Yesterday, the small town of La Mure, France, celebrated America's role in bringing an end to World War II. Liberation came to La Mure on August 22, 1944. There was a parade with men dressed as American G.I.s There were jeeps and other icons of that horrific war.
The French remember American soldiers as brave liberators:
Those soldiers were unlike the soldiers in today’s America serving America’s first dictator as oppressors of their own people. In 1944 America was the greatest nation in the world not because it was big, rich, and powerful but because of its willingness to sacrifice blood and treasure to help save the world from bloodthirsty expansionist dictators such as Hitler.
As an eighty-year-old American it’s heartbreaking to have witnessed America’s decline. My parents and extended family were of America’s Greatest Generation that sacrificed to destroy the evil that everywhere threatened the world during those years. Here is one of my three uncles who served in the war:
Like the French I recall that time when America was truly great, when the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that greatness doesn’t come with amassing wealth and power but with the willingness to sacrifice to save others who cannot save themselves—as Jesus demands in his parable of the Good Samaritan, and as he sacrificed himself to save others.
That is how America is remembered and celebrated by the French, as a nation of heroes. But that is not the America of today. The America of today has the masked thugs of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) terrorizing Hispanic and Asian families—men, women, and children—arresting them and sending them to concentration camps or simply making them disappear in some authoritarian nation on Donald Trump's payroll. The age of heroes is over in America.
Of life, liberty, and happiness
Who bravely fought enemy soldiers
Now an ally of a cruel aggressor.
Of unarmed civilians
Men, Women, and Children
Once loved and respected
Now objects of fear and loathing.
