Is History about to Repeat Itself? | Eastern NC Now

    Is History about to Repeat Itself?

    Vicktor Frankel's "Man's Search for Meaning" was a book I read as I majored in Psychology at Emory. He was a prisoner of the Nazis. He noted how some people became lackadaisical, turned their face to the wall, and died in their sleep while others, like him, endured and survived.

    What he discovered was that those who survived somehow did not give up. They maintained hope that one day things would end and be better for the Jews.

    I had the "privilege" of getting arrested in Mobile ALA doing work cleaning up after Katrina. It was over a man who refused to pay me $2,000 of what was owed for a week of work using my Bobcat and a worker I brought for 4 solid days of serious work putting debris to the street for FEMA removal.

    The state of Alabama has a law entitled "Theft of Services" which makes it a class-3 felony to fail to pay a contractor at the end of a job, no matter if the contract were verbal.

    My contract was written, but the DA would not help with enforcing it. As I sat in their jail for 10 days without trial and contact with my wife (who assumed I was dead), I had the thoughts of the early Christians arrested for being faithful to their Christ --- and Jews with no hope of freedom and sent with no charges to a concentration camp.

    There is nothing like a personal experience of hate and miscarriage of justice to be awakened to harsh reality!

    Mobile, ALA, has more big churches per street corner, of all denominations. They are attended so much that off-duty cops direct traffic. It is all a pretense and the dark underbelly was a source of nightmares to me.

    The stories of the Holocaust were some of my reading as a youngster of the Baby Boomer Generation. I had my draft card during the Viet Nam War and, fortunately, did not get called by the Draft Board in Decatur, GA. I was in college and then graduate school and got a student deferment. I witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought on by the same hate being focused on our current President. Those were US horror stories and more than real to me.

    Are we being reduced to the same state that opened doors for Conservatism to invade Germany? The Nazi Party used their hate of their state in life paying reparations for the destruction of WWI. Their economy was busted. People were angry. They were clamoring for a better state of income all over Germany.

    Then came a man named Adolf Hitler. His Party had lavish parades. The economy improved dramatically, BUT what things came alongside the "success"???