mention to that virus, which wound up killing 600,000 Americans—the equivalent of 1.8 million by the measure of today’s population.
“And if you think your Trump is an idiot,” my grandpa says, “did you know that while living in Paris at the height of negotiations leading to the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson himself contracted the flu, becoming violently ill and delirious? He obsessed about furniture—furniture!—at the most critical stage of negotiations. Six months later, a stroke finished off any remaining ability to govern, yet he stayed in office. He too, like your autocrat, tolerated no criticism from anyone, ally or enemy, and clung to power to the bitter end.”
“Nothing lasts forever,” I hear Grandpa say . . . “Including the Roaring Twenties, which followed immediately what’d seemed to be the world’s darkest hour.”
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
