I was born in Houston in 1938. Yeah, 86 years ago. Back then, people thought old folks were full of wisdom. Today, they think we have dementia.
So far, doctors say my brain’s OK. Looks like Glenn Clark‘s brain is too.
He writes “Growing Up In Bandera” for The Bulletin, taking us back to the 1950s. His stories of life back then tell us about how different it was. And that’s important for lots of reasons.
My family lived just outside Houston’s city limits in the piney woods in what’s now the Memorial area in 1945 when I was 7 years old. Hoot owls scared us at night. School buses picked us up at our property’s gate. Our Daddy had a chicken farm. We watched tiny yellow chicks in the brooders as they hatched out of eggs.
We remember World War II. It began in 1939 and didn’t end until 1945 when I was 7 years old.
There were lots of movies about it. People packed into theaters to see Twelve O’clock High, Sands of Iowa Jima, Flying Tigers, G. I. Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo in the 1940s. In the 1950s there was Pork Chop Hill, The Caine Mutiny, To Hell And Back and D Day.
News clips we saw before movies in theatres brought the reality of that war home to us in stark images starving people in concentration camps, piles of naked bodies stacked 4 and 5 feet high, bombs landing on cities, soldiers being shot dead on beaches – all this before TV was common in American homes.
In the 1950s, we began to see footage of Adolph Hitler – the man who started that war - pounding podiums, delivering bombastic speeches before thousands of cheering Germans swearing allegiance to a depraved authoritarian dictator.
I grew up with a lasting fear of authoritarian figures, making the similarities between Hitler and Donald Trump today extremely frightening. It’s something we should never forget. Our country could all too easily succumb to Trump’s lies and racist dismissal of minorities.
He has called for purifying the blood of our nation by eliminating “vermin,” his name for non-white immigrants. He’s called for concentration camps to corral them before they are deported.
He calls the news media “the enemy of the people,” a tactic Hitler used to end the free press in Germany. He advocates getting rid of protections for free speech in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. He calls American soldiers “losers” who died in battle fighting for America.
His project 2025 concentrates power in the presidency, taking it away from the 3 branches of government meant to balance governing in America as the U.S. Constitution intended.
The U.S. Supreme Court, packed with conservative judges he appointed, has given virtual immunity to the presidency, guaranteeing Trump would never be prosecuted for crimes he committed in office as long as he designates them “official acts.” Nor could his motives be legally challenged.
I firmly believe children in this country should be taught about World War II and the horrors of Hitler’s Nazism so they can see the U.S. Constitution could easily end up in the garbage.
Jodie Sinclair is an award-winning writer who holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and resides in Bandera, Texas.
