Tuesday, December 8, 2015 – One Reason the World is the Way It Is Today.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015 – One Reason the World is the Way It Is Today.

Here’s What I’m Thinking – “Yesterday, December 7, a date that will live in infamy, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attacked Guam. The Japanese attacked Wake Island …” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Address to Congress, December 8, 1941.

If you were in MY (or Ms. Navasota’s) history class at McCullough High School in the late 1970’s and you did not know what yesterday was, we WILL change your grades! And you should be ashamed.

Yesterday I was a judge at a history fair at a local high school. The first presentation was entitled “Nazi POW Camps in Texas.” Before the students began I asked “Do you know what today is?” When they looked clueless, I said “Perhaps had there not been a today 71 years ago, you would not have had a presentation on this topic today.” Still clueless.

The ramifications of the Pearl Harbor attack shaped the world in which we grew up and live today. Americans would think “it will never happen again and the United States will never be attacked from the outside by an enemy” until it did happen again on September 11, 2001.

To understand the world today, it is necessary to understand how and why and what events took place to get us to where we are. Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it and in many cases, erroneous in their views of the world today as a result.

So once again, here’s to The Greatest Generation and to those generations who followed and succeeded because of them. Thank you.