AMERICA…THE WEAK SISTER?
September 2, 1945, the United States was the most powerful
nation in the world. We had defeated
the Axis Powers consisting of the German, Italian and Japanese forces, all
considered to be superior to ours…but that was at the beginning of World War Two. In the
space between December 7th, 1941, and September 2nd, 1945
America had become “Fortress
America”…out-producing
every other country on earth in weapons of war. In 1940 the US Army was training with
automobiles as tanks, broomsticks as rifles and, what rifles they had were
World War One vintage. The Air Corps
was flying biplanes that were obsolete a dozen years before and the Navy was
sailing with ships that were sometimes 50 and 60 years old.
On that fateful day, December 7, 1941, we entered the war
officially, although we had been supplying our allies with materiel before
that. Russia, as an example, was sending
troops to fight the Germans with no weapons whatsoever, and picking up firearms
that they found on dead soldiers. Britain was being pounded by the Luftwaffe
almost on a daily basis and, at that time, the German-invented blitzkrieg and
pilotless V-1 and V-2 flying bombs were raining death and destruction on London. America
enters the war, following a near-fatal attack on Pearl
Harbor, sinking a major portion of the Pacific Fleet while it was
in harbor.
Americans have, to their great honor, always risen to the
occasion, and World War Two was not going to be any exception. Who would imagine, as an example, that in a
building built by the Ford Motor Company specifically to build B-24 Liberator
bombers, they would turn out a ready-to-fly aircraft in just under an
hour! General Motors and Chrysler went
from automobile production overnight, practically, to building tanks and
armored personnel carriers. The
Springfield rifle of World War One was retired and the Garand M-1 was produced
in huge quantities and shipped out to the troops, putting them on a
better-than-even keel with the enemy’s weapons.
America
was able to make so much of everything that we supplied our then-allies with
almost all of their weaponry and even aircraft.
We flew bombing raids over Europe,
along with the Brits, on a daily basis.
We built something called The Burma Road to supply our friends in that
area of the world. Along the way we
liberated prisoners from concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps and towns
and villages both in the European and Pacific theatres. In other words, we were the best in the
world. Period.
Following the war everything went into peacetime
mode. Cars were being produced where
bombers had been. New methods of
production, for everything, some learned in the war, were being used for
everything from bug bombs to housing systems.
The suburbs grew like
dandelions and shopping centers sprung up all over the place. We were again out-producing everyone even
while we helped our former enemies to come back from disaster. In time Japan
would begin rivalling us for electronic goods, while Germany came through with great
cameras and optical equipment. America was on
the road to really big prosperity.
Then, along came the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the
peaceniks. America began to take a turn away
from prosperity and became fractured…little groups of anti-this and anti-that,
all the while ingesting and using drugs.
Fast forward to 2001.
We are a complacent nation, only peripherally aware of people called Al
Queda and the Taliban. On September 11th,
America
was painfully jerked into the real world again. Soon we would send troops overseas again,
and again we would prove to be a superior power…but only for a while. By the time 2008 rolled around America was
tired of “business as usual” with politics and decided, wrongly as it turned
out, to go in a different direction…this time down a path to something
less-than
mediocrity. A man, about which
very little was known, was thrust upon the national stage, capturing the hearts
and minds of people known as low-information voters. He even garnered votes from cartoon characters
and dead people. He was elected to the
highest office in the land…twice.
Now, in the present time, we are looked at with scorn,
laughed at because of our wussified Congress, the less-than-impressive armed
forces and the absolute fecklessness of our leaders who negotiate based on what
it will say about their legacies instead of what it does for the security of
the country they swore to protect. America has
stepped down from the top of the heap and has taken a position at the bottom,
or nearly at the bottom. Our armed
forces are being reduced to pre-World War Two levels at the same time that some
of our former friends…the ones we kept alive during that war, are making their
armed forces much stronger and becoming potential enemies. The current occupant of the White House has
done what he promised…he fundamentally transformed America from the king of the hill,
to damn near a third-world country which would have problems fielding a global
army. We have become a weak sister in
the eyes of the world. Wake up America! Your country needs you…desperately. Answer the call.
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