It was Pearl Harbor Day a few weeks ago. December 7. The day FDR said would “live in infamy.”
Maybe not. The eightieth anniversary seems to have been largely ignored by the media and nearly everyone else. My TV showed a few centenarians who had survived the day and the eighty years since. They looked pretty good, but there was nothing much said about Pearl Harbor, World War II, or their meaning. I know from talking with my engineering students twenty or so years ago, that schools don’t teach about it, either. I had students who didn’t know who was fighting or what the fight was about.
I remember where I was when I first heard about the “unidentified planes approaching Pearl Harbor.” I was eating popcorn, our Sunday night supper, on the living room couch with my father listening to the radio. (TV was not invented yet.) I was eleven; he was forty-one. I wonder now if he thought one or both of us would be fighting in the inevitable war that was to come.
He remained too old for the draft, and I remained too young. But we participated in the war effort. Everyone did. His business (selling and installing copper hot water heaters) had to close. No copper available. He went to work at a shift job in a nearby munitions factory. They made TNT for bombs and shells.
We planted a “victory garden.” We peeled the tin foil off gum wrappers and gave our ball of tin to the person who came around to collect it. I had to squish and mix the yellow coloring powder into the white grease that substituted for butter. Meat, when my mother could get it, was rationed. So were sugar, coffee, and other foods. We turned off lights and pulled drapes for the air raid drills, and watched the air raid warden walk the street making sure everyone complied. (The Germans never bombed us, though Youngstown was a steel-making city that they might have, if they could.)
There were no new cars; auto companies made tanks and jeeps. Gasoline and tires (they were not rubber) were rationed. We never drove over 35 mph, the “victory speed.”
Several of my father’s friends went away in the military; we had going away parties. My uncle went, too. He became a belly (ball turret) gunner in a B-17 bomber. It was a dangerous and difficult job, and he came back “different.” We called it ‘shell-shocked’; today we call it PTSD.
Gold stars appeared in the windows of some houses on our street.
Monday morning, December 8, my friends and I walked to school as usual. We said, “Those Japs made a big mistake; we’ll make them pay.” We were confident, cocky, but we didn’t have a clue what had really happened: the U.S. Pacific fleet destroyed, multiple battleships, aircraft carriers, and destroyers sunk. 2400 sailors dead, nearly a thousand forever entombed in the sunken Arizona. Hundreds of planes destroyed. They paid, I suppose, when Nagasaki and Hiroshima were A-bombed five years later.
Eighty years after Pearl Harbor, we are at war with a virus, a war that is as serious as World War II. That war killed over 400,000 Americans; so far, this war has killed over 800,000. Of course, many were elderly, so . . .
It’s a different war now, and how different the country’s participation! In World War II, everyone did their part. I don’t remember anyone whining or complaining about being put upon by government rules for rationing, speed limits, or even being conscripted into military service. In fact, many volunteered for service.
No-one claimed the war was not real, or was a government trick. No-one claimed there really weren’t thousands of sailors killed at Pearl Harbor, and ships sunk. No-one claimed that the tin foil from the gum wrappers gave you cancer or modified your genes.
Now you hear the indignant cries of “It’s my freedom; don’t tell me what to do!” This over getting a vaccine shot in the arm? Come on!
There are many other excuses given by the anti-vaxxers:
– It (the vaccine) wasn’t tested enough. (Yikes! There were 30,000 people in the trials, and millions have by now been inoculated!)
– Fear of needles. (Babies and children are afraid of needles, not adults. Jeeze! Grow up. Look away; you won’t feel it.)
– conspiracy theories abound which allege the vaccine can cause all manner of major side effects, from infertility to altering your genetics – and even grow hair on your eyeballs. (The no-vaxxers are not dumb; they can’t really believe such nonsense. Can they?)
I don’t believe the anti-vaxxers’ excuses. Here’s why. My father was a super salesman, and he told me this: people will not tell you the real reason they are not buying whatever you are selling (like vaccination). They won’t tell you the real reason, because if they do, then you can answer their concern, deal with the issue, and they will be left with no reason not to buy.
What do I think are the real concerns of the anti-vaxxers? Well, a goodly number of the males are being macho. Big psychological payoff for them if they survive (like Trump survived). They can puff out their chest and say, “I won. I told you so. I was tougher than the virus!”
The main real reason, though, in my opinion, is political. They don’t want to be disloyal to Trump by getting a vaccine shot. Never mind that he says he got the shot; they know he wants them to resist, to not allow Biden to look good. By not getting the shot, they are almost literally falling on their swords for Trump, risking Covid for themselves, their families, their co-workers, and their country. They are giving the virus time to mutate, and one of these variants may well be serious indeed.
Trump gave them hope. By not getting a shot, they’re keeping alive the dream that He will come back and save them from the Liberals and Progressives.
We are losing the war on Covid, in large part because of the anti-vaxxers. Good thing they weren’t around in 1941; we’d have lost that war, too.
Just Sayin’.
John R. Dixon 