It’s funny how viewing or hearing a snippet of something can hit your emotions instantly and unexpectedly. This morning the prolific social media entertainment poster, Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17 on fka Twitter and Threads), put up a clip of Christopher Plummer’s scene from The Sound of Music singing Edelweiss. As Captain Von Trapp, Plummer gets to a point in the song where he breaks down and is close to tears, only to be saved by Julie Andrews and the children finishing the song with him.
The Von Trapp family was planning an escape from Nazi rule and sadly, from their beloved Austria, and the emotions that enveloped that theater were palpable even through time. The thought of that tyranny wrought by the Nazis hit me like a punch in the stomach. Good people from around Europe were displaced, tortured, and murdered just to satisfy the narcissistic will of one crazed man, Adolph Hitler.
In an instant, I felt a tear roll down my cheek. I was moved not just by the sadness of the scene in the movie, but by the sadness of and for good people throughout Europe then, and in the United States today, who were and are disrupted and destroyed by the evil that is fascism and the crazed desire of one man to become a dictator and gain the control that goes with it.
How could this happen? How can this guy be allowed to run for President of the United States after all he has been found liable for and charged with? I hear this from people, especially women, every day. I suspect there were similarly concerned people in Germany and Austria in the 1930s and early 1940s who asked themselves the same question. The answer to how is complicated even if irrational. Yet it is happening and did happen back then.
Are we, like the Von Trapp family, left with the only choice of fleeing our beloved country? Or do we stand up and fight? Unlike the situation of the Von Trapps, we still have time to fight before fascism takes over. Speaking out now and then voting in November for the soul of America has never been more important than it is this year. It is our legitimate weapon to deny fascism from taking over our land and decimating our Constitution.