There isn't a person of my parent's generation who doesn't remember where he or she was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When I was younger, but old enough to be curious, I asked my mother and father where they were. They told me, and almost as soon as they told me, I forgot it, but I'll never forget where I was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
And I'll never forget where I was when Muslim extremists flew their skyjacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a cornfield in Pennsylvania. My grandson was born a month later and my two youngest granddaughters were born seven years after that. September 11, 2001 will have little significance to them, except in history class when they need to pass a test.
And so goes the generational national memory. What was once a visceral thing for a significant segment of the population becomes a historical thing for citizens in declining numbers and then an ancient thing shrouded in time, like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand starting a chain of events that led to World War I. Remember "Remember the Maine?" Spanish-American War.
Grievances from World War II still run deep, though. My father served in the OSS in England during the war and afterward, long into the 1990s, he would never buy a German or Japanese car. My stepmother patiently listened to him for several years and finally said to heck with it and bought a Subaru. I said to my dad, "I thought you were never going to buy a Japanese car." He said, "It's got a lot of American parts."
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