I REMEMBER WHEN --- WORLD WAR II --

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Many times I wonder where I get the thoughts that I do.  They are so random and they catch me so much by surprise.  Today, for instance.  We were driving back from our Easter Holy Day.  After about 45 minutes or so of exchanging Theological chit-chat, we both fell silent and stayed with our own thoughts.  When we passed by the Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, a grey plane was flying around, perhaps serving as a training flight for someone who needed the hours.  For some odd reason my mind immediately transported me back to the early 1940's and I started remembering all the neat things I used to think about airplanes.  I had favorite ones based on the qualities that I thought they had.  Fighter planes were my favorite.  Among them the P-47 Thunderbolt was the best, in my mind.  My favorite big bomber was the B-29, the biggest of the big, back then.  My favorite among the speedsters was the P-51 Mustang.  My favorite enemy plane was, of course, the J... Zero.  We don't say the word any more, but I can assure you that there was a lot of respect in the minds and hearts of those who admired the machine and the people who flew it.  It is the respect and the admiration that is always granted, in american culture anyway, to a valiant opponent.  After all, there is no glory in overcoming without having to strive to the highest limit.  The Zero  brought that admiration out of us, even the children of us who couldn't really explain the psychology of what we were feeling.  We had balsa wood and paper flying scale models of enemy planes on the market.  I built the Zero twice.  I never built the scale models of the German fighters.  I built P-47's, Grumman Hellcats and Corsairs and Zeros.  Those were my favorites.
On top of all that, I thought about some of the interesting facts of life during the war.  I thought of the strange feeling of unease that I would feel during the mandatory "air raid drills" at night when we had to shut off all the lights and not even light a candle.  I sometimes wonder if it was the mournful wail of the siren that kicked off those feelings that I had.  I remembered the difficulty that my parents had to procure meat for the table.  I often wonder how my father must have felt to have sufficient money to spend, and not have anywhere to spend it because of the rationing.  Some of my most intense thoughts are about the team work of the population during the war.  During those times we did not throw anything away.  Not paper, not tin cans, nothing.  We saved everything and when the trucks came by, we would give them what we had crushed and bundled of clothing, paper and tin cans.  Nobody trashed anything during that time.  If we had the same spirit if unity these days, we could save millions of dollars, we would love one another more and I think our country would be more prosperous.  I just get nervous about those thoughts because I wonder if would take another Pearl Harbor to make it happen.
Now that I am older and I see what is happening in Japan, I relive what it must have been in 1945.  I was only 8 years old, but in my heart and soul I now know something of what it could have been.  I also often think about the fact that I went to school in Italy a mere 16 or 17 years after the end of hostilities in Europe.  Italy was still in the process of recovering.  It was for me a small window through which I could discern the recovery of Japan, made all the more challenging because of the massive nuclear releases that had brought the war to an end.  I terminated my musings by shaking my head and wondering why human beings never learn to control themselves.   That is one answer that I am sure I will never be able to answer.  Even though I don't get the answer, you still are not allowed to cry at my funeral.