9/11

     It's the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.  It was a wake-up call for a complacent nation.  It was horrendous.   Over 2,900 people died that day, murdered by a sudden, unexpected assault.

     But we'd been there before.  December 7, 1941: over 2,400 killed in the unannounced attack on Pearl Harbor. 

     Both attacks precipitated wars.  The masterminds behind them were hunted down and dealt with.*

     On December 7, 1964, Americans remembered Pearl Harbor.  We honored the fallen -- and we went on with our lives.  We laid wreaths and went back to work.
_____________________
* Or at least most of them were.  Captain Minoru Genda, a less-confrontational Japanese counterpart to American air-power advocate Colonel Billy Mitchell, was instrumental in planning the attack on Pearl Harbor.  After the war, he eventually went on to command in the Japan Self-Defense Forces and retired in 1962 to begin a long career as a conservative politician.  While visiting London in 1961, he said of the Pearl Harbor attack, "We should not have attacked just once -- we should have attacked again and again." In 1969, on a speaking tour of the U.S., he answered a question from the audience by saying he thought the Japanese would have used the atomic bomb if they had had it. This caused a bigger outcry in Japan than in the U. S. and sharply curtailed his political influence. Is there a moral to this story? Not that I can find.