Sunday, Dec. 8, 2013. Yesterday was December 7. Nothing unusual about that fact. Indeed it was a day of great college football. Yet I had the feeling that something was wrong.
The papers were full of Mandela's death and funeral plans; as they should be. Non the less there was a dark cloud hovering over me.
Then I realized what was the problem, I and my generation had passed out of memory into ancient history. Why should the present generations remember events that dominated the lives of one in which the present median age is about 92 ?
Who cares about Dec. 7; 72 years ago? In fact there are many who now claim what was happening in Europe and Asia for a few years preceding and the next four years is mostly myth.
Well in another 10 years those who served in Korea will suffer the same fate. And the Vietnam generation is now in the 60/early 70s.
I am talking about "that day of infamy,which will live in our memory forever"!
Pearl Harbor day.
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I haven't forgotten Doc.
ReplyDeleteDuring WWII 12 members of my family served in Europe and Africa and 15 in the Pacific theater.
My one uncle Clarence Pierce was a survivor of Pearl Harbor and while still alive made it back there every year to honor those who were less fortunate that day than he!
From this country's beginnings we owe a debt of gratitude to all who have helped to keep us free, especially those who gave up their lives!
I still vividly remember seeing the first films of the concentration camps after their liberation in the mid-1940s.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a sociology professor in the 1960s and 1970s I discovered that my students knew nothing about the Holocaust--so I started teaching then about it.
I came to realize that their sense of history was not like mine--or yours, either, Doc. Such things as the discovery of fire, the building of the pyramids, and the first atomic bomb explosion all happened at the same time--before they were born. It's terrifying that people have no sense of history any more.