While driving home from work one day last week, one of us at the HP saw a letterboard sign in front of a small cornerstore in their mid-sized city that read:
“Was WWII over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
We don’t know anyone at the store, and have no idea what their intent was, but we assume it was a call to resistance against dictatorship in America. The first emotional response was positive. It actually took one second to catch on to… the Germans?
A quick check confirms that the Empire of Japan, not its Axis ally Germany, bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, drawing the U.S. at last into officially declaring war and committing the women and men of its military to combat in World War II.
So was this sign a joke? Was it, just maybe, a knowing nod to how little Americans know about our own history? Or was it evidence of that?
We can’t know. But we can decide to commit ourselves to the first meaning of resistance. When we see the stunning blows dealt to America’s democracy by Americans who have done nothing but benefit from it, the very fact that this is happening reads like defeat. But it’s not. It’s the opening salvo of anti-Americans against the rest of us. And we, like the U.S. navy after Pearl Harbor, need time to assemble our full defenses and our offense, time for people who haven’t taken action to realize they must, and time to move from grief to furious resolve. But then we, like the U.S. navy, military, government, and people will shift into a high gear of both resistance and counter-attack. For us, it won’t be through killing and violence, but through an unstoppable commitment to our democratic processes.
So we’re reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack that began in January. But as another American once said, we have not yet begun to fight.
The Historic Present 