Our fight against fascism will be staged on US soil

Monday, Aug. 21, 2017 | 2 a.m.

Imagine being one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors.

Imagine being one of the last World War II survivors.

Imagine being an older American who remembers segregation, whites-only drinking fountains, lynchings and crosses burned in the night.

We have a generation of Americans who have spent their entire lives watching this country step away from these horrors and fight these evils. We cherish these elders, and we owe them a debt of incalculable proportions. They fought battles, survived the Holocaust, defeated Nazis, drove the Ku Klux Klan into the dark fringes of society and brought America to a better place.

Now imagine being one of those people and seeing the president of the United States standing up for neo-Nazis, the KKK and other white supremacists, going so far as to call some of them “very fine people.”

Imagine the pain of elders seeing Donald Trump follow up by tweeting that he was “sad” about the removal of “our beautiful statues and monuments,” echoing the sentiments of white supremacists who oppose the removal of Confederate statues. Imagine the survivors’ sadness — the true sadness — at then reading reports that the president’s chief strategist called Tuesday’s news conference a “defining moment” in which Trump defended “his people.”

This is a defining moment, but not for the reasons the strategist had in mind.

It’s a moment when Americans must speak out for the principles and ideals that our elders sacrificed so much in defending, and to oppose any group that threatens to overturn the progress that has been made over the past 70 years. It’s a moment in which racism in any form must be denounced, white supremacist groups must be driven back into the shadows and we must demand that our leaders categorically condemn racism, hatred and violence.

Somewhere in the world today, a survivor of the Holocaust will die.

Somewhere today, an elderly person will die who witnessed a lynching, was denied service in a restaurant or was subjected to one of the myriad other heart-shattering forms of segregation that blighted our nation’s past.

Among these people’s last memories will be the horror of an American president whose comments about the violence in Charlottesville, Va., drew cheers from David Duke, former grand wizard of the KKK, and many others of his ilk.

We must not let any others die without knowing that the American people reject this president and his support of these evils.

We owe it to these great generations who risked all fighting racist ideology, and in many cases gave their lives for it, to know that America will not slide backward and lose the more righteous world they gave us.

It’s our debt to their epic battles, and we must pay it by fighting this slide into monstrosity with all we have.

And it’s what we owe our children too.