Dark specters cast long shadows on our lives. The pandemic and its million-plus American death toll makes us wonder if we should mask or not mask. Russia’s onslaught into Ukraine visits us with images of incomprehensible destruction and a litany of death.
At home, the places where our lives are lived — schools, stores, churches — are visited by young men armed to the teeth to kill. Our highest court is poised to rule against a woman’s right to make decisions about her body or the right of the unborn to life.
I’ve learned the best solace and refuge in troubled times, personal and societal, is to delve into history in search of profiles in courage. On the eve of the 78th anniversary of D-Day, I don’t have to look very far.
Link up with the troops hitting the beaches was the mission Richard B. Johnson of Swampscott and other glider troops who were assigned on June 6. Intent on stopping them, German soldiers peppered a causeway crossing the French countryside with machine gun fire and mortar barrages.
Johnson told the great Daily Evening Item reporter Jim Tagalakis on the invasion’s 25th anniversary how he killed a German machine gunner with a grenade and then took an entire machine gun crew prisoner.
Before landing craft transported invaders to French beaches, minesweepers crewed by sailors, including former Item linotype operator Edmund D. Nicholson, braved German coastal artillery to get in close to the shoreline and do their work.
A British pilot volunteered to lay down a smoke screen to mask the sweepers from artillery spotters and took a direct hit from a German shell.
Galina and Yakov Shverdinovsky’s request to leave the former Soviet Union in 1979 cost Galina her job and resulted in a demotion for her husband. The couple didn’t abandon their goal even as KGB agents assigned to monitor any anti-Soviet activity kept a close eye on the pair.
“We were considered to be traitors. We were sure our rooms were bugged,” Galina recalled in a 1989 Item interview.
Over a span of eight years, the Shverdinovsky’s applied six times to emigrate to the U.S. and received permission in 1987. Swampscott and former Soviet Union residents Jane and Slava Stiskyn helped them start a new and free life.
Like me, Salem State University professor Aviva Chomsky started college in the 1970s feeling lost and unmotivated. Unlike me, Chomsky took a road less traveled and left the books for a year to work with the United Farm Workers.
Her activism on behalf of Mexican, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran farm workers led her back to academics. She earned degrees and forged a career as a preeminent Latin American affairs scholar.
Global economic insecurity underpins her research and it is that insecurity, exacerbated by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion, that finds us living in uncertain times.
We don’t have to look far for courageous people, living or dead, who can give us the strength to cast light into darkness and forge through challenges that are equal to ones faced by those who came before us.