Civil War Movie: What Kind of American Are You? - John Kass

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My family survived a terrible Civil War in Greece just before I was born.

Not in some Hollywood movie, with combatants issuing their pithy sayings, those bad fantasy hombres with just the right length of chin stubble as they squint through the sights, but a civil war in real life, with real blood and real bone, where people who knew each other and had histories together and murdered each other.

They grabbed each other by the hair and shot them, screaming, throwing bodies in a ditch. Or on the side of a hill. In the shadow of a building. In a quiet alley off a church square. A water reservoir with other human beings floating mute to the cruelties of men.

Anywhere. Everywhere.

I was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1956, just six years after that Civil War ended over there.

But we rarely if ever talked about the Greek Civil War, though we talked about everything else at those multi-generational extended family Sunday dinners in our two flats on Chicago’s South Side. Every Sunday. On special occasions the uncles might have one Peoria Street highball—whiskey, 7-Up, maraschino cherry, in a fancy glass with a swizzle stick–but not too many. No one ever got drunk or even tipsy. No alcohol was ever served without food. The men wore jackets and ties. We would not wear jeans to a Thea’s house. It was Sunday.

We had hard-core socialists and hard-core conservatives at the dining room table, from the left to the right and everything in between, and over the roast or pastichio and later fruit, coffee, maybe galaktoboureko, we’d talk about everything. From history to the wars in the news, even to parakeets and The Twilight Zone and student protests and blue jeans at school.

We’d crowd around the dining room table and everyone—even kids—were expected to participate. We could think and say anything with respect, no matter the topic.

The only thing we couldn’t do was act like a snowflake and demand others be silenced. We were Americans. We were free.

But they were refugees from Greece, and they’d fought the Germans, the Italians, the Greek Communists and famine to be free, and survived as a family. In the world they’d endured, snowflakes didn’t survive.