It is Pearl Harbor Day, plus seventy-six, and while I don't know how long society will continue to mark this anniversary, since few remain with us who were alive on December 7, 1941, as for me, I think it's fitting to make note of the annual passing of that terrible morning by taking a moment to remember the nearly 2,500 human beings who died there, and to bring to mind the debt owed to those who stepped forward to save the world from the horrors that might have been.
! No longer available (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlwmhWiiD2I#)
:bluesad:
Cudos and much more to all our veterans.
I got to meet one man in my life who was there on that awful day: not as a soldier or a sailor, but as a 14 year old civilian. He lived in Hawaii, and on Sunday mornings he liked to climb up into the cab of a very tall crane on the base and watch the ships come and go. He was in that crane, 40 feet off the ground, when the attack began, and was too afraid to climb down. Thus he had a ringside seat for the whole thing as he watched the magnificent fleet he loved be reduced to scrap metal. He said from then until he was seventeen his greatest fear was that the war might end before he was old enough to fight and kill some of the SOB's that destroyed the Arizona that day!
FDR did it
Then FDR flew a mean fighter-bomber for a dude with steel wheels. Lol
And still no word about the pacifists of WW2...
Even the pacifists of WW1, and how Woodrow Wilson had them oppressed are beginning to get some attention...
Studs Terkel interviewed some WW2 pacifists in The Good War. They were NOT well-treated in the United States.
World War pacifists couldn't even get a break on Star Trek.
Respect to the veterans and also to those who lost their lives on that horrible day.
I don't know how wide spread it was, but in the city in which I live, to mark this anniversary, the flags in city were lowered to half mast.
It is perhaps the most important day of the last 100 years.