A new Pearl Harbor

As I sit here in my cozy and seemingly safe room on the campus of one of our nation's great institutions, the images of Tuesday are still vivid in my mind and on my television. I hold no office on campus or an important title. I'm just like you. But this isn't about me. This is about us. It's about our generation, the one's that came before us, and those that will follow.

Sixty years ago this Dec. 7, our grandparents faced the same type of tragedy. America was suddenly and deliberately attacked without warning on a warm, sunny morning in Pearl Harbor. As people lie asleep in their beds on the mainland, the course of history was changing forever.

Fast-forward 21 years. With nuclear warheads poised to strike the heart of our nation only 90 miles offshore in Cuba, it seemed certain that within days the world would be in another great, and perhaps final, war to end all wars.

Now, 39 years after the Cuban missile crisis and 60 years after Pearl Harbor, our nation is faced with another devastating event. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who make things happen and those who have things happen to them. America makes things happen and the world is waiting to see how its one remaining superpower can handle an event of this magnitude.

Today we face an enemy much different from that of our grandparents' or parents' generations. There is no clear-cut name or face to attach to this atrocity. But there is a cause and a spirit with which we will respond to it. It's the cause of freedom, justice and the indomitable American spirit. The images of the heroes of Pearl Harbor are replaced by the pictures of firemen and civilians.

Today we are all Americans. It's time to strip off the labels that make us so diverse yet serve to divide us so deeply at times, and come to grips with the fact that whether you are the first- or fifth-generation American in your family, you are American. It's time to answer the bell. For our generation, those that came before us and those that are yet to come. Tomorrow the sun will rise, life will go on, and America will answer the bell ... together.

Zach Youngblood
senior in LAS

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