When Will We Learn?

My father fought in World War Two in Europe.

I believe he ended up in Czechoslovakia.

When the war was over a thing that looked like him came back to Seattle.

My mother always told me it wasn’t really him.

Impaired he may have been; silent he was: silent about anything that had happened to him in Europe during that war.

But he always, once in a while, said one thing: “we are going to have to fight the Russians”.

He said had that in the immediate aftermath of VE Day. 

That was when he was still over there.

So, since he would have had to participate in that view of things, I would guess that he felt it to have been a necessary thing.

He really wanted to get out of there, I would suppose.

I know I felt that way in Vietnam.

But he said that we needed to fight the Russians on VE Day.

And he had not been alone.

On that day, he and all of his fellows fully expected to get orders to move on to Moscow.

But the orders never came.

And we now live in a post Soviet world that would seem to be an exoneration for the decision not to complete our (United State’s) job in Europe.

Except that now Vlad the Invader is borrowing the Big Lie from Hitler and moving under his lies to redesign the map of Europe.

And we are standing on the sidelines like Walt Kelly’s Pogo saying “my my”.

We are dithering around the edges of Russia’s imminent takeover of Ukraine.

We want diplomacy and reason to “solve the problem”.

Since “the problem” is that Putin is going to take Ukraine that is a very weak idea.

Unless we inject – NATO and the United States – the number of fighters necessary to cause Vlad to back off, we are going to have a Hitlerian done deal real soon.

Anyone that thinks that he will stop there is an idiot.

There is a stack of states: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland – maybe Finland – that will be next.

My father was right.

He just was too aggressive about the time frame.

The United States needs to reinstitute the draft.  That won’t help for awhile, but this problem is not going to go away in any time that any of us are going to know about.

We need to get our ass in gear to stop this thing.