Do We Remember Pearl Harbor

There’s a lot of hype today, December 7, 2011, about never forgetting the dastardly deed we remember as Pearl Harbor. Truly, in the lifetime of most of us, it’s an event eclipsed only by the terrorists’ act of 9/11/2001.

In subtle ways we’ve long forgotten Pearl Harbor. Yes, a movie about it still shows up on TV every so often, and the media reminds us of the anniversary, but in our day-to-day lives, we don’t remember.

We continue to buy Japanese automobiles in numbers so great that most American automobile manufactures now struggle to stay in the black, financially. Before China started making everything for us, we bought a lot of TVs, radios, and gadgets made in Japan. Even then, did we stop and think that our purchase was enabling the nation that crippled our naval fleet and left so many Americans dead or wounded back in ’41? I doubt many thought about it.

But, Pearl Harbor was only the beginning of the atrocities by the Japanese. They normally chose to fight to the death rather than surrender, thus, many American lives were lost as our military sought to capture Pacific island after Pacific island. Captured soldiers were treated horribly by the Japanese, but who cares to remember that in our “global economy?” Instead, we continue to question our ethics in the use of the atom bomb to bring Japan to the peace table.

We live for the moment, and as a people, we could not care less about Pearl Harbor. Ask anybody under the age of twenty-five what happened on December 7, 1941, and there will not be many who know. The reason is simple, we’ve forgotten, too, and it happened so long ago that it’s no longer relevant to our younger generation.

Surely, many of us have not forgotten and many of us will never forget, but our numbers are shrinking.