We are the lucky ones.

How often do you hear old people say that?

But hey, it’s all in the timing, isn’t it?

We had the good fortune to live our adult lives, mostly to completion, in a relatively peaceful and prosperous part of the world. Of course, if we were members of the favored race and favored gender in these parts, we were even luckier, but that’s another less positive story.

In my birth year of 1939, WWII officially began. A worldwide catastrophe, devasting a big swath of the globe by the time fighting came to an end in 1945. While the world has always been beset with numerous variations of death and destruction, nothing of that magnitude has happened since. From 1945 to 2025, North America, Western Europe, Australia/New Zealand, and scattered regions elsewhere have offered many of their citizens lives with a goodly measure of security and opportunity.

And, even though all residents of said countries weren’t included, it often seemed that sincere efforts were being made to involve more and more of us in the better times to come as liberal democracies proliferated.

I, an old white woman, have witnessed amazing changes in the past eight decades…changes that enabled me as a single woman to raise two children; have interesting and worthwhile employment for which I was adequately paid; and travel the world. Without financial backing, and only acquiring college degrees as I went along, mine is a small, but inspiring story of what has become commonly possible for women during lifetimes lived between catastrophes.

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What catastrophes you ask?

I’ve already mentioned my life began the same year WWII (catastrophe #1) was declared.

I believe the somewhat benevolent world in which I’ve lived is approaching its end, and another catastrophe of worldwide apocalyptic proportions looms. A potential cataclysm of murder, plunder, destitution, and disease…with my country leading the charge.  Catastrophe #2.

Really? Who said that? Me? Did I just write that?

OMG Marjorie, reading it over, isn’t that statement just a little over the top? Have I become a full-fledged doomsayer? Before the November election, even shortly afterward, that prediction would still have seemed hysterical to me. But, as it became clear that our new leaders are talking pure fascism, generally defined as a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition. And, who among these new leaders even bothers to deny the fascism label?

As November/December 2024 turned to January 2025, like so many of us, I was living in a state of deep anxiety, not quite out and out heart-pounding fear…yet. It was surely the right time to compile a stable of contemporary journalists/truthtellers on which I could rely, but with the inauguration and terrifying blather immediately radiating from Washington, what can only be labeled visceral fear set in, and for lack of any direct action to take, it seemed a good time to revisit world history. I had new questions—to which I had only half-remembered answers—and those not reassuring. Has there ever been another time like right now in the modern world? Why does it seem so very dark and dangerous…apocalyptic even? How did the world, the US come to be this way?

It was logical to take a historical dive into the last time fascists gained full-on elected government power…to see what happened. My initial sources were/are The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon and 1938: A People’s History of the Coming of the Second World War by Frederick Taylor. What happened was WWII….

It turns out there are so many similarities between the decades leading up to, and then the actual years of 1938/39 and right now–in the 2020s.  Capitalism ever more greed-driven, resulting in inequalities expanding exponentially; institutions increasingly dysfunctional, with good leadership being a rarity; handy scapegoats—those “others” were Jews, anyone not of pure Germanic blood, intellectuals, and of ocurse, truthtellers in the 1930s; now the “others” are apparently anyone not white, religious, and, again, with fascist leanings. One can almost hear Hitler’s words, “…if a people is to become free, it needs pride and will-power, defiance, hate, hate and once again hate.” (p. 34 in Dark Valley) emanating from the oval office today. Hate, always popular. Believe it or not, misinformation was just as popular preceding WWII, as it is now in the 2020s, proving that if the means to communicate wasn’t quite up to today’s speed and breadth, the hate was just as plentiful in both eras.

Germans, in general, were still feeling the effects of their defeat in WWI; there was latent resentment for a demagogue to build upon. While that’s not exactly comparable to the United States today, there’s frustration aplenty for a wannabe dictator to build upon here and now. And throughout history, they always show up.  Somebody to the rescue. A Hitler, a Mussolini, a Putin, a Trump.

Hey, ageing friends. We really have been so lucky. Probably, out of the entire human race, there haven’t been so very many millions who have had whole lifetimes of the chance to pursue happiness! We should probably do whatever we can to give our kids a shot at it, right?

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Several people of consequence are given credit for a variation of the phrase “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But, still, throughout the land, football coaches are teaching the few remaining history classes, and college freshmen are told to avoid the humanities—no money there. We are so dumb about so much.

Speaking of books. Read. Do what I’m trying to do…tear myself away, at least part of the time, from the plethora of excellent journalism available online…read books. Fiction, history, all of it. Without which, can we really be the kind of informed, smart, educated, wise people that can even begin to get us out of this global mess?