Take a moment from your day

A number of years ago I was standing gazing out of a big plate-glass window in a major department store in the Pearlridge Shopping Mall in Honolulu.

I was gazing out because right below the huge store lay Pearl Harbor. And as I looked I could see in the distance the Arizona Memorial and below the memorial and highly visible was the outline of the hull of the USS Arizona. Within that hull, of course, are the remains of 1,177 sailors and marines who remained trapped after the attack.

The attack was exactly 66 years ago today, on December 7th, 1941.

She still bleeds oil, does the Arizona. She no doubt bleeds metaphorically, too.

The head-shaking moment of that day came about with my realization that the megastore in which I was standing was Japanese-owned.

The cruel irony struck me at the time. If the Japanese had only put off their strategic (and ultimately doomed to fail) plan, they might have been there, setting up shop, regardless.

There need have been no stinking jungles of Guadalcanal, no Bataan Death March, none of the horrors of flamethrowers in pillboxes and hideous POW camps which left even the survivors broken and maimed physically and spiritually forevermore. Ultimately, as pertaining to Japan, there would have been no Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

But, there was. And that is the reality of it all and the madness of human affairs throughout history.

Take a moment to remember the day and ‘all’ its meanings. They are manifold.