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This coming Saturday (Dec. 7) marks is the 78th anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that launched this reluctant nation full-tilt into the war against Japan, Germany and Italy.

Pearl Harbor reverberates through the years as “a day of infamy”, but while we pay tribute to the Americans so brutally killed on Dec. 7, 1941, we must also remember that this cowardly act had a very positive consequence.

World War II was different from other wars because it can justly be said that this truly was a war between good and evil. Both the Nazis and Japanese believed they should rule because of racial superiority. For the rest of the world, Nazi and Imperial Japanese rule would have been filled with murder, slavery and misery because we would all have been deemed their “inferiors”.

Many thousands of Americans died in World War II, but the sacrifice, bravery and virtue of that great generation of Americans literally saved the world.

Our boys – many of whom were plucked from the rural farm fields across our great nation and sent into harm’s way – turned the tide of the war, kept the British from being beaten, freed Africa, Europe and Asia from their conquerors, and defeated the powers of evil that threatened to destroy civilization.

Had we not entered the war when we did, and with such a “terrible resolve”, the Nazis would have made the first atomic bomb and would have been unconquerable.

With so many of the people from that era passing away after living full, rich lives, it is imperative that this generation remember what was at stake and how wonderfully that generation responded to the challenge.

They kept the world from being plunged into a thousand years of darkness and oppression. They rescued civilization. They preserved freedom, liberty and democracy. They delivered us from evil.

Pearl Harbor is not a love story that ends with special effect explosions and, while it was tragic for those injured or killed and their families, in the larger scheme it represents a triumph.

A sleeping giant awoke that day with a terrible resolve to crush evil…and it did.

As we contemplate our place in the world in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, we are well advised to look to the generation that, just 78 years ago, defeated evil and launched a new age of worldwide prosperity and freedom.

It was not just the soldiers of that era who deserve our praise, but also the wives, children, parents and grandparents of those “boys.”

Everyday citizens were asked to sacrifice, and they did so with joy because it was good for the boys overseas. Women were asked to work in factories in an era when few women did such work, and they did so with determination and great efficiency because the things they were making were being used by the boys overseas.

The American people responded to Pearl Harbor, not just the military, which was just the arm of a fully awake giant that was, and is, the United States of America.

– The Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald