What would two Republicans I’ve loved say about their party’s candidate?
~by Victoria Riley, GCNO publisher
Halloween, a holiday on which people make light of death and what follows, is later this week.
It became my least favorite holiday when my older sister died Oct. 30, 1973, my junior year in high school. At school the next day – yes, my siblings and I all went to school the next day – our French teacher turned off the lights and classmates told “ghost” stories. I knew then that I’d never again like Halloween.
But, 50 years later, I often wish I could channel the dead. Not my sister – that’s a long story – but often my father, who died 10 years ago, and sometimes my husband, who died seven years ago.
My father was a research chemist and then a college chemistry teacher, his brain wired much differently than mine. Ten years ago he didn’t believe the global climate was changing. I did. If I could talk with him now, I’d ask if he has seen enough evidence to become a believer.
I would also carefully broach a subject that has become strictly off-limits when my siblings and I gather. I’d ask him if, after examining all the evidence, as scientists do, he supports the Republican candidate for president.
My father was Republican through and through. He was also a World War Two veteran. We learned only after he had a nervous breakdown while caring for my mother, who suffered from dementia, that on his final mission in the South Pacific he was taken off the B-17G in a straitjacket, having been covered with body parts of the airman sitting next to him. He was hospitalized for several months before returning to Michigan State to finish his studies.
My father was not a sucker or a loser.
He passed away during President Obama’s second term. He never voted for a Democrat, at least not that we ever knew of. He would have voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He would have voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
I wish I could ask him if he would still support him now.
My father believed laws are meant to be followed by everyone. Would he vote for a man convicted of 34 felonies?
My father fought alongside many soldiers who returned home in coffins, those former President Trump has called suckers and losers. Would my father vote for a man with so little respect for the military, for those who sacrificed their lives, and for those whose lives were forever changed?
Come forward through time to Vietnam-era veterans. My dead husband Jim served in the US Army for 28 years. After retiring from the Army he went to work as a civilian for Defense Finance and Accounting Service. He spent nearly 50 years serving the military.
To the day he died his salute was crisp and intentional.
He and I were married several years before he retired from DFAS, based in Indianapolis, and moved to Jefferson. We watched “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” together only a few times before he realized President Trump was the target of many of Colbert’s commentaries. Jim refused to watch any more. “He’s the commander in chief,” my husband said about him. Jim, who was less politically informed/active than I, didn’t need to know more. That Trump was Commander in Chief was enough for a man with Army green blood.
And now we’re reminded in an Oct. 22 article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic magazine that Trump received a medical deferment from the draft based on a physician’s diagnosis of bone spurs in a heel. During his presidency, in a conversation with Cabinet officials about aging Vietnam veterans, he was quoted as saying that Vietnam would have been “a waste of time” for him, and that “only suckers went to Vietnam.”
Author Goldberg quoted General Barry McCaffrey (Ret.), a decorated Vietnam veteran, saying that Trump doesn’t understand traditional military virtues like honor and self-sacrifice. “The military is a foreign country to him,” McCaffrey is quoted as saying. “He doesn’t understand the customs or codes… It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”
During a campaign speech this summer, Trump described Medal of Honor recipients as “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”
I remember watching Medal of Honor recipients being celebrated at a Major League Baseball game, with a line up of them each throwing a pitch. Those baseballs were just a bit bigger than the lump in my throat. Losers? No. Ordinary people who have done heroic deeds? Yes.
We’re told Trump wants the same kind of generals Adolph Hitler had, the difference being that the German generals were loyal to Hitler, while U.S. generals are loyal to the Constitution. Imagine what the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection would have been if military generals more loyal to the President than the Constitution were involved.
I wonder if Jim would support Donald Trump now.
Some historians are telling us we’re perilously close to where Germany was in the early 1930s, the years leading up to Adolph Hitler becoming chancellor. I pray the American electorate protects the U.S. Constitution and the American experiment with democracy.
The 47th President needs to understand she/he is second in importance to the Constitution.
