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.
Oh how the mighty have fallen. Trump’s America is no longer great because it is no longer heroic, no longer willing to sacrifice for men, women, and children threatened by the forces of evil. His ambition for America is to make it less great by making it increasingly evil. Yes, today's America has taken the side of evil—today’s Hitler Vladimir Putin—slaughterer of Ukrainian men, women, and children.
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 the America remembered by the French, but is not the America of today.
