It was eighty years ago today that World War finally reached America. Some of my forebears were in that original wave of "Antifa" that reached the Norman shore..but most of them served in the Pacific against Japan.

I have been there. In May of 2002, we were in Manila briefly to find a small waif that needed a new home in America. The Ancestral isle of my family suffered horribly at the hands of Imperial Japan.

In a place called Fort Santiago, even today there are caves and dungeons that were used by the occupying army to torture and dispose of Filipinos. I remember it to this day, our tour guide noted that nobody knew how many bodies were there, as they were still discovering them some sixty years later (at that time.)

Revisionist history regarding the atomic bomb is something I choose not to participate in - but I will only say this. My great-uncle Ray Moore got to live to be 85, helped to put man on the moon (and help save Apollo 13) because he DIDN'T have to invade Japan.

But I digress.

Today, there will be much ceremony and somber remembrance at the site of those long-ago events. I heard on the news yesterday of two survivors that were making the trip, including one sailor at age 101 that was on board the USS Oklahoma.

One would think that such an important event in the nation's psyche would be accurately memorialized - but as it turns out, the National Memorial at Pearl is littered with errors. At least a handful of veterans are trying to get that corrected.



And even though you are reading this on December 7, I've been writing these on the day previously of late. Noting that as I write this, it is December 6, so I must at least mention in passing this horrific event that took place 24 years before Pearl Harbor.

It is why the Official Boston Christmas Tree comes from Nova Scotia every year.

Like Manila, I too have stood on the shores of Bedford Basin and contemplated what happened there.