“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

This is how my maternal grandmother, who I called “Nana,” taught me how to use a manual typewriter in the early 1970’s. She instructed me to type this sentence over and over until I could complete it without errors and without looking at the keys.

This is when I received my first World War II history lesson. Nana was a nurse for the British army who met my grandfather, a member of US Coast Guard, when his ship docked in England to change crews in 1944. Nana explained the typing lesson by telling stories of how she was forced to retreat to bomb shelters as the Nazis dropped bombs on London. She taught me the history of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and how he scapegoated the Jewish people, blaming them for all of Germany’s problems. I learned how the Jewish people were dehumanized as Hitler referred to them as “vermin.” I remember my grandmother comparing Nazism to the KKK in our country, while explaining how, in every country, there are always times when good people are called to take a stand.

Realizing that she had piqued my interest in WWII through that typing lesson, Nana gave me an audio history of WWII on cassette tapes. I remember spending hours in my bedroom listening to the documentary-style tapes which featured historical sounds from battles, interviews with veterans, and speeches given by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler. This is how I learned that Hitler was freely elected by the German people as Chancellor of Germany, and how he changed the government making him a dictator which led to the Jewish Holocaust and to the internment of other “elements of sub-humanity” who were viewed as “internal enemies,” including queer people, communists, and socialists.

My grandparents involvement in WWII and those cassette tapes transformed my simple typing lesson into a profound pledge, a vow to always be ready to come to the aid of my country whenever I hear authoritarian language, phrases like “the enemy from within,” and whenever I hear minorities being dehumanized, referred to as “vermin,” “an infestation,” “dogs,” “aliens,” “low-IQ,” “low-lifes,” “bad genes,” or “theys” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Jim Wallis, best-selling author of False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, prophetically calls the time in which we now live: “a Bonhoeffer moment.” Of course, Wallis is referring to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was executed by the Nazis for his role in trying to overthrow Hitler.

In other words, Wallis is explicitly saying:

“Now is the time for all good [people] to come to the aid of their country.”