Emotional

Maybe I'm emotional this morning, but this article gets me...

Forgive me for being a patriotic racist, but this passage stands out:

My great-grandmother and my grandmother faced the occupiers alone, having ordered the children to hide. The Japanese had been warned that the invading barbarians would rape and pillage. My great-grandmother, a battle-scarred early feminist, hissed, "Get your filthy barbarian shoes off of my floor!" The interpreter refused to interpret. The officer in command insisted. Upon hearing the translation from the red-faced interpreter, the officer sat on the floor and removed his boots, instructing his men to do the same. He apologized to my great-grandmother and grandmother.

There's been a lot of discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki recently because of the 60th anninversary, but also frankly, because Osama Bin Laden has brought this issue to the forefront of discussion - that is, the role of America in the world - perpetrator of great evil or last remaining hope of mankind or somewhere in between. For all of my youth, I feel like the a-bombs were a subject little talked about - a necessary evil. After 9/11, the bomb came up again because they were the moment, the Jihadists, anti-Capitalist, and anti-globalists say America turned into the Great Satan, from which we've never returned. Revisionist leftist historians espouse this same view and part of me hates that this issue has come up again. It's the past. But then the democrat and frankly, the American in me, takes over and thinks, this is a healthy and needed discussion right now and one should ask oneself whether dropping the bomb was the moral choice, as backwards and barbaric as that sounds.