Last Review - Pearl Harbor

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack on US forces station in and around Oahu, Hawaiian Territory on December 7th, 1941.

The Pearl Harbor survivor associations are calling this the last reunion to commemorate the attack since the few survivors left are well into their 80s and 90s. Soon these brave men and women will join their compatriots from WWI in eternal rest. Leaving just various memorials, museums, and a mountain of documents to mark a day which will live in infamy.

The only ship to be based in Oahu that still survives can be found in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, the United States Coast Guard cutter Tanney. In Pearl Harbor itself the shattered remains of the battleship USS Arizona rest at her mooring station while parts of the superstructure lie on Ford Island after they were salvaged from the ship. Parts of buildings at Hickam AFB still bear the bullet scars from the attack. In Texas rests the only surviving Japanese midget submarine. While further north at the state capitol of Minnesota resides the gun that fired the first shots in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the forward mount 5-inch gun from the USS Ward which opened fire and sank a midget submarine outside the entrance to Pearl Harbor over an hour before the aerial attack.

One thing that should be remembered from this solemn day is this, be on guard. Just five years after 911, we are already falling asleep again. To honor all those who died this should not be allowed to happen. It is happening when our voices and pens do not rise to the occasion to oppose the latest encroachment of our inalienable rights in the name of 'tolerance.' Who's tolerance one must ask? What are those demanding this change in the status quo willing to offer to meet the rest half-way to prove they are earnest in their desires of building a community? Unilateral changes without concrete reciprocating changes from the other side is just surrender, plain and simple. That is not the lesson from Pearl Harbor.