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Ships, jets, giant crowd mark Pearl Harbor anniversary event

4 Comments
By AUDREY McAVOY

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4 Comments
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Appropriate recognition at PH.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

You know what I like? I like war memorials that people do not make a big deal about because then they truly become monuments to peace. When people make a big deal about war memorials, it is far too easy to spin the strong feelings they cause into various agendas, most of which can be co-opted for hate.

But you go to memorials of some of the biggest battles in history and you might find people enjoying the weather with their families or having a picnic. For instance, you don't find heaps of hostility at Thermopylae, or Shijo Nawate, or Gettysburg, or Bull Run or Vicksburg or Little Big Horn, or Kawanakajima. I like to think that the soldiers who died at such places might like to see people enjoying themselves and each other in a world of peace, so much different from the hell they knew and died in.

I have been to the Arizona memorial numerous times, and the weather is usually great. And the Punch Bowl. I don't think those memorials will be truly great until people can just enjoy them for what they are, rather than angrily picking a fight with history, taking a side, and getting lost in their deep symbolism. There is no shortage of war memorials around the world. 75 years ago, people fought a war there and now we don't have to. Who takes time to remember and appreciate that?

I mean, here we are, with the keynote speaker saying "“Yet we are also inspired by their great gift to the world - the gift of freedom itself,” " while ridiculing and reviling someone's freedom to kneel during the national anthem. I would like to think that the Americans who died for freedom can recognize and appreciate freedom itself, not some authoritarian's interpretation of freedom. Oh well. The hypocrisy is lost on the kind of people who would rather see monuments to war than monuments to peace.

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

The greatest generation.

0 ( +3 / -3 )

Whoopee. Let's get over it.

-4 ( +0 / -4 )

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