Dec
Ahso!
The American Legion sends me an email newsletter / update about once a week. This one was a bit of a paradox. On one column the headline reads: Legionnaires and servicemembers remember Pearl Harbor. December 7th is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, so it is fitting. On the other column the headline reads: Shinseki named new VA chief Shinseki is America’s first American general of Japanese ancestry and the first Asian-American to get the four star rank. He was born almost a year after the Pearl Harbor attack.
I thought it was rather amusing.
Maybe it is a matter of the times. When folks my age were children, there were many adults who still had anti-Japanese sentiments. Most of the children my age had parents or uncles who had fought the Japanese in World War II. There was even a bit of wartime propaganda lingering around. Old Popeye cartoons showed the funny little sailor punching out a Japanese submarine crew. They were still showing those cartoons well into the 1960s. One of the silly kid poems still going around went like this:
In 1944,
My mother went to war
Her girdle snapped and killed a Jap
And that was the end of the War.
Here it is several decades year later, and the man who had been the Army Chief of Staff and will now be heading the Veteran’s Administration is of Japanese heritage. He was named the same week as Pearl Harbor Day.
There is a lesson here. Old prejudices and animosities will fade. An individual with talent and determination has a good shot at success regardless of what has gone before. The irony of the week’s news illustrates this perfectly.
