We Have to Continue Learning WWII's Lessons

The Second World War ended four generations ago. We are as far from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 victory in the Second World War as he was from Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1865, and both men died in April of their final year of conflict, leaving to their successors to sort out the peace they promised to the American people. To remember Pearl Harbor, we must accept that we can no longer simply recall it. It is now like the recollection of Fort Sumter was for the men who stormed Normandy. History does not play favorites and everything that is not deliberately passed down will be forgotten. This forgetting is not an exclusively American failure; it is the natural passage of time. But its repair demands something of us. When memory passes into the afterlife, the convictions of the living must take its place.