Dec. 7, 1941 - a day which lives in infamy

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked," President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his speech to Congress Dec. 8, 1941, in asking for a declaration of war against Japan.

I visited Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona memorial last year. I have known about the history of Pearl Harbor, seen photos, watched the recent movie; but it is different being there…seeing the names, seeing the ship just below the surface where over 900 men are still entombed, seeing the oil seeping slowly into the water.

And whenever faced with memorials like this one with so many American lives reduced to names on a wall, the overwhelming emotion is the same: this is what our country is worth.

In the short two-hour attack, nearly 2,500 service members were killed and more than 1,000 were wounded; 18 ships and almost 300 planes were rendered unusable. And the attack launched our country into a war that would result in the death and wounding of over a million service members in the course of four years. And that is what our country, our freedom, our American dream is worth.

As a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war once told me, our generation expects that the freedom and the country we enjoy will continue in its current state with little effort.

"Freedom isn't free; you have to work for it," said retired Col. Tom Norris, an F-105 pilot, who spent almost six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He warned that the United States won't always be this way unless we as Americans fight to understand what's going on in the world and take the time to be active and educated voters.

Maintaining freedom is a constant fight, and today is a day to remember those that did not have the luxury of simply fighting with their votes but had the courage to fight with their lives to maintain the freedom that we live in today.