"A day that shall live in infamy"

I remember learning those immortal words from a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when I was a kid and have not forgotten. There are very few veterans left who survived the Pearl Harbor attack. This was the moment in history that put an end to American isolationism that was the hallmark of US foreign policy after the conclusion of WWI. An attack on our soil (Hawaii was not a state then, but it was US territory) was not going to go unanswered, no matter what the America First crowd might have wanted. And since the Japanese empire was an ally of Nazi Germany, answering that attack meant accepting being drawn into another world war. The bombing of Pearl Harbor shattered the illusion that the US was invulnerable to threats from distant neighbors. After all, the US has two major oceans that act as buffers as well as two friendly neighbors to the north and to the south. Once a Japanese attack on the west coast started to look at least conceivable it probably didn't take a lot of imagination to expect that Hitler's air force could also attack the US east coast. 

I don't actually remember this, but I think my parents told me I had seen Pearl Harbor in person in the late 1960s when we briefly lived on the island of Oahu. By then, the damage had long since been repaired. We would do well to remember that in this era, there are no truly safe havens. There is a price to maintaining a democracy, and occasionally people sacrifice their lives so that the rest can live freely - it's an obligation we have as citizens. My dad would have remembered hearing about Pearl Harbor on the radio as a boy. My mom was just a couple weeks away from being born on the day of the bombing. It's safe to say that my extended family had its share of WWII veterans. Never forget.

Here is an article from a couple years ago with photos of the damage from that fateful day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ozymandias

When I think of our current era and all of its dictators and would-be dictators, there is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley that rings as true now as it did when he wrote it:     I met a traveller from an antique land,     Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone     Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,     Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,     The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;     And on the pedestal, these words appear:     My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;     Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay     Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and ...
Read more

Desantis still wants to be Mussolini when he grows up

The Florida governor dictator has been working like madness to kill a ballot initiative that has already been given the go-ahead and which is already on actual ballots, weeks before election day. He is desperate to keep that 6-week abortion ban in place. It's the same ban Trump supports. The tactics Desantis uses are disturbing and anti-democratic: sending secret police to ballot initiative signatories, threatening media outlets that run ads in favor of the initiative, and even cooking up an excuse to invalidate any votes for the initiative. Read more here . What we are witnessing in Florida as is the case in other GOP dominated parts of the US is best understood as follows: GOP politicians don't care about the give and take that comes with governing. They want raw power to rule, period.
Read more