Thread: Memory - the good and the bad

I've been either cursed or blessed (depends on which side of the coin I'm on at the time) to remember some dates and forget numerous others. This is one I will never forget, today, December 7, Sunday. It was on a Sunday, I was almost nine, it was mid morning in Chicago, I was listening to a classical music program in the back of the family grocery store. Abruptly, in the middle of a beautiful classical piece (and I can't remember the composer or the name of the work) the announcer broke in, with extreme emotion in his voice, and announced that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. Even as a naive child I had a sudden sense of the enormity of that statement and suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I have noticed, over the years, as those directly involved (and their relatives) in that great struggle have died off there has been fewer and fewer public mentions of that horrendous day and the years that followed, it all being encapsulated in the WW II heading. Yes, of course, there are mentions of it here and there, but it seems to have become a minor note in the history of man.

While not a religious man, I am a believer in the Universe and this is a day that I take more than a solemn moment to remember and reflect on the frailty of man and his actions and ask the Universe to grant us a calm future.

Yes, thank-you for the reminder, today is the anniversary of Pearl Harbor - "A day that will live in Infamy."

I had been thinking about it several days ago.

I guess with all the problems in the world at present time folks aren't thinking much about the past especially bad things in the past.

That is unfortunate.

Forget the past:Repeat in the future. Ad Nauseum.

For all of us alive in the free world today, that day's events may have had more impact than any other. It changed the direction the war and world were taking. And it shaped the lives of many of our parents and grandparents, in good and bad ways.

These days we rely on the media (television) to teach our children history.

To remember something, we must be taught; by firsthand experience or our parents.

Soon Pearl Harbor will only be found in dusty old books & digital media placed in a section of the library that no one visits, hardly.

I know it's always painful to hear the truth when you would rather have a pollyanna moment. Your words ring so true Hirlau. We can only hope that in a generation or two there will be a resurgence of the need to investigate the past as a living entity, and that there will be the technology to do so, and that there will finally be the chance of learning from the past and avoid those old pitfalls that keep repeating themselves.