Pearl Harbor

As a child I watched movies on television. Television at that time was a black and white set that received four channels with various degrees of fuzziness depending on weather conditions and time of day. A lot of the movies were war movies, mostly World War II.

I knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor. No one ever sat me down and explained what had happened at Pearl Harbor; everybody just sort of knew already. Maybe those black and white films about the war in the Pacific were really effective and absorbing history lessons. 

To me, as a young boy, it all seemed as though it had happened a very long time before. Pearl Harbor and The American Civil War seemed equally distant in the shadowy depths of history. The distortion of youth, perhaps.

Pearl Harbor had actually occurred less than twenty years before I was born. It amazes me to think back on it now as we have just passed the 72nd anniversary of the attack. Pearl Harbor was still a fresh wound on the American psyche, not unlike the way that the 9/11 attacks seem to Americans today.

All of those subsequent battles - The Battle Of The Bulge, Midway, Guadalcanal, the trials at Nürnberg, the development and deployment of the atomic bombs - all of that had happened shortly before I was born. But it still seemed like ancient history.

Following close at hand we had Sinatra and Elvis, the Cold War, Sputnik, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement.

Now, Civil Rights and the Space Program, I do remember. That was my time. That was my world. Along with the Beatles and Walter Cronkite and riots in American cities, anti-war protests, hippies, and sit-ins on college campuses, JFK, RFK, and MLK, Women's Liberation, the sexual revolution, the rise of environmental activism. I remember all of the above, maybe even a bit too well for a young child. It had an impact.

What will children born into this age think of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Ancient history? Something that happened long ago, like the Civil War? The human mind is an amazing thing. Our consciousness serves as its own time machine as we wander the pages of history in a book that unfolds new, crisp, tightly bound pages with each passing day.

Copyright © 2013 Daniel R. South
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