How Could This Have Happened?

Sept 17, 2020

Back in the early 60’s, the Second World War was still a vivid memory in the minds of my parents and other adults who had lived through those terrible years. In schools throughout the nation, teens like me were being assigned to read a newly published book entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” -- a history of the rise of nationalism in Nazi Germany and Hitler's ascension to power. But as I read page after page of that book, I could not understand how it was that what I had read was possible. How could a nation of people living in a democracy willingly abdicate such power to a leader who was so clearly manipulative, consumed with his own ego and bent on the destruction of any force that stood in his way? How was it that these people accepted whatever he said as true in spite of evidence to the contrary?

Based on the history of America during the last 4 years, I no longer wonder. Rather, unlike the teenager basking in the Kennedy era of the early 60’s, I now fear for the future of democracy in America.