Perspective...

I try, every so often, to understand my heroes in a light that we rarely get to see them in.

Tonight, during a discussion with my father, I found a hero I had never really explored;

Werner Von Braun was the father of the Apollo project of the 1960's, that exquisite monster of a rocket and tin-foil contraption that managed, with the generous help of slide rules, pencils, and the brilliance of NASA to put not just two men, but no fewer than 12 men on the surface of another planet; our moon.

They even got to play golf there (Hello Al).

The man behind this amazing feat had an amazingly dark past, something that is never bleached out or hidden in the history texts; Von Braun also created the German V2 rockets for the Nazis.

This was not something he was proud of, nor did he approve of the actions of the Nazi regime, he simply wanted to build his rockets.

Which is cool... But something said by my father tonight really hit me;

"Von Braun," He said, "knew that the Nazis were using Jews for slave labor, but he also knew there was nothing he could do about it. If he complained, he would have been simply taken off the project... And he wanted to build his dream..."

That hurt... I always thought of Von Braun as a noble man, a hero... But now, his dream was worth more than the lives of those Jews...

It's easy for me, a child of Liberty, to think that given the same bleak outlook in life, I would stoically turn my head aside and let them kill me before they had a Jewish slave work on my project. I'm an American. I'm not accustomed to this kind of life. I can no more understand this than I can the plight of that Jew who slaved away in the workshop. To me if I were in the position of that Jew I would stand there and let them hit me, and stoically stick out my chin and defiantly hold out until the bitter end... And die a proud American…

I keep ruling out the part where they rape my daughter in front of me and cut my fingers off and things like that... It's just not something I can easily comprehend... It's so easy for me to build a heroic fantasy like this from my chair in the middle of Midwest America where everyone is relatively peaceful and happy.

It neutralizes both sides... it overestimates the Germans who were there and it sadly underestimates the Jews who suffered.

But it's for lack of reference.

We compartmentalize, sharpen the edges, and make everything easy to understand. If you were a Jew, we sympathize, we know it must have been awful (Like that one time when the power was out here in MiddleAmerica... we Americans have a hard time grasping these things), and anyone who was German... well, you were bad. Pure and simple... No questions...

So Von Braun... he actually let Jewish slaves work on his rockets? My hero... is falling from the sky...

But then I have to be objective; In my fantasy, I (As Von Braun), tell Hitler to do quirky-unusual sexual acts with himself, tell him that his murderous ways are evil, and I might get a bruise or two, but hey, the war will end in a few weeks and I'll go build the Apollo Project and we will finally step onto the moon!

So... in my fantasy... it's only a matter of endurance... I just need to wait until the war is over and all will be okay...

But my Fantasy is distorted by history. To Von Braun the war was not being lost. To him the end would come with Hitler in charge of the world... and if he wanted the moon, he had to stay with Hitler...

Hitler did the worst thing he could possibly do to a people... all of his people... he insisted that everyone have his dream and his dream alone. And anyone who disagreed with his dream would have their dreams stripped from them...

Von Braun had seen this happen to many people... His dream was still alive... for now...

I can't underestimate the power of dreams... of Drive... Somewhere in that cold German world, Dreams kept millions of Polish Jews alive... when all else was lost, those dreams were still alive... simply because they wouldn't let Hitler take them away... Hitler would kill them for this.

Von Braun could have protested, and had Hitler strip him of his Dream as well... and watch as the world went to the moon without him as he shoveled coal into coal-fired vats for the remainder of his life. Erased from history, and a slave himself...

No one would know what happened to him. No one would learn of his sacrifice, and it wouldn't so much as save a single Jewish soul from slavery...

Through the years, many good people have made this choice… Not willingly, and not happily. They made it here in America with the Blacks, they made it in Japan with the non-Samurai.

Of course, the noble thing would be to quit in protest... Turn away, nobly shovel coal in the snow for the rest of his life, knowing he did the right thing...

Which is easy for me to say, since I have never shoveled coal...

Right and wrong are no more than two facets of the same diamond. We like to think that they are as different as day and night, but when looked at from a different perspective, every facet can shine…

---Me.