My grandfather was at Pearl Harbor Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941. Franklin Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy.” No December 7 comes and goes without my thinking of him. Sometime between 7:53 and 9:55 a.m., he was hit by shrapnel — nasty chunks of metal packed into bombs.
In 1941, he was 50 years old. He was a civilian aviation and ship repairman at the Navy Shipyards Shop 70. When the bombs started to fall, the men of Shop 70 made stretchers and painted big red crosses on the tops of hospitals and trucks transporting the wounded. It was no use; bombs and guns hit the red crosses as readily as ships and barracks. In the end more than 900 at Pearl Harbor were injured or killed, and 18 ships were hit.
Grandpa wasn’t killed. He was treated and released. He remained at Pearl Harbor until 1945. In that time, 15 of the 18 ships hit were repaired and set out to sea.
From Pearl Harbor, my grandfather wrote a letter to me, “his first and only grandchild.” In the letter he enclosed a U.S. Savings Bond and the piece of shrapnel the doctors removed from his body. The letter said, “One day, you in your first childhood and Grandma and I in our second childhood, will play by the lake shore.” We never did.
When the war was over, my grandfather was sent home to die. It wasn’t the shrapnel; it was the cancer the doctors discovered while treating his wounds. He stayed at his post as long as he could. For almost four years, he did his job, fighting the cancer while helping to fight the war. I only saw him once, and I never heard his voice. Those three things — the letter, the piece of shrapnel and the United States savings bond — are all I have from my grandfather.
I write about the history of this community; just this once, however, I am moved to write about us here and now. It is Grandpa’s letter, you see. It is a remarkable letter, filled with love for and a deep belief in the future United States of America. His generation will win the war, he wrote, and my generation will know how to build a better world in peace. I wonder if he would be proud of what we have done.
It’s interesting that in every sentence of his letter, he talks about America and Americans as “we.” Perhaps a strong external enemy pressed them together and created unity, but it is still alarming that, today, America has a stronger sense of us and them than we: American Democrats v. American Republicans, American Blacks v. American Whites or Hispanics, American rich v. American poor.
Grandfather had a sense of ability and optimism. No one had to tell him, “Yes, we can”; he knew he and his fellow Americans could — interesting that we now need experts from outside our communities to tell us what good is. We need a poll to tell us how we feel and what we believe. We need pundits to tell us what the speech we just heard or the legislation just passed really means.
Grandfather knew good from evil, right from wrong, and he knew what the problem was. He had watched it unfold. It was the concentration of power and wealth in a few hands, the erosion of democracy and the reversion to oligarchy or worse. He knew concentration of power, wealth, or resources, undermined the rights and the opportunities of the many. He didn’t like that. He wanted to hold onto his rights and had no fear of exercising his responsibilities. Do we? How peculiar that we say nothing about giving corporations 99 percent of the wealth and then giving them the right of freedom of speech, a right reserved for people. Evidently, owning the media outlets was insufficient. Strange that we sit and watch as they use both to influence not just elections, but truth itself.
I appear to be talking about national politics, but actually similar things happen right here. There are rooms with good acoustics. There are groups of people with sharp ears. In these rooms and by these people, voices, even disparate voices, are heard. Not all rooms and all people are equally well equipped. Not all communities build a room for people to come together and listen to one another; not all people want to hear. In this community, partly because of our history and partly because of our size, we have such rooms and we have a tradition of listening to our neighbors.
In town meetings, we make the decisions that shape our towns and our civic life: We are our own government. Local elected and appointed officials are not removed from us; they live next door. We know them, know how to reach them. We meet in big rooms and talk to each other, and listen with respect even when we disagree. Why? Because these are our neighbors, we know them, we help them and they us; we celebrate together and do business with one another. Continuing the relationship is more important than perfect agreement on every issue. This form of government is rare; it is a privilege: How and why would anyone pervert it? If anyone tried, why would the majority allow it? If it is taken from us, it would be the theft of something of great value: an underpinning of a very nice way of life. So, what just happened?
Hopefully it was an aberration, a mistake that 80,000,000 voters corrected. Never vote to limit your own rights; exercise them. Never vote to limit the rights of others; it is precedent for limiting all rights. The best conspiracy was the one that created this country — read about it, know about it, pass it on.
Things were clear to my grandfather; they are no longer clear to us. The more ways we invent to communicate, the less we are able to say much. Communication reduced to 140 characters and 30-second soundbites creates more confusion than clarity, more heat than light. Listeners seek to be entertained rather than informed. The result is that in this information age, we are startlingly uninformed, and perhaps therefore startlingly uninvolved.
For me, Pearl Harbor Day is reduced to a chunk of shrapnel, a United States savings bond and a letter. But to all Americans, the legacy is much greater than that — don’t waste it.
