It may be hard to imagine now, but there will come a time when today’s combat veterans, the ones who survive the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan long enough, will become the elderly veterans who wave to us from the parade floats.
They will become the graying American Legion and VFW members who help us keep patriotic traditions alive.
There will come a time when the immediacy and the horror of 9/11 becomes a distant memory. Future generations will rally around their own, fresher wounds while those of us who lived through it, will gather together every September and keep our memories alive.
Then there will come a time when we are gone and 9/11 will only be remembered via video clips and historians.
It’s hard to conceive now, of course, but if in 1951 you told an American that the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy would recede into the mists of history it’s likely they not only wouldn’t have believed you, they probably would have thought you were some kind of communist.
There was a time when Pearl Harbor was the rallying cry of the nation. More than some tiny print on a calendar date, Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, was a really big deal, commemorated, as it should be, by parades, school essays and shared moments of silence.
At the time the attack was a shocking act, one that roused the nation from the shell of isolationism, shook off the Great Depression and set America inexorably on the path toward becoming the dominant world power for the latter half of the 20th century.
It was literally a day that changed the course of history: a “Date which will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt called it.
Pearl Harbor Day 2011 comes next week, 70 years to date after the fact. Remember to thank a veteran for the freedoms we enjoy. Our grandparents and great-grandparents now, were the young men and women who fought and won that war and they are leaving us by the day.
Soon, all too soon, they will be gone and all we will have are the history books.
