A Camera person's reflections

Liberty

On Oct 19, 1944 my grandmother Elsie Alexander christened the 384th and last Liberty Ship built at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore. She was a housewife and unremarkable person in most ways, except she had 7 sons serving in the military in WWII. Most were in war zones, all survived, only one was wounded. The Liberty Ship building and sailing program is an excellent example of Americans recognizing the common enemy and coming together to do what they could to defeat that enemy, help our allies and preserve democracy and human dignity as best we could. Right now we don’t agree on who or what the common enemy is. I think it was Pogo who articulated “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We seem to be there. When my grandmother smashed the bottle on the bow of that ship we knew who and what we were fighting. We need to get straight on that…and then we have a fighting chance to not be the “sputtering flame” of democracy.