Note: I posted this journal a year ago when I was phroggmoulis, which, apparently I still am(?) 
Anyway...
My mother had finished her classes for the semester at Belhaven College and was preparing for final exams in the coming week. Her brother was working on a business correspondence course and getting ready for band practice. His days were divided between his job at Pilot Life Insurance and gigs as the drummer for a dance orchestra. People said they sounded a lot like Tommy Dorsey. My father was an English professor and Dean of Men at Mississippi College, and was probably grading final exams that afternoon. The dishes from Sunday dinner were still drying when the announcement interrupted Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra: "From the NBC Newsroom in New York: President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked the... Pearl Harbor, Hawaii from the air. I'll repeat that: President Roosevelt said that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air. This bulletin came to you from the NBC Newsroom in New York. Now back to our regularly scheduled program."
Is that all? My mother had heard the words "Pearl Harbor" before, but had little idea where, or what, it was. Even less idea of why the Japanese would attack such a place. Hawaii, though, was a U.S. territory. That was alarming. As the details began to emerge over the radio, and as the newsboys shouted the headline from the street corners, my mother, my father and my uncle came to the uneasy understanding that their world had forever changed.
My uncle had only a few months until he turned 26 and his selective service registration would expire. My father was 29 and had not even registered for the draft. But that changed in 1942 when General Marshall asked for the draft to be extended to age 35. Rather than chance the vagaries of being a draftee, both men enlisted in the Navy in 1942. My father began as a pharmacists' mate and then was promoted to Lieutenant junior grade and was assigned to Communications at the Canal Zone in Panama. My uncle was trained as a submariner and was on the crew of the S.S. Grouper in the Central Pacific. The first time my mother saw my father was at church. He was wearing his dress blues. She thought he was the handsomest thing she'd ever seen.
They were part of "The Greatest Generation". It wasn't something they chose, but rather something that was thrust upon them. I have never heard any of them say that they were somehow more noble or selfless than any other generation, but simply that they did what they had to do. They went from the Great Depression to the world's most cataclysmic war with hardly a full breath in between.
The Depression hit my mother's family so hard that my uncle had to earn an income from the time he was 14, and as often as not, he was the principal breadwinner. After graduating from Millsaps College he was beginning to shape a life and career when suddenly he was off to war. He, and many of his contemporaries, had virtually no days of carefree youth. Yes they danced the Jitterbug and listened to Swing Jazz, and my uncle played the trap set - made all the rage by the drummer Gene Krupa. But he was never able to escape the burden of hardship or his responsibilities. Like any teenager he could grumble and be resentful, and he was, but he did what he had to do.
That they were the Greatest Generation I acknowledge. They were also the Post-traumatic Stress Generation, at a time when it was barely known or understood, or was called "shell-shock". A few months after he returned from the Pacific, my uncle called a family meeting. Then and there, with his mother and father and two sisters, he described in first person and in graphic detail the horrors of submarine warfare. After he finished, he told them that he never planned to bring it up again. And he buried it.
Many, many others did the same. Why? Because they had to. "Happy Days" America was a period of repressed memories. It was all in the plans. How many G.I.'s and sailors were able to keep their sanity by holding onto a vision of life after this horror, of life returning to "normal"? How about all of them? The post war years were affluent enough to allow them - at long last - to realize that kind of life: comfortable, orderly, and blessedly bland. And part of it was the necessity of burying war memories. No one could create such a normal life, no one could even function, if their waking hours were filled with such horrific memories.
Of course it was this Greatest Generation against which I rebelled, strenuously. The post-war consensus began to quickly unravel when this generation had its assumptions challenged. We thought that they had not only repressed their war memories, but had also forgotten justice. The struggle for Civil Rights earned once again by American minorities in their service in this same war was being asserted. We thought our parents just didnt want to deal with yet another cataclysm. I also think that, in part, we were actually rebelling against what seemed to have become a habit of war in America. When the war in Vietnam began to escalate, in addition to the real issues surrounding it, there was also an element of Well be damned if our Youth gets stolen from us the way yours was!
Overall, I think our society has become resistant to repressed memories. We have discovered that it is psychologically risky, and that, collectively, it has all sorts of hazards for a society that is unable to come to grips with its past. The Greatest Generation fought a war to defeat a great evil of the time, and it was the right thing to do. Repression was a means of survival for them. And for a few years, it worked. Then the lid popped off, and has never been put back on. And that too comes at a price.
My mother is now 86 and living in Alpharetta, Georgia. She is a gracious southern lady, admired by all who know her. Whenever I ask her about Dec. 7th, 1941, her memories are still clear. Her friends who are still living participate in the ritualized memorials of Pearl Harbor Day. And though my mother makes her best effort to relate to both my generation and that of her grandchildren, to go with the flow, she is very uncomfortable living in the 21st century. I think she would really rather forget. Not Pearl Harbor, not the way things were. I think she would rather forget the way things are now.
Things that many of us are celebrating today, such as the regime change that is soon to come in our country, frighten my mother. She is frightened, not because were soon to have a black president. My parents always believed in racial equality. Its not even because his policies are liberal, though this does bother her. Its because he represents fundamental change and, in her 86 years, shes had enough of it. She would rather that the lid stayed on.
On Pearl Harbor Day I am able to think about their world for a moment. I hear the news bulletin as it must have sounded coming from their Westinghouse radio console. The student radical in me is unable to forget that it was this same corporation that topped the list of War profiteers during Vietnam. But I try to put this aside for a moment and to understand the world my parents knew that was suddenly shaken to its roots. That during this terrible war they clung to a vision of post war life that was safe, was predictable, and was the same. And I can begin to understand why my mother and her contemporaries would like to tell us: We survived the Depression; we defeated Hitler; we gave you a home in the suburbs and a college education. Havent we done enough?
Yes, I think they have, actually. More than most generations are called upon to do. I believe our rebellion against them in the 1960s was not wholly misguided. There were many crucial issues. As the novelist Turgenev is often quoted: Every generation must kill its fathers. But our rebellion was truly much less about age than it was about power, and the evils that it can perpetrate. I can now see this, and I can enter into their world the world of 1941, and begin to understand, and be grateful for what they did.
USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Anyway...
My mother had finished her classes for the semester at Belhaven College and was preparing for final exams in the coming week. Her brother was working on a business correspondence course and getting ready for band practice. His days were divided between his job at Pilot Life Insurance and gigs as the drummer for a dance orchestra. People said they sounded a lot like Tommy Dorsey. My father was an English professor and Dean of Men at Mississippi College, and was probably grading final exams that afternoon. The dishes from Sunday dinner were still drying when the announcement interrupted Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra: "From the NBC Newsroom in New York: President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked the... Pearl Harbor, Hawaii from the air. I'll repeat that: President Roosevelt said that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air. This bulletin came to you from the NBC Newsroom in New York. Now back to our regularly scheduled program."
Is that all? My mother had heard the words "Pearl Harbor" before, but had little idea where, or what, it was. Even less idea of why the Japanese would attack such a place. Hawaii, though, was a U.S. territory. That was alarming. As the details began to emerge over the radio, and as the newsboys shouted the headline from the street corners, my mother, my father and my uncle came to the uneasy understanding that their world had forever changed.
My uncle had only a few months until he turned 26 and his selective service registration would expire. My father was 29 and had not even registered for the draft. But that changed in 1942 when General Marshall asked for the draft to be extended to age 35. Rather than chance the vagaries of being a draftee, both men enlisted in the Navy in 1942. My father began as a pharmacists' mate and then was promoted to Lieutenant junior grade and was assigned to Communications at the Canal Zone in Panama. My uncle was trained as a submariner and was on the crew of the S.S. Grouper in the Central Pacific. The first time my mother saw my father was at church. He was wearing his dress blues. She thought he was the handsomest thing she'd ever seen.
They were part of "The Greatest Generation". It wasn't something they chose, but rather something that was thrust upon them. I have never heard any of them say that they were somehow more noble or selfless than any other generation, but simply that they did what they had to do. They went from the Great Depression to the world's most cataclysmic war with hardly a full breath in between.
The Depression hit my mother's family so hard that my uncle had to earn an income from the time he was 14, and as often as not, he was the principal breadwinner. After graduating from Millsaps College he was beginning to shape a life and career when suddenly he was off to war. He, and many of his contemporaries, had virtually no days of carefree youth. Yes they danced the Jitterbug and listened to Swing Jazz, and my uncle played the trap set - made all the rage by the drummer Gene Krupa. But he was never able to escape the burden of hardship or his responsibilities. Like any teenager he could grumble and be resentful, and he was, but he did what he had to do.
That they were the Greatest Generation I acknowledge. They were also the Post-traumatic Stress Generation, at a time when it was barely known or understood, or was called "shell-shock". A few months after he returned from the Pacific, my uncle called a family meeting. Then and there, with his mother and father and two sisters, he described in first person and in graphic detail the horrors of submarine warfare. After he finished, he told them that he never planned to bring it up again. And he buried it.
Many, many others did the same. Why? Because they had to. "Happy Days" America was a period of repressed memories. It was all in the plans. How many G.I.'s and sailors were able to keep their sanity by holding onto a vision of life after this horror, of life returning to "normal"? How about all of them? The post war years were affluent enough to allow them - at long last - to realize that kind of life: comfortable, orderly, and blessedly bland. And part of it was the necessity of burying war memories. No one could create such a normal life, no one could even function, if their waking hours were filled with such horrific memories.
Of course it was this Greatest Generation against which I rebelled, strenuously. The post-war consensus began to quickly unravel when this generation had its assumptions challenged. We thought that they had not only repressed their war memories, but had also forgotten justice. The struggle for Civil Rights earned once again by American minorities in their service in this same war was being asserted. We thought our parents just didnt want to deal with yet another cataclysm. I also think that, in part, we were actually rebelling against what seemed to have become a habit of war in America. When the war in Vietnam began to escalate, in addition to the real issues surrounding it, there was also an element of Well be damned if our Youth gets stolen from us the way yours was!
Overall, I think our society has become resistant to repressed memories. We have discovered that it is psychologically risky, and that, collectively, it has all sorts of hazards for a society that is unable to come to grips with its past. The Greatest Generation fought a war to defeat a great evil of the time, and it was the right thing to do. Repression was a means of survival for them. And for a few years, it worked. Then the lid popped off, and has never been put back on. And that too comes at a price.
My mother is now 86 and living in Alpharetta, Georgia. She is a gracious southern lady, admired by all who know her. Whenever I ask her about Dec. 7th, 1941, her memories are still clear. Her friends who are still living participate in the ritualized memorials of Pearl Harbor Day. And though my mother makes her best effort to relate to both my generation and that of her grandchildren, to go with the flow, she is very uncomfortable living in the 21st century. I think she would really rather forget. Not Pearl Harbor, not the way things were. I think she would rather forget the way things are now.
Things that many of us are celebrating today, such as the regime change that is soon to come in our country, frighten my mother. She is frightened, not because were soon to have a black president. My parents always believed in racial equality. Its not even because his policies are liberal, though this does bother her. Its because he represents fundamental change and, in her 86 years, shes had enough of it. She would rather that the lid stayed on.
On Pearl Harbor Day I am able to think about their world for a moment. I hear the news bulletin as it must have sounded coming from their Westinghouse radio console. The student radical in me is unable to forget that it was this same corporation that topped the list of War profiteers during Vietnam. But I try to put this aside for a moment and to understand the world my parents knew that was suddenly shaken to its roots. That during this terrible war they clung to a vision of post war life that was safe, was predictable, and was the same. And I can begin to understand why my mother and her contemporaries would like to tell us: We survived the Depression; we defeated Hitler; we gave you a home in the suburbs and a college education. Havent we done enough?
Yes, I think they have, actually. More than most generations are called upon to do. I believe our rebellion against them in the 1960s was not wholly misguided. There were many crucial issues. As the novelist Turgenev is often quoted: Every generation must kill its fathers. But our rebellion was truly much less about age than it was about power, and the evils that it can perpetrate. I can now see this, and I can enter into their world the world of 1941, and begin to understand, and be grateful for what they did.
USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
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New found family and friends are all good thing in my book.