im a vet, i remember, i also remember having multiple conversations here on said topic, and im worn from it.....lets hope it doesnt happen again.

......but you know in the back of your head, it will, in whatever form taken.

Doc Brasso

Apparently it only took 64 years to become a joke, or almost totally forgotten.

Its sad that December 7th is a date that will live through a "crappy love story movie".

I should have guessed since the 7th was nearly over and nobody said a word.

Thankfully, none of us are a "Pearl" generation so thats really no excuse for not knowing. I could excuse a non-American for not grasping the connection but never a native born.

I don't know whats more disturbing. Not knowing the significance, or not caring to know.

I do not hold todays Japan accountable. Still, there is a tragic event to be remembered. I have really only met one Pearl Vet in my whole life so the amount of people alive that were even there is getting pretty slim.

Anyway, I just wanted to clarify that I am not posting this to alienate Japan, just to make people aware. I was surprised that the thread had not already been posted yet is all.

From a militaristic standpoint, I would probably have done the same thing back then as the Japanese did. I would have carried it to the next step and totally wiped out all resistance but as they say, hind sight is 20/20.

The audacity of taking on a superpower in one fell swoop is inspiring.

Calm down, no one was accusing anyone of s**tting on anyone else.

The event, although it happened on American soil, actually shook the greater part of the world. I just assumed that it was still being taught in history at the very least. The fact that it is pretty old news is a factor for it not being remembered however so I do understand not remembering.

Anyway, I posted the thread to get everyone to ponder. If your idea of pondering is to group ALL tragic events into one pondering thats good too.

When I think of tragedy, its not 9/11 its Dec 7th. So much for the generational gap I suppose.

I'd rather think of it like this:

Some very important things happened on December 7. One of those was the attack on Pearl Harbor. While the attack itself did have a major impact on world history, so did the events in 1787, 1917, 1975, and 1988, and who can say what else had a major effect on world history. Perhaps one of the people killed in one of the above events would have been the next Hitler, or Gandhi.

If youre going to observe this day as a day when people were killed, there are other days when more people died. If youre going to observe this day as a turning point in history, you might as well observe every moment as a turning point in history. If Rigoberto Alpizar had taken his medication that day, he could still be alive, and who knows what impact his death will have.