Of infamy and inundation


Today's the 80th anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It changed the course of history.

If you are pausing today to reflect on the events of that Sunday, you might also want to send out good thoughts toward the Hawaiians of now. They're in the grip of a hellacious storm, one of the strong, slow ones that cause a lot of damage and take lives.

God rest the people who died in 1941, and God help the people who are holding on for dear life today.

Comments

  1. I'm a "senior auditor" nowadays at Portland State, and when the instructor announced that the final would be the morning of December 7, I quipped "a day that will live in infamy". All the other students were twenty-somethings, and as far as I could tell, none of them had a clue what I was referring to.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, I bet most know little, or even care, about the sacrifices that our soldiers (and country) made during the war. But they could probably name all of the X-Men and all of the Marvel characters. Even though I am not of that generation, when we were younger we were well versed in all of the major battles and knew all of the major battleships, aircraft, and most of my friends built models of those magnificent machines that won the war. It is almost like those men are forgotten once you get past the Gen X age group.

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    2. WW2 was 80 years ago. As a kid were you also well versed in the specifics of WW1? That would probably be a more equivalent time separation as WW2 is for youth today.

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    3. Yes we were to a point. We knew about Big Bertha and about the famous dogfights and such. You have to remember that back then TV was full of documentaries. With only 5 channels to watch, and with programming generally being more mature, you could not escape being versed in the culture and history of past generation(s).

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    4. And the original commenter was talking about college students, not children. Even when I was a ‘kid’ I knew a heck of a lot about the Civil War. I was obsessed with the ships of the era.......especially the battle between the Ironclads. But of course that was decades before smartphones when kids had to amuse themselves and adults didn’t read comic books. Or at least very few did.

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  2. ^Eh, the Soviets did most of the dyin' and bleeding to win that war, we've been coasting off it as maybe the 1 american-involved war that was both justifiable & a decisive victory for ~76 years now with few alive that made or knew contemporaries that made personal sacrifice to win it.

    You could say the Civil war, also, but the actual good guys that fought it at great personal sacrifice under the USA constitutional order and radicals kinda lost that one...in the long(er) run if you take a longer view IMO?

    And it's not just the '20 somethings' ...that ex CIA creep H.W. Bush trotted himself out on Oct. 7 & declared it 'Pearl Harbor Day' lol.
    IDK if it was an intentional joke by him or his minders, but it didn't *seem* like it at the time heh.

    Hope they get thru the storm, the war in the pacific against the Japanese was no picnic for american GIs (or the Japanese) by all accounts...

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