Image by Grok
December 7th
Eighty-four years ago today, 2,403 Americans (mostly sailors and civilians asleep on a Sunday morning) were killed in a single surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. It was the moment the country realized the world was bigger and more ruthless than many had wanted to believe. Within hours, the generation that grew up in the Depression was lining up to enlist, knowing they might never come home.
What hits hardest on this date is how quickly that kind of shared, visceral memory fades. Pearl Harbor, Antietam, Chosin, Khe Sanh, Fallujah… each one cost blood that most of us today can barely comprehend, and yet a lot of people under 40 couldn't tell you what happened on December 7, 1941, let alone name the battles their great-grandparents fought in 1861–65 or 1950–53.
It's not just ignorance of dates and numbers. It's that we've slowly lost the felt sense of what those numbers actually meant: entire towns with no young men left, telegrams arriving on doorsteps, gold stars in windows, hospitals full of teenagers with no legs, and refugee columns of freed slaves dying of smallpox and hunger because freedom came before anyone had a plan to feed them.
Am I wrong to be sickened by the apathy and weakness I see everywhere in this once strong and good nation? A nation that forgets the price of the things it claims to love (freedom, unity, independence) starts treating them like they're free, or worse, like they're optional. And when that happens, the next time someone has to pay that price again, fewer people understand why it's worth it.
So yeah, today I'm thinking about the kids on the USS Arizona who never got to be old men, the civilians in Missouri torched out of their homes for picking the wrong side, the Marines frozen solid at the Chosin Reservoir, and the fact that most of the country will scroll past this date without pausing.
We owe them more than a day off from grill sales. We owe them a memory that actually hurts, not a little but a lot, because that's the only way it sticks!
