Daily Jots

Thought of the Day:
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander of the Japanese Navy, 1941

Thinking Outside of the Box:
“A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for,” said William Shedd, a protestant theologian. Evidently he was mistaken, for the ships at Pearl Harbor that morning were anything but safe.

I knew a doctor who was in World War II. He would have been fairly young but I believe he was a physician and not a medic. At any rate, I met him some 30 or 40 years after that Sunday morning in December of 1941. He was obviously still touched by that morning and it was difficult for him to talk about. He was in the Navy and he happened to be stationed at Pearl Harbor. I remember him saying how there were so many men dead and wounded that it was a completely overwhelming scenario. He recalled with emotional strain in his voice, “We had to decide who would live and who would die. I just don’t know how we did that.”

War isn’t something that touches us briefly. We can’t go to a war like we go to a movie, and then leave just to shake the feeling off in the parking lot. War goes into us… seeps into our pores if we witness it. To hear, see, touch, smell… to actually witness a war is a different thing. Perhaps the war movies help us to understand, but what we can never understand is what it did to the people who were actually there.

The above quote? I hear the regret in the Japanese Commanders words. I have also heard that he didn’t really say those words, but then I have heard he wrote them in a diary or a letter. Others say they were there when he said it. Who knows and really who cares? What has been immortalized by these words is important.

And it reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw a thousand years ago. “War is not good for children and other living things.” Simple. Succinct. True.

Some Last Thoughts:
“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
Albert Einstein

“Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.”
Winston Churchill

“In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”
Jose Narosky

“The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed during war.” Chinese Proverb

“Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind… War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”
President John F. Kennedy

The Pearl Harbor Memorial Web site provides a great deal of information and gives visitors a chance to donate to the cause of the Memorial. Take a look to learn about what happened December 7, 1941. Take the time. Don’t forget.

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