Lieutenant Harold Kaminsky: [to Captain John Earle, who demanded confirmation before alerting anyone when informed of a sub sighting in the restricted zone] You wanted confirmation, Captain? [Pointing to the Pearl Harbor fleet aflame] Take a look! There’s your confirmation!
Tora Tora Tora 1970
I found myself thinking of my father yesterday and realizing that the people who are currently occupying colleges and screaming for the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews would have defined him as having “White Privilege”.
Well he certainly was white (although many in society didn’t consider the children of Sicilian immigrants white and he certainly was loaded with privilege his entire life.
- He had the privilege of being born to a family of 9 from Parents who came from Sicily with nothing
- He had the privilege of leaving school at 13 to work full time in the paper mills to help support a family that while having a little bit of land was dead poor.
- He had the privilege of working through the shutdowns of the plant to clean out the vats for extra money in an age when there was no such thing as “welfare”.
- He had the privilege to spend years in the Pacific on an Ammunition ship knowing it would take but a single hit for his life to end it his 20’s.
- He had the privilege after the war of running a bar and restaurant in a town that didn’t like Italians.
- He had the privilege of enduring gunshots fired at his house and business for being an Italian businessman in the wrong town, of being jumped and in one instance run over for daring to carry on and not pay protection.
- He had the privilege of seeing his wife and mother of his four children at the time caught in an explosion at his place, being badly burned but somehow surviving to eventually give birth to a fifth child.
- He had the privilege of using his skills as a carpenter to build the house where he moved his family to and eventually build next door to his mother-in-law after her husband died to take care of her.
- He had the privilege of having her move in with her and devoting himself full time to her welfare when she was too sick to live in her house next door.
- And he had the privilege of after a lifetime of labor to die just after retirement at 65 before he ever received his first social security check.
But the biggest privilege he had was being brought up in a faithful Catholic house, marrying a faithful Catholic wife and during all that time of unremitting labor and danger thanking God for all the blessings he had. Always sharing what he had with strangers in need and never complaining about his lot, at least not in the 23 years that I shared a house with him.
Yet in contrast we see people attending elite universities, people who have rarely if ever had to struggle, who would be considered part of the 1% not just of this nation but of all human history abusing that advantage to gain an elite education, flouting the law and terrorizing their fellow students whose primary crime is to belong to a race that has survived thousands years of various attempts to exterminate them.
I’ll wager these pampered fools never had “no” said to them in their lives. They wouldn’t have lasted 15 minutes in the great depression let alone on the battlefields of World War 2 in the world where my dad and millions like him bore the “privilege” of responsibility. They’ve not builders they’re destroyers.
Even worse the “adults” in the room are encouraging them to continue such behavior and at the highest levels of Government people holding power do little or nothing out of fear that enforcing the law might cost them votes come November.
In my fathers day they would have been quickly arrested and subject to the full penalties of the law and in states like Florida where sanity still rules they are, which is why you aren’t seeing Campus takeovers and bridges blocked, because people protest within the boundaries of the laws and the adults in charge make sure that if they cross the line between exercising their rights and abusing the rights of others, they suffer the consequences.
These kids never faced the consequences of their actions. Now all of us get have the “privilege” of doing so.
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