June 6, 1944/June 6, 2009

I awoke this morning to one of the most insightful comments I have ever heard on radio, compliments of NPR's Scott Simon.

I wish I could persuade the world to visit his words and take them to heart, especially these quoted from his interview with historian John Keegan, responding to the question:

'What if D-Day had failed?'

"America would be marooned," said John Keegan, sweeping a hand over a globe. "Alone on a vast planet flooded by fascism." Hitler might have let America alone for a while, he said. But every Jew in Europe, every Roma, every gay, Jehovah's Witness, disabled or retarded person, and millions more Poles and Russians would have been executed or worked to death.

How many millions would we allow to be killed, he asked, so that Americans could live in an isolation some would call peace? And what kind of Hell would be left to our children in a world dominated by the creators of the Nuremberg Laws and death camps?"

It is sobering to remember that Hitler was only fifty-one years old when he took his own life the following May. Had he and his regime prevailed, he and his could have been in power well into the 1960's and beyond. It beggars the imagination.

So, here I sit on June 6, 2009, drinking coffee, watching the Memorial Golf Tournament (hosted by Mr. Nicklaus), catching up on the laundry. My bride and children are thriving, each in their own corner of the world. Business, although down somewhat, is good. We get to follow our dreams and make a living at it. How many people have that privilege?

We have this, in great part, because of what these brave souls accomplished on June 6, 1944.

One of those boys who did not survive that day hailed from a small town in central Kentucky, one of my mother's dearest high school friends. Her eyes still well up when she recalls him, these sixty-five years later. My father, recently passed, fought in the Pacific. In his final years, he shared memories of boys who never made it home. He arrived home with a lifelong case of survivor's guilt, and his adulthood friends were mostly boys from his Marine company who all settled within two miles of one another. He was the last to depart, and his loneliness was profound.

What if we lived our lives a bit more deliberately in the shadow of these men and women?

Would we have hit songs like 'Blame It On The Alcohol' all over the radio?

Would we conduct our politics with knives and poison?
Would we tolerate mayoral races featuring wrestling midgets?

Would we embrace business practices based on the notion that the person on the other end of any transaction is a sheep to be fleeced? Would a Bernie Madoff even be possible?

Would we look at the world outside our borders and say 'Never again' (and mean it!) to the new flock of facists who think it's perfectly acceptable to massacre entire classes of people in the name of some twisted utopian ideology?

Would we not look harder at ourselves, and make certain we are not headed down the slippery slope toward despotism ourselves?

What would we do with our lives and our culture if we lived a bit more in the shadow of June 6, 1944?