Berlin Part I act 2 "for the sake of God there goes I"

During these years when this film was made you could not tell Berlin from my home town of Baltimore Maryland except for the spelling on street signs. The people look the same they dressed much the same and they went to work by street car and walked busy streets with a friendly nod here and there. There was a difference though. The people in Berlin did not have the American constitution that gave them the same status as the king of any country. They were not sovereign.   In the united states, the states are sovereign as is each and every person. Our Federal government not sovereign Under our constitution we as individuals have more power to run the country than does our Federal Government.  WE are more powerful that was Nero of Rome each has ultimate control over hydrogen Bombs and jet fighters. Few other people on earth has a document that demands under penalty of impeachment in a trail before the Congress.  Held by the Chief justice of the supreme court with the intent to convict any tyrant failing to do his constitutional duty to uphold the constitutional rights of each, and every American.
The German people as  result were willing to trust an individual to benevolently run Germany and protect their rights. To protect their rights? Can someone protect your rights for you?  Should we be willing to forestall such an outcome here in this American land.  We have a duty to stand and yell "God Bless America for we are it".   How can we possible be embarrassed to stand on a street corner and proclaim this statement of love of country.

A symphony of video portraying Berlin in 1927 This was the early years of the Third Rich.  The German Government was splitting off into a kind of dangerous socialism called Fascism The world and the United States in it's innocence was soon to loose that innocence and would see an explosion of Faschism.  German trust of Government and a supposedly benevolent socialist Leader Adolph Hitler would soon become the Angel of death to much of Europe the Jewish as well as Polish people.   Some of the slightly older boys I grew up with in the 1930's would loose their lives and the future family's they and their sweat hearts would have had. They were left rotting in the ground.     There is no sound but the video tells the story without it, of a gentle people who handed over their freedom to elegant sounding political figures and they lived and died for their weakness while carrying their guilt to their graves. A rich proud people were bought for a few Government gifts that they themselves paid for. .

The last of the Pufferbelliest

WE were at war! The Japanese had bombed Perl Harbor and Germany declared war. It was 1942! We were loosing in North Africa and we were being Driven back in the Pacific. We were melting down everything metal we could find. We kids collected aluminum pots and pans and turned them over to the fire department to be used in building airplanes.

The Baltimore News Post put a story on the front page that Steam locomotives would be towed to the steel mills to be melted down to build guns and ships. On that day hundreds of people walked down the streets to the railroad crossings to watch the locomotives being pulled through town.

America was well attached to it's steam locomotives.  Lionel and American Flier toy trains were the most popular toys around every Christmas. Engineers were our heroes. We looked on steam railroads in aw.

There was more, we were watching the end of an era and everyone sensed it. It was also the approaching end of a way of life but we didn't sense that and it didn't come for may years. Our American love of machinery would one day become a love of cheap electronic toys. The highly skilled American craftsman was soon to be equated to the low level white collar worker and his skill and years of education and training was lost in a single generation.

Only thirty years later another long line of machinist, mill wrights, tool makers and die makers all tramped there way to big box stores to greet customers.

The pride of a nation, the machinery that provisioned a war on two fronts and overcame odds that the whole world thought America would succumb to was sold to the Chinese for pennies. We have been reduced to making electronic toys and calling this failure, progress.

Today we send our children to get a degree and become nothing more than specialized word smiths. Few thus educated have the ability to think outside their narrow area of their study.

It is the experienced mechanical Engineer that has gone with the machinery. The kids come out of college knowing nothing of real know how and there is no factory to gain the needed experience to become a truly qualified engineers. They don't even know they are lacking.

The Locomotives were only the first to go. Our lessor Gods, the production line would follow.
Our Children are educated to look back on those years  of the assembly line worker as the dirty industrial years.  Of course they were the years where America earned it's wealth to give our youth their educations. God Bless the machinery.

Doug