Remember Pearl Harbor! I do. Sunday, December 7, 1941.
Sunday's my sister and I got to plan, prepare and serve an 'International Supper'. We had a good one. Mexican - a can of chili con carne and a bag of chips. Our server costume consisted of straw hats from summer at the farm, bright towels from the linen closet and red rope ties from my bedroom curtains.
Bummer! Mom and Dad didn't want to eat. They wouldn't turn away from the radio.
When Dad came to tuck us in for the night, he told us he wouldn't be there in the morning. He had to go and fight the enemy that attacked our country. My sister and I had talked about this and we had it figured out. We told him to hide behind a tree and shoot each bad guy as they came off the boat. Then he could come home.
Don't laugh! I was nine, my sister seven. All our young lives we had seen soldiers come off trains one by one before forming military formations. We had been down to the port and watched sailors come down the gang plank one by one. We knew our Dad could win the war in short order if he just followed our battle plan.
We grew up during the four long years of war fought on two battle fronts. Everyone labored in the war effort. In December, our church offered prayers for the dead at Pearl Harbor and their grieving families. This happened with dispiriting regularity after Iwo Jima, Bataan, Corregidor, Anzio, D-day, on and on.
After the victories in 1945, my sister and I came of age as our nation labored mightily to renew the neglected infrastructure. Interstate highways were built. New housing sprang up like mushrooms in the spring. Airports rose out of corn fields. TV's began to take pride of place in thousands of living rooms. We were a nation on the move into a brave new world.
Always during the painful sacrifices of war and the frantic rebuilding of victory, there was time for the Fourth of July. We stopped long enough to celebrate our nation's vision. We sang along with bands playing songs about the land of the free and the home of the brave. We'd OOH! AAH! at fireworks that painted the night sky with the joy of living with liberty and justice for all.
Memorial Day began May 30, 1868 when freed slaves placed flowers on the graves of Union Soldiers in Charleston, SC. They had disinterred a mass grave of Union captives in a Confederate Prison camp, re-interred the bodies in individual graves and built a fence around them designating hallowed ground.
Memorial Day finally became an official national holiday on June 28, 1968. Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Act in order to create convenient three-day weekends. Memorial Day was designed to kick off summer vacation fun.
That was then, this is now.
We're urged to celebrate 9/11 as our nation's defining holiday. Solemn public ceremonies lay flowers at the rubble of bombed office buildings and school massacres. We're encouraged to rejoice at hi-tech SWAT teams for every village and hamlet. We OOH! AAH! in approval of building and filling ever more jail cells.
How does a land of the free choose to remember the death and destruction of war?