Today is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor

For what it's worth.  I posted on the attack here and here, and perhaps even here.  I dunno.  I just can't bring up another huge post since it's barely mentioned at this point in America's life.  Maybe things just fade into memory, and then beyond memory, no matter how big you think the event happens to be.  I've seen a smattering of articles or stories reflecting on that day so long ago, like this one.  Mostly we've just moved on.  Growing up, I always considered this the breaking point between the old world and the new.  It was the dividing line.  Up until that morning of December 7, the world was still old.  Things were the way they were and always had been.  A person born in 1920 lived in a world, despite industrialization and modernization, closer to the world of Jesus than a person born in 1950.  But when the US came into the conflict, it propelled everything forward.  The arms race was on.  The rush to out advance the other side was on.  Everyone who was anyone was scrambling for new technologies, new weapons, new logistics.  By the time the ashes settled on Nagasaki, the world that emerged was, for better or worse, the one in which we now live.

Anyway, a hat tip and a prayer to those who died that day, and to those who rose up to fight the evils of that particular darkness.  Thank you boys. We've lost that spirit and that grit.  Perhaps America is no longer worth defending.  Maybe the critics are right, and the only reason there are problems in the world is because America has always caused them.  But on that day, people thought America was worth defending.  And on that day, Japan thought America was worth disabling.  It's ironic in some ways, that the America forgetting this day, the America no longer able to rally together for a common cause, is exactly what Japan thought it was up against.  In some ways, post-9/11 America is everything Japan had hoped we would be.

As the first bombs fall, the close of an historical era as the world lurches into modernity