Sunday, December 7, is Pearl Harbor day. The original Pearl Harbor day, 1941, was also a Sunday. My brother Bob and my cousin Leo and I were out at the farm playing war on that Sunday afternoon, and as we walked back into town we heard newsboys shouting “Extra, Extra, Read All About It, Japanese Bomb Pearl Harbor.”
The Legacy of Pearl Harbor
This was a maybe twice in a lifetime event, to have a newspaper put out on Sunday in Hartford City, population 7,000, and to have newsboys shouting and selling papers on the street. Besides, what was Pearl Harbor? And why would the Japanese bomb a place that belonged to us?
They had people in Washington at the time talking peace programs. It didn’t make sense, but we stayed glued to the radio for the rest of the day. On Monday we got out of school to hear President Franklin D. Roosevelt address Congress and declare war on Germany and Japan. A lot of it didn’t make sense but there we were, in the war we had tried so hard to keep out of.
That “Extra” changed this country forever — from a sleepy, isolationist, post-depression, God-fearing nation to what we have today — a world power, caught up in materialism-with-a-vengeance, living in what is sometimes called the post-Christian era.
Isolationism is probably gone with the wind, not possible anymore, but the materialism has to be fought as hard now as it ever was, and the mandate to become once again a Christian Nation is more urgent now than ever. In any event, pray on Pearl Harbor Day that God will bring good out of the chaos that that December 7, 1941 triggered.
Rest in Peace, Mary Cardy
Say a prayer for Mary Cardy, a wonderful woman and long-time pro life activist who died this week and is to be buried Saturday from St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Skokie at 10:30 a.m. Mary was a photographer and would take any assignment: she helped us with pickets, traveled wherever we wanted her to be, and was one of those innocents whom you wanted to protect from the world.
But Mary had a deep and abiding faith and suffered without complaint, ending her life in great pain from runaway cancer, but with a joy we should all pray to have at the end of our lives. We hadn’t seen Mary for a while, but we never forgot her, and now we should all ask for her to remember us, still down here trying to continue her mission to save God’s little ones. Mary was only 56.
December Activism
Here are a couple of upcoming pro-life events in December which locals may want to attend:
- A picket complete with Christmas carols in front of Lutheran General Hospital from noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday, December 13.
- Then on the following Saturday, December 20, join the national Empty Manger Caroling Program being sponsored by the League in conjunction with Pro-Life PLAN, the Pro-Life Activist Network.
Pro-Lifers across the country will take part in this pre-Christmas effort to remind Americans that abortion, the empty manger, must end, if America is to survive.
