Political Reality Check

Builders, 

In this political season, opposing perspectives will attempt to portray the other side of the aisle as nothing short of evil. Tonight I share a New York Times obituary and a disturbing souvenir from the Wynne family china cabinet as a reminder of what real political evil actually is.

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Above, a silver plate from Commodore Vong Sarendy, Chief of Naval Operations of the Cambodian Navy, presented to my father in the summer of 1974.  It was to express his country’s gratitude for my father’s extraordinary efforts to thwart the Cambodian Communists in his country’s civil war. It was a bitter presentation, as US support for the democratic government was faltering, in spite of JFK’s call to arms that we would “Pay any Price, bear any burden and meet any hardship to insure the survival of liberty.” Sarendy said to my father that the Americans could go home, but he and his family would stay and fight to the death. Within a year, they had perished, the Khmer Rouge owned the country, and the Satanic Pol Pot began a systematic genocide that took the lives of two million people, 25% of the people in the country. During the four years it took to fill up the 20,000 mass graves,  China was Pol Pot’s tireless supporter, supplying tens of thousands of soldiers to assist him. 

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Above, the NYT obituary of Sydney Schanberg from July 10th. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work attempting to warn the western world that the Khmer Rouge were as vicious as the Nazis. His writings were the basis of the 1984 film “The Killing Fields. ” Schanberg is in the center smoking. On the right is his assistant Dith Pran who went on to survive four years in some of the most brutal tourture camps of the 20th century.

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Today was a good day for my family. It was the first day my father was home in three months.  After dinner, where he was restored to sitting at the head of the family table,  we  reminisced over past moments with 3 of the 4 children present. We later put dad to bed, and the last thing he softly said was “I didn’t think I would make it home again.”

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It is now the middle of the night, and I sit a quiet watch at his bedside. My sister will relieve me at 6am. Through the long night I will type this and spend the hours looking for the words to express my father’s absolute hatred of Satanic totalitarian political movements and the carnage they have caused to humanity.

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From the time he swore into the US Navy at age 17, my father has been willing to give anything, including his life, to defeat   Evil regimes. Then it was the Facists and the cult of death Hirohito preached. Today it is ISIS, and somewhere in between, in the 1970s it was the Khmer Rouge.  The earth has supplied an endless stream of Satanic tyrants,  but in my father’s view, this didn’t justify accepting   the existence of any of them. 
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Tomorrow I could turn on any cable news station, or read countless Face Book pages, and within minutes I could see someone call their political adversaries Nazis, Evil or Satanic.  This might be just a sad joke, except for the fact there are Americans among us who know what real evil is.  I am not a blind fan of either party or their candidates, but I can discern between today’s crop of  ethically challenged  offerings and a purely evil  entity like Pol Pot. No matter who is elected in November, our country will go on, and anyone who suggests we are headed for the national nightmare Cambodia experienced is paranoid or emotionally unstable.

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A few miles from my house is a  simple convenience store called “Hwy. 17 Beverage.”  When I walked in ten years ago, the  owner and family patriarch was slightly stunned that I could tell is family was from Cambodia.  He mentioned that no other neighbor in rural Florida had understood this. He went on to say he had survived his country’s own holocaust, but had come to accept that the great majority of the  people born in his adoptive country didn’t have the slightest idea of how fourtunate the are. When I think of this man watching a national debate or reading extreme political opinions on Face Book,  I cringe, and harbor the hope he has a great sense of tolerance and a generous sense of understanding .

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