Future National Holiday

Today is not a national holiday, but there is no doubt in my mind that eventually it will be.  Okay, well maybe not a holiday-holiday, like Christmas and Labor Day, but at the very least a national day of remembrance.  You know, like Pearl Harbor Day.  And it won’t happen anytime soon either.  Do you know when Pearl Harbor Day became federally recognized?  August 23, 1994.  That’s right, almost 53 years after the event, Congress finally decided to make it official.

To me what that means is that most of those congressmen (average age: late sixties) that voted to remember Pearl Harbor officially, were probably teenagers when it happened.  You remember being a teenager, right?  Everything was just…more.  Those feelings of love and hurt and passion were new to us and we were feeling them for the first time, and so we felt them a lot harder, having no other similar experiences to compare them to.  Imagine then, being already genetically and hormonally predisposed to heightened emotional states, finding out that your country was just attacked.  Sure, everyone was angry, but maybe you felt a little angrier.  Maybe you took it a little more personally.  And maybe it stayed with you just a little bit longer and burned a little bit brighter.

Now fast forward to your years in the US Congress.  You have been smoldering for years, like everyone else in your generation, over the attack on you and your country.  Sure, the war had been over for decades and all the men responsible for the attack were dead.  Yes, the attackers were now among our closest allies.  And it’s true that we already had Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day to remember soldiers, both living and dead.  But that one day still stuck in your memory.  And you finally had the power to do something about it.  And so, more than fifty years after the attack, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day was voted into being.

I’m not sure when 9/11 will get its own day, but I’m sure that it’s coming.  If nothing else, it marks an important date and turning point in American history.  It is our Pearl Harbor.  Our children and our grandchildren will be asking us about it for school reports, and none of us will ever forget where we were that day, holiday or no holiday.  And someday, when all of those scared teenagers of 11 years ago become members of Congress, and when enough time has passed that they are scared that people might not remember like they used to, and despite the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead and the war on terror has become a distant memory, we will get that holiday.  And we will never forget.