80 Years After Pearl Harbor America Lives in Infamy Every Day

Eighty years ago today, Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor killing more than 2,400 Americans prompting U.S. entry into the Second World War. The U.S. and its allies fought an enemy that would not surrender until not one, but two atomic bombs were dropped upon its populace. 

In the space of less than four years, Americans rationed food, textiles, fuel and transport in the name of defeating the Japanese. In pursuing this objective, Japanese Americans were deemed an enemy and stripped of their land, possessions and forced into internment camps. Something for which would take more than four decades to make recompense. For most Americans, Pearl Harbor is something for the textbooks if anything at all. There are fewer than 250,000 Americans who served during WWII left to tell what happened during the war. It is important that we honor those who are still here and those who died on December 7, 1941 and August 18, 1945.

Americans did get a sense of what Pearl Harbor was like 20 years during the attacks of September 11, 2001 though we did not have to ration goods or make much in the way of sacrifice. There was some anti-Muslim sentiment, but Muslim civilians were not stripped of their property and put into internment camps. Unlike Japan, Afghanistan is back in the hands of the Taliban. Whether this means they will welcome back al Qaeda or another Islamic terrorist group to harbor another attack on America remains to be seen. 

Yet over the past 20 months or so, Americans have seen more death than ever before. We are now approaching 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 - nearly double the number of Americans who died during WWII. In the midst of these ongoing deaths, many Americans are most fearful of an attack from within. Of a war between neighbors and possibly families. This was the year where America did not have a peaceful transfer of power. While it did not produce the bloodshed which occurred at Pearl Harbor and on 9/11 it is very likely a harbinger of worse things to come. There is a critical mass of Americans who believe Donald Trump won the election and are asking when they can use guns to kill people with whom they disagree.

Pearl Harbor was a day of infamy. But America now lives in a time in which we have spent years in infamy with the worst still to come.