Why Are Americans Naive About Evil?

In my new book Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life, I write about growing up with my European immigrant parents. Much of the story is very funny — and of course true — but some of it is quite serious. That’s because my parents saw the horrors of communism up close, and in the stories they told me and my brother they helped us understand that there was real evil in the world. As we learned from them about the evils of living in places under the oppression of Marxist atheism, we also learned about the blessings of living in America, where God and liberty were at the heart of much of our culture, so much so that many take it for granted.

My father grew up in Greece and saw great evil during the Second War, often suffering real hunger; and when that ended, a civil war erupted and Communists tried to take over his beloved country. My mother grew up in Germany, losing her father at age 10 and then suffering tremendous deprivations after the war, also including hunger and malnutrition. Her part of Germany was indeed taken over by the Communists, who forced their Russian Marxist propaganda on her in school. It was so awful she risked her life to escape at age 17, fleeing to the West and then to the United States in 1954.

My father came here in 1955, to New York, where the following year he met my mother in a nighttime class of immigrants learning English. Their first date was to Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace in Manhattan. A year later another date took them to the Statue of Liberty, which is memorialized on the cover of my book. The next year they were married.

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