Everything
I learned, I learned in an antiques store. Not totally. I learned plenty of
other things in other places I worked. But I’ve learned much working in an
antiques store. Not only do the browsers and customers teach and share volumes—the
actual antiques in the store tell their own stories too.
One
story the antiques tell and teach is that the more time goes by—things stay pretty
much the same. There is truly nothing much new under the sun.
We know
that the generation that fought in WW II is considered the greatest generation—and
what we are going through today in can’t compare totally to what that
generation went through. But today I stumbled across an ad in a 1943 magazine
that spoke to me, and taught me, that wars, battles,
conflicts and politics
change—but basic human nature and deep
feelings of most Americans, change only minimally.
The ad
sponsored by Nash-Kelvinator—yes, the folks that made cars and refrigerators—might
be a bit sentimental for today’s tastes. A bit dramatic. But I read between the
lines and found the emotions in this ad to be timely.
The ad
shows a gaunt American soldier, a prisoner of war in Japan. He is behind barbed wire and
is clutching a letter from home as an armed guard looks on.
The
American’s response to his letter from home is: “Reading behind the lines of
your blessed letter, I feel again the warmth of your love, and your unshaken
belief in our future together. Just to know there is still in the world such
faith as yours is enough to keep me sane…”
The
American soldier writes of his hopes that, as he and his other fellow captives
look to the sky, that the Americans will deliver them from evil and bring them
home again.
He goes
on to write, “Home—where I want unchanged, just as I remember them now, all the
things that I hold dear. The right of a man to think and speak his thoughts,
the right of a man to live and worship as he wants, the right of a man to work
and earn a just reward! Don’t ever let these be lost. Keep everything just as
it is until I come back...back to American where no armed guard bars the door
to liberty…where there will never be a barbed wire fence between a man and his
opportunity to work and build and grow and make his life worth living—this war
worth winning!”
Yes,
going back over 70 years, or 300 years ago—even though our conflicts and wars have changed—the reasons
why we fight (even on the home front) and in our hearts and minds, does not
change. And what America was hundreds of years ago—and even decades ago, should
not change because other outside forces want us to change.
And that’s
what I learned in the antiques store today.
