On this Veterans Day, I'm thinking of my Grandpa Mike.
His entire extended family emigrated from just outside of Minsk (in what is now Belarus) to the United States in the decade or so before World War II, escaping poverty and oppression under Soviet rule, but safely well before Hitler's army came to town. I'll never know quite how bad it was or how much they knew about what was on the horizon, because my grandfather passed away 7 years ago yesterday, and he was famously a man of few words, especially when it came to his less-than-idyllic childhood in "the shtetl," as they called it.
After a brief detour through what is now Israel, my grandpa arrived in the US as a teenager with almost no English, attended high school and college in NYC, where, though he studied pharmacy, he decided instead to buy and run a liquor store, and lived the American Dream of a quiet life in the suburbs with two kids, a nice split-level tract house, a big green backyard, good schools, and a happy, healthy, loving family.
But before settling down, just years after becoming an American, my grandpa fought for America in WWII, against fascism and anti-Semitism and hate. He was an infantryman who saw combat, including the Battle of the Bulge. I do not know if he carried emotional scars with him from that war, but he did carry physical ones, and was awarded a Purple Heart for what I'm told was the shrapnel that he carried around in his knee for the rest of his 87 years.
As I think about the values that he fought for: freedom, tolerance, human rights, diplomacy, global peace and cooperation--and the values he fought against: hatred, oppression, nationalism, fascism--and his good fortune to be accepted into the United States, even as an immigrant from an 'undesirable' group--I can't imagine what my grandpa would think about what just happened in America. I only wish he were around to offer a few words (very few, as was his nature), perhaps laced with an expletive or two (though I don't recall ever hearing him curse), about what it means to have Donald Trump as his president-elect on this Veterans Day.