... he refused to take up arms. Many of my wild west ancestors were dodging wars in Europe, wars in America, and the U.S. Civil War. They landed on these shores and hit the ground running.
Given a choice of prison or building and repairing ships for the Merchant Marine, my Pacifist grandpa chose to work the shipyards. Not Navy ships, no guns. (My other grandpa was an Army Air Force Officer in World War II, but that's another story. He never talked about the War. Emerging from the war as some kind of wizard of exotic metals, his proudest accomplishment, that he would always talk about, was his work as an engineer for the Apollo Project. Bits of his metal are on the moon and in the Smithsonian.)
My Pacifist grandpa once got beaten up badly by the cops when he was out protesting the internment of his Japanese American neighbors.
It frightens me when we don't recognize how close the U.S.A. is to being a fascist state. A frightening number of U.S. Americans didn't recognize the threat of Nazi Germany, the same sorts of people who voted for Trump. The same sort of people who were undisturbed by Franco's Spain and all the bloody Latin American dictatorships this nation was supporting.
Had the U.S.A. been within geographical reach of Nazi Germany, and had so many of our uber-wealthy not been Anglophiles, I think the U.S.A, would have folded to Hitler quicker than France did. Philip K. Dick's and Amazon's The Man in the High Castle is a terrifyingly realistic alternate reality.
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