Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been seventy-three years since the Day of Infamy. So many of the people that lived it are now gone. But their echoes and the lessons they impart to our lives continue.

When I think of December 7th, I remember it is the day my elders began the most difficult four years of their lives. I have seen in their eyes the fear, anger and resolve that come from experiencing what it was like to survive in territory occupied by the Empire of the Rising Sun. My mother had never heard of Pearl Harbor. For her World War II began on the same day seeing the Japanese bomb a U.S. naval installation called Cubi Point at the entrance to Manila Bay in the Philippine Islands. My grandfather never spoke of what horrors he had seen on the Bataan Death March or his years in the prison camps. When I look at my father, I always see the aura of my other grandfather’s memories of his son – my father – hanging off the side of a Japanese patrol boat with an Arisaka rifle pointed at him forced to give up the catch needed to feed his family to save him in the middle of the night in a place called Subic Bay.

Time has passed but the poignancy has not faded. Each December 7th I’m thankful they survived because I would not be here to muse about it if they hadn’t. The echoes of their ordeal drive me deeply to make sure that such a thing will never happen again. Whether called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or some other name made up by the contemporaries of my day, the evil that lurks underneath those who believe their ideas justify the horrors they impose must always be confronted and defeated.