It’s human nature to disbelieve the bad thing until the bad thing happens to you.
Most Americans have yet to be impacted by this Administration. The awful things that have been done, because the judiciary and legislature haven’t objected, have yet to reach most of us.
That’s about to change. When people aren’t paid, when they lose their health insurance, when they’re told to starve, I believe it will break through the walls many put up against seeing what came before. A Civil War is coming.
It is starting now, as SNAP aid runs out and federal employees aren’t paid. It’s going to accelerate in the next few months, as the new budget closes off other aid families depended on for generations.
Liberals say most federal aid goes to conservatives, but conservatives don’t believe that. They don’t even believe that money is aid. They see themselves as entitled to it. What happens when you don’t get what you’re entitled to?
Looking at the future, I’m reminded of the climactic scene in Judgment at Nuremberg, between Spencer Tracy’s Dan Hayward and Burt Lancaster’s Emil Janning.
The screenwriter spent the movie making Lancaster’s character appear credible, honest, different from the men on trial with him. First, by casting Burt Lancaster. Second, by showing his moral conflict.
Now, having been sentenced for his crimes, he pleads with Tracy for mercy. “Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it, You must believe it!”
Tracy believes him but replies that “it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”
This has already happened. ICE, ICE baby.
A Personal Story
The backdrop to the movie was the fear of communism, America’s willingness to turn a blind eye to confront it through Germany.
This was when my “Uncle Herb,” Herbert Blankenhorn (he is not related but Blankenhorns are scarce on the ground), entered the story.
Herbert Blankenhorn was a minor functionary in Hitler’s foreign service, right through the war. He joined the Nazi Party in 1938. But a Catholic diplomat later testified that “he was in reality anti-Nazi,” that he had patiently explained Germany would lose the war, when it was at the height of its power.
Herbert Blankenhorn helped form a Christian Democratic Union in the British sector during the occupation. He became the architect of Konrad Adenauer’s foreign policy, from which what’s now the European Community slowly emerged.
Like Lancaster’s Janning character, Herbert Blankenhorn laid low while the world burned. He said later he joined the party because his family was threatened. Herr Blankenhorn found himself a diplomatic post in Switzerland during the war. He was said to have come to his later work with clean hands.
It was important work. The transformation of West Germany into an architect of European unity, alongside France, was a seminal event of the 20th century. I was able to see the Netherlands celebrate “Tachtig jaar van vrede en vrijheid,” 80 years of peace and freedom, because of the work Herbert Blankenhorn began after the War.
But was he a great man? Was he even a good man?
The Jannings of this era have already condemned themselves. I wonder, how will the Blankenhorns fare? Most of us are Blankenhorns. (The image of clouds was taken by my son.)
