ON THIS DAY – AT 12:31 P.M. ET:  This is the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, or, as leftists would have it, the imperialist American warmonger attack on Japanese tourist planes making a peaceful visit to their brethren in the far islands. 

To those of us of a certain age, December 7th will always be sacred.  It is one of a small number of days on which a single event marked our time – September 2, 1945, when World War II ended; November 22, 1963, when the president was assassinated; September 11, 2001, when we were attacked in our own homeland. 

Young people today know very little about Pearl Harbor.   They are taught very little contemporary history.  And so they really don't understand the sacrifice, bravery, and determination of "the greatest generation," a generation that survived the Great Depression of the 1930s, only to face bullets and bombs.

Here is a great, and personal, Pearl Harbor story.  Please read the whole thing...and note the last paragraph, which will get to you.  From Reuters:

LOS ANGELES/HONOLULU (Reuters) - It has been 75 years, but U.S. Navy veteran James Leavelle can still recall watching with horror as Japanese warplanes rained bombs down on his fellow sailors in the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War Two.

Bullets bounced off the steel deck of his own ship, the USS Whitney, anchored just outside Honolulu harbor, but a worse fate befell those aboard the USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, USS Utah and others that capsized in an attack that killed 2,400 people.

"The way the Japanese planes were coming in, when they dropped bombs, they'd drop them and then circle back," said Leavelle, a 21-year-old Navy Storekeeper Second Class at the time of the attack.

Leavelle, now 96, was among 30 Pearl Harbor survivors honored at a reception in Los Angeles before heading to Honolulu to mark Wednesday's 75th anniversary of the attack.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor took place at 7:55 a.m. Honolulu time on Dec. 7, 1941, famously dubbed "a date which will live in infamy" by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Fewer than 200 survivors of the attacks there and on other military bases in Hawaii are still alive.

Wednesday's commemoration at a pier overlooking the memorial to the sunken USS Arizona built in the harbor is set to begin with a moment of silence at precisely that time.

About 350 World War Two veterans and their families will be serenaded by the Navy's Pacific Fleet Band with a musical remembrance made bittersweet by the knowledge that every member of the USS Arizona band - one of the best in the Navy - died that day.

Attendees will watch a parade, and two families will participate in a private ceremony in which the ashes of crew members who survived the attack and later died, will be interred in a turret of the Arizona.

Across the United States on Wednesday, Americans will pause to remember those who died at Pearl Harbor, and the long and difficult war that followed.

And...

For his part, Leavelle would be touched twice by the hand of history. After the war, he became a policeman in Texas. On Nov. 24, 1963, he was the Dallas officer handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy was shot to death by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

COMMENT:  Present at history twice.  How remarkable.

December 7, 2016