Remember Pearl Harbor

After lunch five of us lingered after finishing our tuna casseroles and apple pie. We talked of 9/11. We remembered watching on television as the towers collapsed.

I was in Albuquerque. Mariam, Sara, and Becky were in their homes in the Dallas area. In the ten years since the attack, all of us sold our houses and came to live in this retirement community. Richard, a retired Naval officer, said he was in Norfolk, Virginia, “working on the Wisconsin Project.”

I wondered, “How come he was involved in Wisconsin when he was in Virginia?”
Richard said, “The admiral came in and told us, ‘Turn on the television.’”
I made the connection. I said, “Your project was with the Battleship Wisconsin, not the state.”
“Yes,” said Richard, “We were restoring it. It is still in the museum in Norfolk.”

I said, “Four of us here remember where we were the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.” (Becky, the youngest of our group, was not born until after World War II).

Sara turned to Richard and said, “Where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?”
“I don’t remember,” Richard said.
“You were eleven years old,” Sara reminded him. (We keep track of each other’s birthdays.)
“Was it Sunday afternoon?” Richard said. “We didn’t have the radio on. I didn’t know anything about it until I went to school the next day.”

I remember vividly December 7, 1941, sitting in the back seat of the Daddy’s Hudson as on the car’s radio H. V. Kaltenborn told us Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. I never had heard of Pearl Harbor, but even as a twelve-year-old kid, I knew something terrible had happened.

This trivial conversation reminded me that our reaction to events depends on the information we receive, whether we see it “live” on television or hear it third hand or read some nonsense published on the internet. Also, how much do we understand of what we see and hear? I confused the state of Wisconsin with a battleship.

During World War II we hated “Japs”. In the years since, most of us changed our attitude. In New Mexico I knew men who survived the Bataan Death March and four years in brutal Japanese prisons. Without exception they held no bitterness against the Japanese people. A man from Taos Pueblo told me, “It was their culture.”

Yet Curtis, a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific, says angrily,. “I will never buy a Japanese car.” Curtis is angry about many things. Toyota is the best-selling car in the U.S.

I hope those who publish vitriolic diatribes against Muslims will realize that the small group of fanatics who spread terror throughout the World distort their religion. Thousands of U.S. Muslims are better citizens than the fanatical fundamentalists who would force their religious beliefs on the rest of us.