by Ralph Greenberg,

I turned 92 recently and I began to think about the past and the future of our country. I want to urge everyone to vote to save and protect our democracy.

My eyes are wide open and I see the ugliness and hate around. In just one week, two African-American were killed in Kentucky, eleven Jewish people were murdered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and mail bombs were sent to leaders in the Democratic Party, journalists and critics of President Trump. As I write this, in New York City police arrested a man for scrawling an anti-Semitic hate message on a synagogue in Brooklyn and they are investigating to find out who wrote a racial slur on the monument at the African-African American burial ground in lower Manhattan.

While we might not be able to stop people from harboring hateful feelings, we can oust politicians who seem to give tacit approval to this kind of hate.

We have had ugly moments in our history and we survived them.
I was in elementary school in the 1930s and became very aware of politics. The stock market crash of 1929 had pitched the country in to the Great Depression and most of us were in survival mode. My father was an organizer and an elected official of the Teamsters Bakery Drivers union. He and the people around us talked about the bosses fighting the workers.

There was propaganda then, too, from business leaders and politicians who thought Roosevelt was going too far to try to create a safety net for Americans. Many opposed his creation of Social Security. They also criticized his great jobs program, the Works Progress Administration, that put Americans who’d lost jobs and a lot else back to work.

With Hitler’s rise in Germany, there was anti-Semitism in America too. In 1939, 20,000 Americans, Nazi sympathizers, marched to Madison Square Garden and held a rally.  20,000 people is a lot.

But that movement, thank God, didn’t catch hold in the United States. We had only newspapers and radio and no internet to magnify the hate.

I served in the Army during World War II to defend our country and defeat Hitler. I stayed in the military as a naval reserve officer in a submarine unit while I went to Columbia University.

Here’s my point.

Today the internet and social media make it easy for haters and people who want to destroy the United States to manipulate and influence peoples’ thinking. We face an existential threat to our democracy that we never faced before. A large part of our population has been convinced by the propaganda of sinister forces that their fellow citizens are their enemies. Trump, the Russians and others are experts in lying and deceiving people and by now you know that they use Facebook and Twitter to do it.

But despite it all, I’m still hopeful that we will unite and make better choices in the future for the sake of our children, grandchildren and the generations to follow. We will have to learn how to recognize propaganda on social media and control the dark forces that seek to use it for their own corrupt purposes. We also need to vote, to elect decent leaders who will tell the truth and put the best interests of our country first.

VOTE.