It makes me glad to be my father's daughter.
Thank you for that story, Fiberbabe. I'm glad you're glad! you should be - he sounds like a wonderful man. It is very difficult for people of our (ie yours and mine - sorry everyone else!) parents' generation to forgive the Japanese, as an entire race, for their atrocities during WWII. So good to hear of someone who held an untainted view. It was nice to learn of some of the good pre-WWII things.
On another tangent: I visited Pearl Harbour when I was in Hawaii in 1998, en route to Australia for a year. I was well impressed with the exhibit there (Pearl Harbour, not Oz! though Oz also has plenty of impressive exhibits!). One thing that struck me most forcibly, was that at this US monument, there was acknowledgement that the attack on Pearl Harbour was an almost-perfect military maneuver. I thought that a very generous admission on the part of the US'ns.
And so, putting myself at great risk for some serious strafing on a similar topic: 9/11 was truly horrifying. It will echo around the planet for some time to come. It devastated the lives of many and is still doing so, and I feel great sorrow for those who lost their lives, and those who lost family, in those attacks. But as terrorist attacks, you have to admit they were damn' near perfect. The planning, the thought, the effort that went into to bringing that off.....would have been so much better spent on world aid programmes and initiatives for peace.
So here's to those who have, truly, given their lives to such programmes and been initiators of good: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and many others less-recognized (such as Fiberbabe!), who seek for the good in others and hold that up as a heartening example to us all.
Blessed are the peacemakers. They have so much more to teach us than the warmongers do.
Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.
