Get prepared

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

Sometime in the 1970s while I still lived in Cincinnati, one Sunday afternoon my wife and I went over to Northern Kentucky to the Burlington Flea Market. It still goes on today.  

Poking around, I found a complete year’s edition of Reader’s Digest, 1944. I was amazed that every story in each of the 12 monthly volumes was about World War II. I don’t care if it was a story about a nurse in Papua New Guinea, a soldier on a ship off the African Coast, or a missionary in Constantinople, the never-ending theme was the war.

I have spent a great deal of time over the years studying the U.S. Civil War, World War I and World War II, with a smattering of studies of Napoleon, the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s and so forth.  

I once had a young man working for me whose surname was “Ave’Lalelamont.” Not sure I have the spelling correct. The story was his family lived in the Alsace Lorraine area overtaken by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War.  

His surname translates, “Salute the Germans.” If you can’t beat them, join them, I guess.  

The U.S. Civil War started with the shelling of Fort Sumter. World War I started around Aug. 1, 1914, after all the parties got their troops mobilized. World War II’s start date is a bit more uncertain. Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 but Japan had been fooling around in Manchuria, with sharp sticks and explosive objects, many years before that. We joined on Dec. 8, 1941.

Today, there are serious war-like activities in Ukraine, Crimea, Gaza Strip, Venezuela, Iran and many other countries in the Mideast. Russia is involved in Ukraine and cheering on the Iranians. Then there is China and Taiwan; North Korea and the rest of the world. Further, there is talk of a dustup in Cuba.

For you readers who have an appeasement bent, you will rant and rave about our president entangling us in some of these conflicts. For those of us who are tired of watching the can kicked down the road, we are cheering him on.

George Washington advised us not to get involved in foreign entanglements.  

Good advice except when the antagonists are shouting “Death to America” even from within our borders (I am looking at you, Minneapolis).

Regardless of your thinking or for which parties you are cheering, it is time to realize that World War III is on our doorstep. We won’t be writing articles in Reader’s Digest, we will express our thoughts and anecdotes on social media, in fact, we already are.

We already have turmoil and terror on our shores; we just have not put it all together yet.

Be prepared for a nearly full engagement of our population, just like World War II.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.