The (first) day everything changed...

"We are like the country was on December 6, 1941. Or September 10, 2001. Soft, vulnerable and unprepared. Have we learned from history? Hell no." 

Many call it our day of infamy. It was our first real "sucker punch". Did we deserve it? Not in the eyes of the vast majority of Americans. For the Japanese at that time, they might have had a different view. We were standing in the way of Axis expansionism. Some Japanese thought they could negotiate us into submission to their will. Others - not. In any event, on a sunny Sunday morning in December of 1941, the world, our world, changed.

The Japanese scored big. But not as big as they wanted to. Took out our battleships, other Navy ships, and many aircraft. But not our carriers. If they had taken out our carriers on that day, things might have turned out differently. But the damage caused was horrible enough. 

But what it really did, was to wake up a country who tried to support our allies without getting totally involved. Kind of like our support for Ukraine right now. When evil stalks the land, sitting on the sidelines can only work for so long. Ronald Reagan knew that. He did not want another Pearl Harbor on his watch. He took a broken Navy he inherited from Jimmy Carter, and modernized it and grew it. As a defense contractor for the Navy at that time, it made my days very busy. But a good busy it was. 

"Peace through strength". It was a great motto, and a great path for us to be on. We finally really woke up from the sucker punch from December 7, 1941. Or did we? Our "peace through strength" started to wane under Bill Clinton. Instead of trying to guess our enemies next moves before they happened, we were lulled into a false sense of security. Our military that Reagan started to rebuild did very well, thank you, under Bush (41) in the Gulf War. But after Bush (41), the "water started to leak out of the tub." Clinton, who once said he "loathed the military", had not changed much.

Bush (43) had barely taken office when 9/11 hit. It was not a Pearl Harbor. It was not military against military. It was terrorists against civilians. Even though the death toll was about the same as Pearl Harbor, it did (like Pearl Harbor), start our entry into another war - the "War on Terror". For a while, we took that new war very seriously. Then Bush (43) was out of office, and we had Barrack Obama. "Lead from behind" became our new marching orders. And once again, our military started to wane.

Then came Donald Trump. Like Reagan, he wanted a strong military. Why? He understood "peace through strength". But for Trump, a strong military was just part of his "MAGA" initiative. Unfortunately, an unfriendly Congress for the last two years of Trump's administration, thought that Trump, not the world's bad guys, was the enemy. That finally resulted in Trump losing re-election, and Obama's henchman, Joe Biden, become our new POTUS. And our military was turned into a DNC "woke" organization, instead of trained protectors. 

And that is where we are today. Are prepared from another Pearl Harbor or 9/11? Not a bit. We now have open borders, where anyone and anybody can come into our country. All kind of bad stuff can come out of this. But once again, the "sleeping giant" slumbers. Only under Biden, we are no longer a giant. We have shrunk in our stature and our readiness.

We are like the country was on December 6, 1941. Or September 10, 2001. Soft, vulnerable and unprepared. Have we learned from history? Hell no.