Letter: Romney symbolizes what America was once all about

Editor,

We just heard something we haven’t heard in a long while.

Being the eldest son of an itinerant immigrant carpenter, along with one of my siblings we lived through WWII. No one knew how the war would turn out. We were just little kids but knew the concerns of adults.

It was a different world then. There was no TV. We listened to President Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” declaration on crystal sets or old tube type console radios. We didn’t have spy satellites in the sky. Radar was in its infancy. The Japanese armada had left Pearl Harbor a twisted, burning junk pile and disappeared out into the open ocean.

Many expected that any day we would see hoards of bayonets swarming up from our western shores raining horrific destruction like we heard was happening on Pacific islands and throughout Europe.

It was a time of serious soul searching. Nighttime skies were flooded with powerful searchlights scanning for enemy airplanes. Cars had to have blue cellophane covering headlights to reduce target visibility from the sky. Much of our domestic needs were being rationed. Our father was appointed as a neighborhood air raid warden.

Churches were full and some had standing room only. Americans were united and ready to defend to the last breath. It was a time of serious soul searching.

But those days are gone. The war was won and once the roaring blasts of our atomic bombs died down, peace and quiet reigned … well sort of. An amazingly novel Marshal Plan was implemented. Eventually life returned to a new normal. We now ruled the new “Free World” with marketplace technology.

As Samuel Morse had said not so long before, “What hath God wrought.”

Well science and academic refinement has been a large aspect of it. Our population along with the rest of the world has soared. We’ve confronted other threats like Korea and Vietnam, as well as energy and pollution crises. We’ve overcome!

We’ve even learned that ethics, soul searching and even the search for truth can be resolved in the marketplace.

The arts of business, advertising and politics now are refined, as well as confined, to backroom game rooms while churches with all their mystical rituals and ethical considerations get viewed as relics of ancient times… until yesterday.

We retired as very independent interstate truckers. We now have time to watch the news. I’m not bound to political parties nor to the Mormon church, or any other church for that matter. But when Sen. Mitt Romney chose to declare his honor of conscience in the face of near certain dungeon-type retribution, it was like the sound of Ulysses S. Grant’s trumpet call as his regiment charged the Appomattox Court House.

So if Sen. Romney wants a cheering section for his tenacious commitment to honest and truthful decency, sign me up. Unless I miss my guess I’d get lost in the crowds of like-minded people who remember what America once was.

Al Williams

Oak Harbor