Every time I listen to Utah Phillips’ “Yellow Ribbon” my throat gets tight and my eyes well up. When I play “There’ll Be a Jubilee” by The Andrews Sisters there are tears aplenty. There’s just something about WWII music that shreds out my insides.

That something is mostly my own uncontrollable and unwarranted hope and excitement about the possibilities of the future. Maybe it’s obvious or maybe you never would have figured me the type, but I am, to the bone, a pacifist. I may erupt venomous declarations that all rapists and child molesters have forfeited their right to life and therefore deserve nothing but immediate death, but really that outrage stems from my root belief that it’s our humanly duty to be good to each other, or at the very least try not to do harm. The distinction between wanting a person “to pay” for their wrongdoings and wanting a person to simply cease existing is an important one to me.

Although WWII was like all other wars in that its primary strategy was killing millions of people, here in the states it was unlike the rest because we truly believed that afterwards there would be no more mortal conflict, no more senseless dying and suffering, and the whole world would have a nice group hug. The mainstream populace actually believed that wholeheartedly. There were rampant isms and discrimination, of course, but when you called upon that common hope of peace and progress you instantly, albeit temporarily, had yourself a family.

When I listen to the music that relayed that sense of community throughout 1940s America, I feel connected to all the positive potential within people and almost burst with anticipation and warmth. But then there’s the simultaneous crushing of my joy, caused by the reality of how we have so thoroughly failed ourselves.