Why We Still Swim in Normandy
“The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”
I never thought I’d have to wonder how my grandfather would feel about the world today. For years, it felt understood. What he and his generation fought for, they fought for all of us—so no one would have to face that kind of hatred or answer to that kind of tyranny again. He was a soldier in the 4th Infantry. He landed on Utah Beach, marched through the Battle of the Bulge, and stood at the gates of Buchenwald. He didn’t just survive history. He helped shape a world that was never supposed to forget.
There was a time when the beaches of Normandy belonged to the wrong side of history—when they were guarded by men who believed freedom was a threat and difference was a crime. The same shores where children now play were once lined with barbed wire and guns, meant to keep a continent in check and a people in chains. Jews were forced from their homes. Streets abandoned. Towns silenced. The trains kept moving. The tide brought only silence. Until June 6, 1944, when freedom landed in steel and smoke and didn’t ask permission. When men from farms and factories met the machinery of tyranny head-on and kept moving forward. They didn’t win because they had to. They won because they chose not to let evil stand.
History turns on moments that were never guaranteed. Normandy was one of them. The odds favored the entrenched, not the incoming. Every gun was aimed downhill. Every mistake could have ended it. A missed signal. A broken line. A moment of hesitation. If the landing had failed, if the bluffs had held, if those men had faltered even for an hour, the war might have turned. The continent might have stayed chained. Evil might have won ground it would never give back.
“They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.”
Because it wasn’t just an army we were up against. It was a system built to erase. By the time those boots hit French sand, Europe was already a graveyard. Cities emptied. Families disappeared. Six million Jews murdered. Dissidents shot. Gay men jailed. Disabled children cut from the future. Books burned. Churches boarded shut. A continent brought to heel by a doctrine that decided who got to live and who didn’t.
They weren’t just storming a beach. They were storming a worldview—a belief in camps and chains, in superior people and disposable ones. And in that moment, they did what heroes do. They stood between civilization and collapse.
The enemy didn’t arrive overnight. It crept in—book by book, law by law, neighbor by neighbor. Hate made ordinary. Intolerance made law. To say they were fighting Germans is to miss the truth. They were facing Nazis—from Germany, yes, but also Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia. A coalition of cowards and zealots, men who chose obedience over conscience and cruelty over courage. What waited on those bluffs wasn’t just an army. It was a system built on submission. A world where following orders was easier than asking why.
For years, we told ourselves that fight was over. That fascism was a lesson—read, tested, and shelved. The idea that that kind of fear could rule again felt impossible. But we only get to speak that way because a few thousand men didn’t flinch when history called.
There is something FUBAR in the world today. Walk the streets of Paris, London, Berlin, and it’s there—something old dressed in new language. The signs have changed. The slogans have been rebranded. But the hate sounds the same. Jewish homes marked. Synagogues guarded like embassies. Children told to hide their stars, their names, their history. We were raised on “never again.” We believed the world had learned. But the chants are louder now. The crowds are bolder. And the same continent that once marched Jews to their deaths now watches them run from classrooms, neighborhoods, and public squares. The language has changed. The target hasn’t.
The threat didn’t disappear. It adapted. Islamic extremism carries the same DNA—dehumanization dressed as doctrine, purity framed as divine, violence sold as sacred. Like the ideologies we were too slow to confront in 1939 and too bloodied to ignore by 1941, it feeds on fear, thrives on obedience, and survives on scapegoats. It doesn’t ask for belief. It demands submission.
Then and now, the playbook is the same—erase pluralism, silence dissent, and replace democracy with control. If the men who stormed Normandy could see it, they wouldn’t just ask how we let this happen. They’d ask what we plan to do about it. Because they did their part—on the beach, under fire, against the odds. They faced death and held the line. They made it off that shore so the world could have another chance. The question now is whether we’re still worthy of it. Whether we’re still willing to stand up when it’s easier to look away.
No generation is perfect. But some are called to the front line of history and choose to stand. That’s why we call them the Greatest Generation—not out of sentiment, but because they met evil with resolve and didn’t back down.
We talk about D-Day like it’s a chapter. It wasn’t. It was a reckoning. A moment when free people faced a system built to erase them—and won. But memory is fragile. And if we forget what was defeated on those beaches, we risk missing its reflection now. The names are different. The flags have changed. But the ambition is the same. To purge, to control, to replace freedom with fear. Nazism wore a uniform. Today’s threat wraps itself in religion. But both demand the same thing—silence, submission, and the erasure of anyone who lives outside their lines.
Visit Omaha Beach today and you’ll see families in the water. Children laughing in the waves. The memorials still stand. The names are still read. The weight hasn’t vanished—but the water has. It’s free now.
It wasn’t always. There was a time when not everyone was allowed to swim. When freedom—of movement, of worship, of existence—was rationed by race, by faith, by bloodline. The men who landed on that shore didn’t fight so a chosen few could inherit the tide. They fought so no one would ever have to prove they deserved to live.
We forget that at our peril. We hedge our language. We dodge the truth. We tell ourselves the fight is elsewhere, the threat exaggerated, the moment not ours to meet. But history isn’t moved by caution. It’s shaped by conviction. And it doesn’t care how carefully we choose our words. It cares whether we choose to stand.
So if you ever walk the beaches of Normandy—free to believe as you believe, to live as you are, to speak without fear—maybe take a moment to thank the generation that bled so you could. I thank my grandfather. A man who stood against evil when it wasn’t theoretical. When the only ballot box that mattered was good versus evil. When the only party worth joining was the one that celebrated victory and peace.
They didn’t wait to be asked. They chose to go. The question now is—what will we choose, when the evil we face doesn’t wear swastikas, but wraps itself in scripture, in flags, in dogma—and demands the same submission.
The world doesn’t need martyrs. It needs heroes. A hero will die for their country—but they’d much rather live for it.