Will You Remember?

Today is Thursday, December 9. If your week has been anything like mine, it has been hectic. There is always more to do, but in the midst of all this, Tuesday passed and commemorated something important. Did you remember?
 
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack and bombed Pearl Harbor. It was the key event that precipitated our country entering WWII. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. 
 
In the attack, the Japanese air assault destroyed or damaged “nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight battleships, and over 300 airplanes. More than 2,400 Americans died in the attack, including civilians, and another 1,000 people were wounded”1. It was a profound blow to our country, despite the fact that most of our fleet was not in Pearl Harbor at the time. The iconic quote sometimes attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”. He was right.
 
So why is this important and why do we remember Pearl Harbor on December 7 each year? First, we clearly want to honor and pay respect to the men and women who gave their lives in this event. They gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country. To all of them, we owe a debt we cannot repay.
 
The second reason to remember Pearl Harbor is simply the preservation of history. The importance of the American people to recall this event is hard to overstate.  However, history accounts become distorted over time, or worse, completely forgotten. Indeed, today you can find mainstream media who talk about Pearl Harbor remembrances in disdainful undertones and focus on how it precipitated decades of American revenge on various countries.
 
Apparently, the concepts of freedom and justice evade them. We must not let Pearl Harbor be the victim of revisionist history or misleading conclusions.
 
Third, it represents something deeper in our nation’s psyche. We were founded on the concepts of liberty and freedom, and we are committed to protect them at all costs. Pearl Harbor was a challenge to whether freedom and liberty could be preserved in this world. It was a conflict of ideas: tyranny and oppression versus freedom and liberty. We were “all in”. 
 
Finally, it is important to remember Pearl Harbor as Christians. If you look at our logo, you’ll see the words, “Faith, Family, Freedom”. There is a reason for those words, and just as importantly, their order. Faith guides the preservation and thriving of families. Families give rise to communities, communities to societies, societies to governments, and governments to the preservation of freedoms through representation. 
 
The interesting thing about this sequence is that it can be reversed as well. As freedoms are eroded, they have grave consequences for our government, societal bonds and values erode, which negatively affect our families, and ultimately this sequence manifests itself as attacks on our faith. I don’t need to convince you of that reverse sequence, given the past year or two.
 
I maintain that the freedom we fought for in WWII was fundamentally an existential fight for our faith. This is precisely why we at North Dakota Family Alliance fight for all three. Faith, Family, and Freedom must be preserved if our country is to prosper and remain undergirded by the biblical principles upon which it was founded. They are inextricably linked.
 
Tuesday may have come and gone for you without a remembrance of Pearl Harbor, and I am certainly not one to cast stones, since I too have sometimes forgotten to commemorate Dec 7. However, I simply ask for this favor: Will you remember Pearl Harbor? Perhaps more importantly, will you remember the flag planted that day which symbolized the defense of faith, family, and freedom? We truly are a sleeping giant, but we can only make a difference if we awaken and stand for what is right.