Does anybody south of Scarborough remember the Maine?
I would be willing to bet it’s been a hundred years since anybody outside of Texas remembered the Alamo.
What’s the point, anyway? Remember the Alamo by beating up a Mexican?
There really needs to be an expiration date on these things, especially since they all seem to be memories of times someone kicked the crap out of Americans.
Today is the 80th anniversary of the day Japan kicked the crap out of our navy at Pearl Harbor, which of course resulted in us kicking the crap out of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the entire Empire of Japan less than four years later.
My mother died last year at age 93. She remembered Pearl Harbor. I’ll be 72 later this week. I was born eight years after Pearl Harbor.
I figure the only people who have any faint memories at all of December 7th, 1941, have to be at least 85 years old. Forgive me for this one, but a lot of them are lucky if they can remember where they left their keys.
What do I remember? I remember there weren’t that many thrilling things that happened in the ’50s, which made up the first 10 years of my life. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and the Kennedy assassination 13 months later. Those are supposed to be the two biggest formative historical events for older Baby Boomers.
The only real “Remember the …” event in my lifetime is probably the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, but people don’t seem to describe them that way. They say “never forget” instead, which is close but not the same thing.
The reaction to 911 and Pearl Harbor was very different in at least one respect. The only people who saw the Japanese attack as it was happening were people who were actually there, and even later, it was months and even years before the full extent of it was shown.
Sixty years later in New York, people saw what happened on television within minutes of the attacks, and those of us who were watching saw the Twin Towers fall as it happened.
Anyway, we did kick the crap out of Osama bin Laden, although to be fair it took us nearly 10 years to do it.
So if you want to remember Pearl Harbor today, that’s fine. But we ought to be getting near the end of its shelf life soon.
I guess I’ll remember comedian Flip Wilson, who said he had a friend named Rufus Yamashiro, who was half black and half Japanese.
Every December 7th, he would attack Pearl Bailey.