40 years from now, when we're all best friends with all the Arab nations, and some other group has become Enemy #1, there will be millions of doddering old fools who still think every day is 9/12/01. They'll be walking around waving their canes and screaming about "jihad" at anyone who looks remotely middle-eastern.
I'm sure most of us know people who even now refuse to buy Japanese or German cars because of WWII, right?
I don’t know anyone who won’t buy Japanese or German, but I do know people who still mutter about “Hanoi Jane” Fonda.
I know a woman who is only 46 who still is “just sick about what the Japanese did to us in Pearl Harbor” that she doesn’t like anything Japanese. You know, even though she wasn’t even born then, had any relatives even serve in WWII and has lived her whole life in Iowa.
So, yeah.
My grandfather was a Marine who fought in the Pacific. He has always been my hero and he was a swell, swell, guy. I never heard him say a racial slur of any kind until my cousin Kris’s (aka, The Swack’s) wedding in 1998.
Kris’s brother was dating a lovely girl at this time. She was of Hawaiian-Philippine descent, and when my granddaddy was introduced to her (after he’d had many, many pre-ceremony bloody Marys) he asked (kind of jovially if you can imagine), “Are you a Jap?”
To which she she replied, “No….” And he said, “Good, because I killed a bunch of them in Guadalcanal.”
We were all mortified (and, I admit, kind of amused at at the old codger’s bluntness). But in my book, anybody that went through that kind of shit is allowed a momentarily, drunken, racist outburst.
So my long-winded point is, I give anyone who engages in combat–or experiences enemy-occupation, torture, etc.–a pass when it comes to holding a grudge or being politically incorrect–regardless of my own values.