By Barbara Morris
Life has never been predictable.
The same applies when one government tries to deal with another government. Leaderships change, economies change, and, sometimes, natural forces necessitate a different direction. There are also cases where something that appears to be a profitable venture for both sides, in retrospect, prove to have had a sinister purpose from the beginning on the part of one of the parties.
So it was with the terrorists who came to our country, enlisted in our schools (including flight school), and then turned the skills they had been taught here into an unimaginable nightmare. Prior to World War II, Japan’s government had contracted to buy our scrap metal which was sold to them enthusiastically. There was no suspicion then that they were secretly turning the metal into bombs, shell casings, planes and ships to be used against us at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
We were having a wonderful day that Dec. 7. We had gone to our yearly celebration of our paternal grandmother’s birthday. We were just returning home on a ferry when the radio in our 1937 Ford announced to us what had happened. I had been half asleep, but the urgency in the newscaster’s voice made me fully awake. I couldn’t realize at the time how difficult it must have been for our dad to drive home after the ferry docked, knowing that another war would soon be declared. He and our mother had both lived through World War I and had hoped peace would last forever.
We listened to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first and following speeches after that attack, with a quiet resolve to do whatever we could to help, and to do it without complaint. To the vast majority, there was no alternative. There were no long debates about why the enemy didn’t like us or how we could convince the innocent Japanese citizens living in their homeland that we were only angry (very angry) at their government and were determined to defeat their plan to destroy our beautiful country, our way of life, and our people.
We became a nation of recyclers — paper, metal, rags, rubber and rendered fat from whatever meat rationing permitted. Looking back now, how much smarter we would have been had we retained that recycle process. Our landfill problems would have been a lot fewer. Maybe what we should do now is to unload our unwanted refuse onto our present enemies, sue them in world court to get some of the fortunes they are reputed to have so that they will pay for the material damage they have done and partially compensate families who have lost loved ones. Besides that, as much as I love flowers, I’d also vote to destroy one of their sources of illicit income — the poppy fields that they turn into drug money.
These ideas might just be the wild imaginings of someone who has witnessed the destruction of too many lives and too many communities for too long through the infiltration of illegal drugs and moral dilapidation. Our own streets were, for too many years, filled with drug terrorists and other criminals who found safe havens here, sometimes only because their neighbors or families felt a warped loyalty to them because, at some time, early on, they had been innocent. Be warned. Some have yet to be caught and punished. Some were caught, released, and are active again. We had begun to win the war against drugs and other crime. Now that we have a major war to contend with on still another front, we cannot allow domestic or foreign terrorists to dissuade our resolve for the protection of our country, of our people.
Please, if you have reason to believe that someone is committing a drug or other crime, tell the police (anonymously, if you wish), and let them investigate.
Let’s all cooperate with law enforcement so that we can get the job done and win the wars we’re in!
