Knit your bit

Today is, of course, Pearl Harbor Day. (In fact, it's the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day).

One of the people I follow on twitter posted a link to a poster of the era ("Remember Pearl Harbor: remember, purl harder." Of course, in those days, knitting for the troops was probably more urgent*)

I wonder how many people my age or younger think much about this day. I remember as a kid, my dad saying he knew something was up (he would have been a very small child in 1941) but didn't know what, he just knew the grown-ups were worried about something from the tone of their voices. (My mother is a bit younger and doesn't remember this day, but also - her family lived in a rural area and probably weren't as plugged into the media as my dad's family were; I think his father was still working for the Chicago Tribune at that point in time).

My fifth grade math teacher (Mrs. Krause? I think that was her name) was about 10 years older than my parents and she told us how she remembered hearing them break into a radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic to announce the attack.

(I remembered that, and got a bit of commendation in eighth grade American history when my teacher asked "Does anyone know why this day is important?" and I did.)

Many years later, our AAUW Christmas party fell on the 7th. Some of the women vaguely remembered the attack from when they were kids, but my friend Dorothy (who was in her late 80s and was probably the oldest member) remembered the attack, and remembered learning to drive during WWII when she was a college student, because she was needed to transport...I think it was medicines? To a hospital near her college, and the men who would normally do that job had all enlisted or been drafted.

*It's funny...at the start of the Iraq war back in '03 or thereabout, I wondered if we'd see rationing, if there'd be any kind of home-front type stuff like in WWII. Because really, what I had heard about WWII from older relatives was pretty much the only "war knowledge" I had (It was assumed, I guess, that Korea and Vietnam were either "police actions" or were much smaller and didn't affect people at home).

Well, what we got - instead of rationing and odd things like limitations in the number of flavors of ice cream for the duration (Oh, can you imagine the reaction to that today?) was an exhortation to continue to go out and spend, and then stuff like TSA searches at the airports. I guess the world has changed greatly, and at any rate, whatever wars are going on in the world they are smaller than the World Wars. (And if we had another World war...well, there might be none of us left around to write the history of it after it was over. Maybe the cockroaches, but they don't seem to have developed a written language, and they might not care all that much what happened to the people...at least until the supply of cardboard and wool and other edible stuff ran out)