As they do every five years, though they say this may be the last time, Pearl Harbor
survivors gather in Hawaii to remember those who weren't so lucky on that infamous day.
In their lifetimes, there have been three true tests of American citizenship: the war that began that day, the war in Vietnam, and the Global War on Terror.
Tom Brokaw has famously called WWII-era America our "Greatest Generation." And what they accomplished in overcoming the Axis (the real Axis) is as truly historic as any accomplishment in our nation's history.
The contrast between our nation's handling of that crisis and the latter two is stunning. It's so obvious that it should need no explanation.
Yet every day, today's Republican Party and its enablers — the mainstream media, the talk-radio bloviators, and the 101st Keyboardists — demonstrate a willful ignorance that hobbles America's ability to ever again be so great.
In WWII, we had a President who helped prepare a reluctant country for the inevitable confrontation with the voracious forces that were storming Europe and Asia. He established a draft a year before the attack, and once it came, he fostered a culture of shared commitment and excellence that earned Brokaw's epithet.
Unlike thousands of young men a couple of years older, I escaped the body bags of Vietnam, courtesy of Nixon's criminally belated exercise of his "secret plan" to end the war.
In the years afterward, there was a popular bumper sticker: "Forget 'Nam? Never!" I felt that spoke to proud veterans
and to strong opponents to the war. When someone who was both — John Kerry — was "Swiftboated," it was stark evidence that those stickers had not been heeded.
The obstinacy was breathtaking when the boy king — who dodged his service in 'Nam and condemned us to relive it in Iraq, instead of rallying the country to fight the actual sources of the 9/11 terrorism —
visited southeast Asia. It was clear that he took precisely the wrong lesson from Vietnam:
"We hear voices calling for us to retreat from the world and close our doors to these opportunities," the president said in a speech at the National University of Singapore. "These are the old temptations of isolationism and protectionism, and America must reject them."
I was proud of my generation, the Baby Boom generation, for standing up against the war in Vietnam, and I was proud of the Walter Cronkites and photojournalists for their gutsy reporting of the truth on the ground there. I fear for my children's generation and their children's if we can't collectively aspire to such courage and good sense.
No doubt it was fun for George W. Bush to
pose as the war hero that his father was. But WWII wasn't a pose, and it wasn't an abitrary conflict. Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini had to be fought. Just like Al-Qaeda should have stayed in our sights. And not at all like Vietnam, which simply shouldn't have been fought at all.
It's sobering to project what the truth on the ground in Iraq will be by the time of 2008 election.
Why don't we try to give the Greatest Generation a run for its money, and elect the best, smartest, most decent person we can, instead of a towel-snapping beer buddy? Why don't we insist on a media that tells us the truth? And why don't we honor the dead of both earlier conflicts by learning how and when to band together and fight enemies abroad, and when and how to fight incompetents within?
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