Nigel Calder lives in Newcastle.

My parents were born four days apart in England, in 1914. Six weeks later Great Britain entered the First World War. Mum and Dad were teenagers during the Great Depression. They were 25 when the Second World War began. My father was a pacifist. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps so he could do his bit to fight fascism without carrying a gun. My mother joined the Royal Army Nursing Corps. They met for the first time, fell in love, and became engaged.

My father was sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force. It was crushed by Hitler’s Wehrmacht. His unit was behind the German lines during the Dunkirk evacuation and unable to get out. He fled across northern France and was evacuated from somewhere in Normandy. My mother was on a hospital train in Ramsgate Harbor, providing initial triage for the worst of the burn victims being ferried back from Dunkirk. Many were terribly burned. She did not know if Dad was dead or alive.

My mother and father met again briefly before he was shipped off to North Africa, where
Rommel’s Afrika Corps was gaining ground. Simultaneously, the Germans marched into
Greece. Churchill ordered troops to be sent from North Africa to Greece in a failed attempt to halt the Germans. My father was wounded and captured. He spent the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He carried a piece of shrapnel in his back until the day he died.

Dad made it home in 1945. My parents married. Dad was somewhat messed up and had lost a third of his body weight, which he mostly never regained. My mother, who had waited for him and turned down several marriage offers, including from a castle-owning Scottish aristocrat, wondered what she was getting into.

I was born in 1948. My parents never talked about the war, at least not in front of me. They did occasionally talk about “Good Germans.” Good Germans were all those fundamentally decent Germans who never supported Hitler, who were appalled by his actions, who collectively could have stopped him, but who did not speak up and act in time. They then either submitted, or resisted and died in fascism’s concentration camps.

I used to think nothing like this could happen here: our guardrails are too strong. Whenever President Trump expressed dictatorial intentions, I thought, and said, “He doesn’t have his Brownshirts,” the gangs of thugs who did Hitler’s dirty work and paved the way to his seizure of power.

Then Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters. The entire world got the message: he will protect those willing to do violence on his behalf. Next, with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans in Congress handed Trump $30 billion to recruit tens of thousands of ICE agents.

ICE is directly under the control of the executive. Immigrants have taken the place of Jews in the authoritarian narrative. ICE is increasingly violent. The administration’s response to the shooting of Renee Good has been to immediately brand this young mother of three as a “domestic terrorist,” telegraphing to ICE agents, in case they hadn’t already got the message, that they can act with impunity.

At what point will ICE openly cross the line between law enforcement and the Brownshirts? Has it already done so?

I lie awake in the small hours of the morning wondering what I can do as an individual to play my part in halting this slide toward an authoritarian state. I write letters to the newspapers, I stand on bridges, I am very active in Lincoln County Indivisible, I feel the need to do more. I do not want my children to one day wonder how so many ‘Good Americans’ could have allowed us to lose our cherished freedoms.

I am a fan of Emmylou Harris. Whenever I hear her singing “Bang the Drum Slowly,” her
ode to her father and his Second World War experiences, it brings tears to my eyes:

“I always meant to ask you about the war
And what you saw across a bridge too far
Did it leave a scar?”

I think of my parents and the “Greatest Generation,” and what they endured. I think of the tens of millions of Good Americans today, fundamentally decent people who do not share my fears and sense of urgency. I hope I am wrong. I hope these Good Americans will be spurred to action before the rising tide of authoritarianism engulfs us all.