Days of Infamy

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes destroyed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.  The next day, as President Franklin Roosevelt asks Congress to declare war, he said the attack was "a day which will live in infamy".

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down by an assassin's bullet on the streets of Dallas, Texas.

On December 8, 1980, singer-activist John Lennon was also killed by an assassin's bullet just outside his New York City apartment.

On December 2, 2015, fourteen people in a San Bernardino, California banquet hall died in what is now considered to be a terrorist attack, the worst in the United States since September 11, 2001.

All of the above involved weapons, political agendas, allegedly demented individuals, airplanes, or any kind of combination.

So how do you react to something like this?  Do you take up arms?  Do you demonize the enemy?  Or do you sit back and hope "this too shall pass"?

If you're President Barack Obama, you spend 15 minutes on a Sunday night between football games reassuring a frightened country that the U.S. is on the case in helping rid the world of the scourge called ISIL, but without providing specifics about how they're going to do that.  Given the President's failure to convince a gridlocked Congress to go along with his plans to get guns off the streets in the past, his chances are not good.

If you're Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, you call for all Muslims to be temporarily banned from entering the United States, even though it is realistically and constitutionally impractical.  Trump wants to hearken back to the days when, following Pearl Harbor, FDR ordered Americans of Japanese descent to be rounded up and sent to internment camps.  Just like Hitler sent six million Jewish people to their deaths in places like Auschwitz for no good reason other than he didn't like them.

Others might denounce Trump for suggesting something so drastic in the wake of a major tragedy, but he doesn't care.  Not as long as he leads every other GOP candidate by a wide margin in the polls, and could take those numbers into an independent campaign if he chooses to turn his back on a promise not to do so.  And that's what has the Republicans running scared.

If you're an ordinary citizen, you might be seriously contemplating buying a gun to protect you and your family. Even though the odds of getting killed in a terrorist attack or a mass shooting are rather small, and the crime rate is supposed to be down.  But if you watch enough TV news, listen to conservative talk radio and read questionable reports on the Internet, you'll believe that even a trip to the grocery store is fraught with danger unless you're packing heat.  And who pays any attention to those "guns are prohibited in this building" signs, anyway?

This is the American mentality we are living with as 2015 comes to a close.  The Wild West is alive and well because of determined assassins, hysterical politicians, sensationalized media, and a public that either doesn't know what to believe or is preparing for a real or imagined invasion.  If something doesn't change, it won't be long before there's another day of infamy.