Immigrant son, American icon, writer, centenarian. Damn, what a burn. The Road Ahead I have always been deeply proud to be an American. In the time I have left, I pray that will never change. by Kirk Douglas Actor, author of 10 books and a book of poems “Life Could Be Verse” published by HCI, December 2014 I am in my 100th year. When I was born in 1916 in Amsterdam, New York, Woodrow Wilson was our president. My parents, who could not speak or write English, were emigrants from Russia. They were part of a wave of more than two million Jews that fled the Czar’s murderous pogroms at the beginning of the 20th Century. They sought a better life for their family in a magical country where, they believed, the streets were literally paved with gold. What they did not realize until after they arrived was that those beautiful words carved into the Statute of Liberty in New York Harbor: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” did not apply equally to all new Americans. Russians, Poles, Italians, Irish and, particularly Catholics and Jews, felt the stigma of being treated as aliens, as foreigners who would never become “real Americans.” The longer I’ve lived, the less I’ve been surprised by the inevitability of change, and how I’ve rejoiced that so many of the changes I’ve seen have been good. They say there is nothing new under the sun. Since I was born, our planet has traveled around it one hundred times. With each orbit, I’ve watched our country and our world evolve in ways that would have been unimaginable to my parents – and continue to amaze me with each passing year. In my lifetime, American women won the right to vote, and one is finally the candidate of a major political party. An Irish-American Catholic became president. Perhaps, most incredibly, an African-American is our president today. The longer I’ve lived, the less I’ve been surprised by the inevitability of change, and how I’ve rejoiced that so many of the changes I’ve seen have been good. Yet, I’ve also lived through the horrors of a Great Depression and two World Wars, the second of which was started by a man who promised that he would restore his country it to its former greatness. I was 16 when that man came to power in 1933. For almost a decade before his rise he was laughed at ― not taken seriously. He was seen as a buffoon who couldn’t possibly deceive an educated, civilized population with his nationalistic, hateful rhetoric. The “experts” dismissed him as a joke. They were wrong. A few weeks ago we heard words spoken in Arizona that my wife, Anne, who grew up in Germany, said chilled her to the bone. They could also have been spoken in 1933: “We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here…[including] new screening tests for all applicants that include an ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values…” These are not the American values that we fought in World War II to protect. I have lived a long, good life. I will not be here to see the consequences if this evil takes root in our country. But your children and mine will be. And their children. And their children’s children. All of us still yearn to remain free. It is what we stand for as a country. I have always been deeply proud to be an American. In the time I have left, I pray that will never change. In our democracy, the decision to remain free is ours to make. My 100th birthday is exactly one month and one day after the next presidential election. I’d like to celebrate it by blowing out the candles on my cake, then whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again.” As my beloved friend Lauren Bacall once said, “You know how to whistle don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-road-ahead_us_57e03be4e4b08cb1409749f2
Anyone who compares Donald Trump to Hitler even by inference doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. And I like Kirk Douglas a great deal.
You're like the perfect barometer of popular opinion; whatever position you take, it's opposite is the correct one to have.
His own supporters compare him to Hitler -- and consider it a point in his favor. His campaign makes extensive use of imagery lifted directly from Nazi propaganda. Anybody who fails to see that Trump is the same kind of dangerous demagogue as Hitler doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Yeah this just shows that Douglas is stupid. America has always had the right, like every country, to decide who can and should come to America. Is Australia full of Hitlers because they reject a lot of people and only allow certain types to immigrate? Is Mexico who has a fucking wall on it's southern border? Why is it that America and America alone must have no restrictions on who is coming to this country? Because of a fucking statue? I disagree. We do not need to build America anymore. The waves of immigrants needed to do such a thing are no longer needed. America is built. Now it's time to change our immigration policy from letting anyone in and restricting who can come in. America can no longer afford to allow waves of poor people to come.
Let me guess, this Nazi imagery is a shape on a graphic which looks like the outline of a Star of David?
Because I wasn't making a comparison to something as inconsequential as Hitler's dietary preferences. Not sure what architecture has to do with anything.
The Skittles thing was originally a Nazi story depicting Jews as poisonous mushrooms. There's another.
Hitler was obsessed with architecture. Even as Soviet artillery shells were falling on Berlin, it has been said that Hitler in his literal last hours was tinkering with models of the city.
If that's the case then feminists and the #YesAllWomen hashtag were a Nazi campaign as well: Alright, there's my queue to exit this discussion.
Yup, he helped break the Blacklist with Spartacus, and..."They traveled to more than 40 countries, at their own expense, to act as goodwill ambassadors for the U.S. Information Agency, speaking to audiences about why democracy works and what freedom means. In 1980, he flew to Cairo to talk with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. For all his goodwill efforts, Douglas received thePresidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Upon giving the award, Carter said that Douglas has "done this in a sacrificial way, almost invariably without fanfare and without claiming any personal credit or acclaim for himself." Wrote a dozen books, An Academy award nominee and winner, yet he's the stupid one while the elite of Wordforge who's main accomplishment is a massive post count are the smart ones.
America is built? Really? There are no more new industries to launch, no infrastructure in need of construction or repair, no challenges left to meet? No discoveries to be made? What a sad and limited little world you live in. Obviously the US, like any sovereign nation, has an inherent right to control its own borders. Be we got to where we are in large part by taking in anyone who wanted to come, giving them the opportunity to excel, and then embracing what they came up with. That hasn't changed just because we're not throwing a railroad across the continent at the moment.
The nature of the workforce has changed radically though. Even massive modern companies like Google with a global reach employ just a fraction of the number that a single car company did in their prime.
And the same could be said of how the regressive left attacks people who disagree with them about, well, anything, even if they're liberals themselves.
I get tired of people bringing up Hitler anyway. Why not compare someone to Stalin or Mao? They each committed just about as many (or more) atrocities and crimes against humanity.
We don't need waves of poor people to build the country. We already have millions of poor people in the country who could do those jobs. We have millions of people, not necessarily poor but working in crap paying jobs, who would gladly step up to better paying jobs to "build" America. America is no longer a nation with 10 million people. It's a country with over 310 million. What a sad world you live in that you think we can keep taking in millions of unskilled labor who just turn around and end up on welfare programs which drain your wallet. Did you hear how California, a state already on the financial brink, is working on a way to give Obamacare to illegal aliens? Who pays for that? YOU DO. I'm not against immigration. I'm against uncontrolled immigration which is what we have now. We do not need unskilled labor. You want to let engineers and doctors in? Fine by me. But we don't need burger flippers. We've got enough of those plus in a few years there will be no burger flippers because technology will obsolete a huge swath of this country.
We do. Obviously. But it's generally for emergency care. This would take it and make it regular care. And once word went around the world we'd see even more influxes of people coming to America for the freebies.
I think there's an inherent issue with bringing M&M-based arguments into a thread with Dayton present.
Really loved daddy Douglas in the moving pictures, but he must be on some serious medication these days to think a Hillary presidency will be a "happy days" state of affairs for any but a select few. And besides, "here again," wtf was wrong with the black guy? And then, for a good larf, consider for a moment how much the Messaiah affected the life of the average American with black skin. Shit, even any whiff of "black" optimism (recall Michelle's daytonesque "for the first time" inanity) vanished about a week into his first term.
