I woke up this morning thinking about D-Day, of which we celebrate today the 65th anniversary. Actually, I thought about my father before going to bed last night, imagining the hour (around 2 am) may have been about the time he'd have been getting into a plane, preparing to be silently dropped onto the Continent. What must be going through your head when you know that in a very short time death is a very real possibility? Might you be feeling like a number in a lottery, like the Spanish Christmas lottery in which there are lots and lots of "winning" numbers? I don't know, but I suspect that to counter those potentially fearful thoughts a great effort would have been made to stay sharply focused on the details of the task at hand. Just a few minutes ago I finished reading Pedro Aparicio's weekly column in Diario Sur. He uses today's article to make a call for participation in tomorrow's European Parliament elections and at the beginning of the reflection he writes that at the conclusion of the war, "Half of Europe, including the Iberian peninsula, prolonged its drama under dictatorship. But the other half rose up thanks to freedom. Its big democratic political parties –left and right– explored their mutual identities and decided to share the values they did not want to give up: liberties, democracy, human rights, Europe, respect for borders. All the democrats got on 'the same shore', undertaking a dialogue that led to the Treaty of Rome." I don't really like to imagine my father pointing a gun at someone, but if ever violence was justified, surely the liberation of Europe from Nazi terror in the summer of 1944 was an example. So I'm grateful to friend Pedro for reminding me: "the other half rose up thanks to freedom..." And C.D. had a hand in that. The other night, at the presentation of his new book (a big volume that brings together five novels), Ballesteros talked about his past, about the fight for democracy in Spain. Links in a chain...
6.06.2009
Sixty-Five Years Later
I woke up this morning thinking about D-Day, of which we celebrate today the 65th anniversary. Actually, I thought about my father before going to bed last night, imagining the hour (around 2 am) may have been about the time he'd have been getting into a plane, preparing to be silently dropped onto the Continent. What must be going through your head when you know that in a very short time death is a very real possibility? Might you be feeling like a number in a lottery, like the Spanish Christmas lottery in which there are lots and lots of "winning" numbers? I don't know, but I suspect that to counter those potentially fearful thoughts a great effort would have been made to stay sharply focused on the details of the task at hand. Just a few minutes ago I finished reading Pedro Aparicio's weekly column in Diario Sur. He uses today's article to make a call for participation in tomorrow's European Parliament elections and at the beginning of the reflection he writes that at the conclusion of the war, "Half of Europe, including the Iberian peninsula, prolonged its drama under dictatorship. But the other half rose up thanks to freedom. Its big democratic political parties –left and right– explored their mutual identities and decided to share the values they did not want to give up: liberties, democracy, human rights, Europe, respect for borders. All the democrats got on 'the same shore', undertaking a dialogue that led to the Treaty of Rome." I don't really like to imagine my father pointing a gun at someone, but if ever violence was justified, surely the liberation of Europe from Nazi terror in the summer of 1944 was an example. So I'm grateful to friend Pedro for reminding me: "the other half rose up thanks to freedom..." And C.D. had a hand in that. The other night, at the presentation of his new book (a big volume that brings together five novels), Ballesteros talked about his past, about the fight for democracy in Spain. Links in a chain...
