On this day 76 years ago, the Brits, Canadians, and U.S., after pooling their money, fuel, machines, strategists, and too many kids to ever count, cashed in on the biggest amphibious gamble to date, and ended up giving the Russians, Partisans, French, Jews, and anyone else not waving an Axis flag the biggest break of their lives. By just a year later, the Russians, Brits, Canadians, Americans, and French would meet on opposite sides of Berlin, and for a few short weeks might share rationed cigarettes or rationed feelings and make chalk doodles of Kilroy together before being thrown into gulags or redlined picket fences on opposite sides of the iron curtain.

Somehow, back in the 40’s, an imperialist baldy who loved fat cigars, a communist dictator who murdered and rode coattails to power, and a paralyzed radio-host lawyer who put his Asian citizens in camps, managed to all three shed their differences and put their heads together to take Europe, Asia, and their territories back from the storm of two and a half genocides. And yet, once Hitler died and the Reichstag flew a Red flag, all that cooperation vanished. Stalin threw his conscripts back into gulags and poverty, Churchill and the Europeans banished their Jews to stolen land in Palestine, and Truman sent the black and brown back to sharecropping and manual labor while their white brothers-in-arms were given the affluence and recognition that any color of traumatized kid should enjoy for a time.

You might think I’m stupid and pandering for shoehorning a current political message into an event from almost 80 years ago, but war is inherently political, and both world wars left scars on the earth and humanity you can still see today. If we could firebomb and bloodsoak an entire continent, join hands with our former oppressors and a communist dictator, reline the Middle East’s borders twice within 30 years, and evaporate two cities for the sake of righting the world’s injustices, it should be no problem to right our injustices at home.

With all of that said, stay safe, black lives matter, happy Pride, and take care of yourselves, broskis.