B''H
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Consider what happened to the lady who either had a mental
breakdown or simply panicked when she approached or tried to run her car into
the grounds of the White House. She was shot down like a dog. It is not that
she was simply shot but that she was shot so many times "they had difficulty identifying her because
of the extent of her injuries"[1]. If you
take the time to view some of the videos taken after the incident, you will see
the officers involved carrying M-4s: the same weapon our troops use in
Afghanistan. Lethal military-style force with overkill was used against an
unarmed civilian who probably had a psychological disorder with a baby in a
car. And nobody, at least in power, seems to care.
Our country has a long history of periods
of overreaction against foreign threats: the Alien and Sedition Acts over fears
of the French Revolution coming to the United States; the Know-Nothings in the
1850s after the revolution of 1848 in Europe associated with the influx of
immigrants from Germany and Ireland; the Red Scare after 1919, the Russian Revolution; the McCarthy era in
the 1950s; and, I believe today, after 9/11.
On continuing the process described above,
I discovered correspondence between my wife's grandfather and his relatives in
Europe prior to and during World War II. The letters are written in Polish,
Yiddish, and German. When I showed them to my 92-year-old father-in-law to find
out who was who, he expressed interest and surprise, asking "where did I get them?", having never seen them.
They had sat in his basement for 30-plus years in a box after the death of his
mother. I have inherited them. In 1939 the return address on a series of them
changed from Lodz, Poland to Warschau (German for Warsaw) with a Nazi stamp on
them. Until 1941 the postmarks in Chicago are dated fairly contemporaneously, but
after that date the letters were not received until 1946. This entire family
perished.
