Tears of a Veteran:

Facing the Mirror of White Nationalism

TikTok Video

There’s a viral video going around one meant to make us “feel good” in the face of open white supremacy. This video is a world war 2 veteran breaking down, showing frustration and a deep sense of loss. “This country is going to hell in a hand basket.” he claims, exasperated at the thought of his dead brothers and sisters work being undone. “We haven’t got the country we had when I was raised, not at all” he follows. “No body will have the fun I had, no one will have the opportunity I had, it’s not the same, it’s not what they died for.” These last words falling out of this man’s mouth, trapped between tears and desperation. However, this desperation falls into a void, a void in search of understanding.

Listening to this mans words, at a surface level, brings easy empathy. A world war 2 veteran seeing the rise of Nazism in the United States, of course he we would be desperate to plea. He clearly lost friends fighting the Nazi war machine and understands the horrors that the Nazi empire acted upon large populations of people. Everyone from Jews, to African descendants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and any European community that wasn’t a white, straight, christian community. Having a hobby interest in history stirred up an even darker realization. This man, at the end of World War 2 in 1947, would have been roughly 18 years old (this is taking into consideration that there were young men lying about their age to join the fight) Hearing this man call desperately for a world back to his childhood now pits a pit in my stomach. Being 18 in 1947 meant this man was a full adult on December 1st, 1955. The fateful day that Rosa Parks made the heroic decision to stand against segregation, leading in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956. This veteran, this hero, this man, puts into question what it means to be human.

Sitting on this, knowing this man grew up in a segregated United States. Listening to this mans words of “We haven’t got the country we used to.” wrenches my gut. “No body will have the opportunity I had, it’s not the same, it’s not what they died for” puts into question my own humanity. Did this veteran see the headlines of Emmett Till and dehumanize him after signing up to fight the same ideology happening in Germany not 8 years before? The same ideology he grew up in segregation. This man had a cognitive blind spot to the evil in his life. A blind spot so shadowed and covered up through generations of conditioning ourselves to maintain that blind spot. If we turn to find it, we may fear that we lose everything in understanding our humanity, because our humanity isn’t human, it is oppressive.

I’m sure this man was loved and respected by many. Where the discomfort comes in is the realization of who he may have been loved and respected by and who my have feared him, and the countless souls that laid to waste the Nazi empire. How did they treat the oppressed classes when they returned home from fighting open supremacy? Did they have a nagging in their moral standing as White bodies in segregation after facing the evils enacted on European “non-aryans”? We may never know the answer and we have little time to learn from the generation that felt a sense of loss in the face of integration.

So now we lead with our knowledge, or lack thereof, of integration. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s words of “I fear I may have integrated my people into a burning house.” sits heavy, and reflecting on those words as we head into the second Trump administration, those words ringing ever truer now 61 years later, brings a sense of hope. While Black Americans may have integrated into the burning house of American Whiteness, it has brought a tie that wasn’t there before. A tie for White people to step out of supremacy culture and step into humanity on a larger scale. A call to action now, which was a whisper before. A demand to heal not only ourselves of White Supremacy Culture, but to heal each other. Humanize ourselves and learn how to manage differences without it turning into another Civil War or American Revolution. And this demand is difficult, however we are learning the tools to build and reconnect to each other. However, as usual with us European Americans, we begrudgingly answer that call. Cultural toddlers stunted by the colonization of ourselves before we spread that horror among the rest of the developed world. It is okay to be cultural immature as long as we hold it accountable and not demand every culture around us to ignore our incapacity for genuine human living. We all start somewhere, and we only have ourselves to blame for being so far behind. We built our entire empire on the labor of every community around us, spoiled children in the garden of Eden, devouring all the fruit and forcing Adam and Eve to grow more for us to devour. While were fighting over who’s turn it is to hold the high chair, we don’t see that our house is burning down.

-Chris Pratt

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