Thank you brave men and women, both lost on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, those who have passed on since, and those very few who remain alive today, for your service on that Black, yet proud day in America's short rich history on earth.

Like a deer in headlights, I stop dead in my tracks anytime I hear Franklin D. Roosevelt's impassioned "December 7th, 1941" speech. It is one of a handful of speeches to have this effect on me.  It stands with Churchill's 'Never Surrender, King's 'Have a Dream' and Kennedy's 'Ask Not' speeches. Perhaps if we only had audio of Lincoln's Gettysburg too...

The importance and impact of the event at Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt's from the gut address to Americans can never, ever be understated. All who know and feel the power of the moment and speech, the lucky Americans still alive who remember standing by a radio or loudspeaker, shoulder to shoulder with their countrymen, the generations following who hear and understand some shade of the feeling up and down their spine as Roosevelt recounts and in plain words describes the sneak attack on a young and fiercely free populous in what was becoming the superpower of the world. The social net Roosevelt crafted at the same time, catching America's week and feeble poor elderly, orphaned & disabled, the same net people who call themselves 'religious' want stripped away so only the wealthy can survive. What a sad hypocritical joke these 'righteous' truly are.

And of course, the impact of the outcome can never be understated. All of these events stand as towering pillars overshadowing what we as American's allow our government to do with the might we inherited from the moral and strategic victory of WWII. The events shape our goals even now. However terribly planned, executed, or wrongly intelligenced, the real truth is America wants Iraq to be the Japan of the Middle East. A beacon of freedom and industry leading a politically impoverished region into a free future. If we only had the leaders America once had.

Barney Moran
Grateful Word

http://www.gratefulweb.info