Seventy years ago today the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; "a date which will live in infamy” in the words of then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt actually spoke those famous words to the nation the day after the attack--December 8, 1941--and within one hour after he concluded his speech, Congress voted to declare war with Japan.
For many years after Pearl Harbor, just the mere mention of the date itself—December 7—had the same significance to most Americans as the mention of September 11 has today. We memorialize days like December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001 and November 22, 1963 because the events that occurred on these dates were so psychologically vivid and traumatic that they are engraved—indeed scorched—into our minds and memories to remain there as scars on our psyches for the rest of our lives. For as long as we live, we hear or read the date and in true Pavlovian fashion we remember all to vividly the tragic events that occurred.
I can’t escape the feeling that we might be better off as a species if our minds were wired a bit differently. We remember tragedy all too vividly, but the good days—maybe not quite as much.
But, we also experience days that are memorable for their goodness, for the happy emotions we felt. Mostly these good memorable days are personal to us: the day we graduated from school, they day we met the love of our life, the day we got married, the day or days our children were born or were adopted, the day our child won an award or achieved recognition. But a few—a very, very few—of the ‘good days’ we experience get enough media attention to also be writ large on our collective memories. July 21, 1969, comes to mind; the date when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface and said "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
As I get older, the ‘good days’ and the dates associated with them are the ones I want to remember as vividly as I can and to memorialize. The tragic, ‘bad days’—not so much.
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